It’s easy to see why PC makers are targeting gamers — what other consumer demographic is willing to pay high prices for premium Windows hardware? But the problem with PC gamers is that many of them don’t need PC makers to assemble components for them, since you can get better results for less money when you build it yourself.

You can’t really do that with laptops, though, which perhaps explains why a number of PC makers have produced high-end, super-powerful notebooks with the express purpose of gaming on them. And Acer is the latest to jump into this arena with the new Predator 17, one of ts first portable gaming machines. It’s everything you’d expect from a gaming laptop: huge, heavy, and hefty specs.

A gaming laptop is also a whole lot more expensive than a desktop with similar performance, and its design seriously compromises the portability advantage you’d expect from a laptop. So why would you want one?

A lot of gaming laptops have ultra-aggressive styling, and Acer says the Predator 17’s design was "inspired by intergalactic battlecruisers," which at least wins the company points for finding words that‘d never make it into a Jony Ive video. And it’s not an inaccurate description — this thing is like a Star Destroyer on my desk. It has an aggressive black and red color scheme, with bright LEDs illuminating the keyboard and glowing stripes on the back of the screen, and it’s very safe to say that Acer didn’t have cafe tables in mind when designing this colossus. I don’t like the soft-touch rubber finish that picks up fingerprints too easily, but the Predator 17 is very well put-together otherwise. Also, you can swap out the Blu-ray drive for an extra fan called the FrostCore, which made basically no difference in my testing but I love that it exists.

Not a single bag I own will fit the Predator 17 inside. At 8.7 pounds and 1.6 inches thick, it’s just not practical to move this laptop anywhere outside the house unless it’s going to be sitting on your car’s passenger seat. The battery won’t last anywhere near as long as what you can find in far more portable laptops, either — I tried to use it for a work day, but only made it to 3 hours and 40 minutes of light Slack and Chrome use, along with 3 hours and 56 minutes on the website-looping Verge Battery Test. Moving it from room to room is one thing, but you’re unlikely to want to take it much farther than that.

The Predator 17 model that Acer sent me retails for $2,599.99, and it’s a ludicrously powerful machine. It has a quad-core 2.6GHz i7-6700HQ Intel Skylake processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPU, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3, a 512GB SSD backing a 1TB hard drive, and a frankly gratuitous 32GB of DDR4 RAM. The display is a 17.3-inch 1080p IPS LCD. (Lower-specced models are available.) All of this is top-of-the-line or near to it — the i7-6700 is Intel’s best mobile gaming CPU and the GTX 980M is Nvidia’s best mobile GPU, though some competing laptops include the 8GB card rather than the 4GB version found here. The display doesn’t have the best viewing angles in the world, but it looks punchy and vibrant head-on, and 1080p is the right resolution for a gaming laptop even if it seems lacking next to high-res ultrabooks.

In practice, what all of this means is that the Predator 17 just breezes through practically anything you could throw at it. I installed the most challenging titles from my Steam and Origin libraries — think Ryse: Son of Rome, Crysis 3, Dying Light, and so on — and saw smooth frame rates on the highest graphical settings in all. Ark: Survival Evolved, a Steam Early Access title with notoriously poor optimization, was playable on higher settings even though it grinds to a halt on my gaming desktop. Last month I bought The Witness to test because I’d heard that its PC port was inflexible and a lot of people were having trouble running it. My result? Near-flawless performance, with the occasional torn frame when looking at puzzles. In desperation I tried Star Wars Battlefront, possibly the most visually advanced game out there today and one that I’ve been playing on Xbox One for months. I learned two things: Star Wars Battlefront looks a lot better on a good PC than on the Xbox One, and the Predator 17 handles it pretty well on ultra settings with the odd frame-rate drop. Turn the shadow detail down a touch and you’re golden.

So no, performance isn’t a concern with the Predator 17 — at least not in early 2016. One issue with gaming laptops is that you can’t really upgrade them later on, meaning that you’ll need to buy a whole new machine once the GPU inside isn’t up to snuff. And considering that the 980M came out in 2014, that may well be a concern. But the Predator 17 runs everything with such aplomb that I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be fit for this purpose for quite a few years to come.