Acer has been pushing product after products to give you the most gaming in portability, but as for this one, I might have a question for the “Portability” in Acer Predator Helios 700. With my preference of 17 inch gaming laptops, the weight for this absolute beast is no where I would expect it to be. Yea, it has a strong build within it but man, when it comes to carrying this bad boy around, I felt like i might be hiking to a long journey for an esports tournament grind.
We often complained about laptops being unworthy as their graphics and build can’t satisfy high graphics and refresh rate gameplay. Acer seeing this market pushes this masterpiece to shove it into the faces of the market like, “There, we got it all.”
With a quality build of being a i9 and RTX 2080 build, the laptop surely hangs a price that cost as close as a 999.9 Gold Bar. Enough of these small talk, let’s get geeky!
Acer Predator Helios 700 – Design
Acer doing a wonderful job building their laptop to be as quality as possible while bringing in the sharp and edgy design for a “GAMING” laptop. The build presents as a wild and rough gaming laptop that will surely consumes your souls when you play on the laptop, you won’t get to rest but keep playing as it pulls you towards a world where only gaming exists.
The laptop has a special “HyperDrift” keyboard which the whole keyboard and palm rest (with the mousepad) slides out of the normal laptop position and towards the user. My first thought was very cool seeing it sliding out to a comfortable usage but then a catch comes in, the mouspad is in an awkward but ergonomic spot. The keyboard felt more comfortable with the palm rest being slanted.
With keyboard and stuff sliding out not only for style, “HyperDrift” features a space for some aircraft mystery in your laptop to bring out awesome thermal improvements. “HyperDrift” allows more airflow through the normally blocked path into the center of the chassis. Remember the aircraft mystery, Acer had installed 2 superbly powerful fans at those positions to push out even better fan performances.
During our tests, the fans acted like it’s about to bring your laptop into the air. The fans were very loud but effective, making cooling the laptop very possible in a lot of ways. With Acer’s PredatorSense app, users can now overclock their setting with only a few clicks or just, slide the keyboard out.
The unit that was sent to us are with the specifications as listed below.
Processor | Intel Core i9-9980HK |
LCD | 17.3″ IPS 144Hz LED LCD |
Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8GB GDDR6 VRAM |
RAM | 32 GB DDR4 2666MHz |
Storage | 512GB + 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD RAID |
WLAN/Bluetooth | 802.11AX+BT M.2 Killer |
Battery | 72Wh Li-ion battery |
The keyboard also has it’s WASD “Linear Switch Technology” and built-in 5.1 surround sound including a subwoofer at the bottom of the laptop.
The laptop is about one and a half to two inches thick and weighs about 5KG. Oh don’t forget about the humongous power brick that you need to bring along.
Display
With the outstanding in built performance, the display is also another winning point. Ours comes with a 17.3″ inch IPS panel with 144Hz refresh rate, Nvidia G-Sync and a native 1080p resolution. Well, this might satisfy me as my preferred resolution is 1080p but for it’s hefty price tag, 1440p panel should be invented in this scenario. The bezel itself is quite thick unlike the Helios 300 that was released this year.
Performance
Coming with RTX 2080, Acer Predator Helios 700 surely will bring you the ultra performance for almost all titles. Check out the hunts that I went for Monster Hunter World, both tempered Bazelguese and tempered Kushala Daora.
Other than that we also runned 3DMARK Time Spy Extreme Stress Test,
PCMARK 10 Extended test
and Userbenchmark.com.
With all those test, you can surely tell that this piece of architecture is surely a monster in a chassis. The gaming laptop Acer Predator Helios 700 has a wonderful performance, but a hold-back on the weigh. Oh yea, before I forget, the fans are really really loud that it affects our workplace, I had to go to a separate room to run these test. Remember to buy a good Noise cancelling headset but that might not be able to stop the plane to fly.
The battery is just okay as Acer claims that the laptop can run up to three hours run time, but in gaming terms given the power draw. Still, I dont see why you’re not plugging in to play with the laptop.
Verdict
The performance may be superb as a laptop, but with that noise coming from the fans and the weigh of the laptop, it might just be ok as a whole.
With the price tag starting from RM17,999, I think it’s a very pricey laptop to be hold. But like all the products, there are a market for them.
Let us know what you think in your stand, do you think a laptop this powerful needs to here now with the intelligence architecture from Acer, or you might just go for a PC? Whatever it is, the Acer Predator Helios 700 is here for you to consider.