Acer Predator Helios 300
Is Acer’s sun-named laptop a little too hot?
Acer described its new Helios range as having a radical new design, but from what you can see, the Predator Helios 300 is rather dated. Wrapping the laptop is a well worn brushed metal finish, relieved by the odd speed stripe and a cheap plastic undercarriage (which trades out weight for style). And while the keyboard and number pad look fine, the rounded keys and red colouring don’t offer much in the way of uniqueness. For some reason Acer has decided to bunch all the ventilation to one side of the laptop and has blocked off a whole half of the rear vent, which means there’s going to be crossover in CPU and GPU thermals. We recorded 100°C peaks throughout our testing, so you should expect some thermal throttling when gaming and potentially accelerated wear over time. The Intel Core i7-8750H CPU managed to get a score of 1039 in the Cinebench Multi-threaded CPU test, which puts it above half of the units tested here. Add 16GB of RAM to that and throw in a Nvidia GTX 1060 and you get respectable Ghost Recon: Wildlands average frame rates of 35.5fps (Ultra 1080p). Battery life was two hours and 19 minutes under strenuous home usage conditions, which isn’t great, but is pretty common in the gaming laptop space. The entry level unit comes with a 128GB PCIe-connected SSD and a 1TB HDD, but you can bump up the SSD storage to 256GB or even 512GB if need be. While there are options for a 15.6-inch 144Hz IPS display at 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution in the States, it seems we’re stuck with only 60Hz options locally.