Acer Predator Helios 500
Is this oldschool gaming rig predator or prey?
With the emergence of hexacore laptop CPUs and Nvidia’s power-conserving Max-Q GPUs, modern gaming laptops have far less thermal pressures and, as a result, are far more compact and discrete than their predecessors... well, at least most of them are. The 3.8kg Acer Predator Helios 500 is no such beast. It’s not only more than a kilo heavier than its closest brethren, but it’s also over a centimetre thicker than the next thickest device here (the Predator Helios 300) and there’s even a few additional centimeters on each edge of the footprint (which makes sense given it’s the only 17.5-inch rig in the roundup). This big IPS display is also faster than most with a 144Hz refresh rate and the bonus G-Sync compatibility means it’ll play nice with the device’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. This graphics card is supported by an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and 16GB of RAM for what seems like pretty standard rollout against the other gaming rigs here. As expected, the Helios 500 topped the Cinebench Single-Core, but it was by only one point and while it excelled at the PCMark 8 Home benchmark, it hit a few stumbling blocks on the work tasks. If we take a look at graphical performance however, the Predator Helios 500 is the clear winner. Beating the Razer Blade 15 (2018) in 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark by 13%, the Helios 500 managed to translate this into considerable real world gaming boosts of between 8 and 25% more than the next closest contenders, with 51.9 fps averages on Ghost Recon: Wildlands’ Ultra 1080p benchmark.