Acer Predator Helios 300
Good performance at an excellent price
The Predator brand usually seems to denote high end gear, but the Acer Predator Helios 300 is a distinctly mid-range gaming laptop. That’s not a slight on the machine – far from it. It’s a very solid machine aiming for a balance between power and affordability and hitting admirably close to the target. The machine comes in two different form factors, either 15.6” or 17.3”. We opted to review the 15.6” version as we think it offers the best price to performance ratio of all the models, and given the fact that both sizes feature a 1080p screen, the higher pixel density makes the images really pop.
Like many other Acer laptops, the chassis is made of a combination of aluminium and plastic, but the red details and prominent Predator branding really label the machine as being designed for gaming. Open the lid and you’re greeted with a 15.6” screen surrounded by quite a large bezel, and a full sized keyboard. Due to these two factors, the Helios 300 is a little bigger than a number of other 15.6” laptops on the market but is still only weighs in a 2.7Kg, making it quite portable. Under the hood is a quad-core i7-7700HQ running at 2.8GHz, 6Gb GTX 1060, 16Gb RAM, a 128Gb SSD and 1Tb 5400 RPM HDD, and a full HD IPS screen. For gaming, this setup hits a real sweet spot. Sure, as the benchmarks show, you can’t turn every bell and whistle on and expect a solid framerate for games, but most games will run at high to very high specs and achieve 60 frames easily.
The keyboard is unusually stiff for a laptop, with keys taking more force to depress than regular keyboards of laptops. It takes a little getting used to but once you do it makes for quite a pleasant gaming and typing experience. Less pleasant is how cramped the right hand side of the keyboard is. The Helios 300 boasts a full sized keyboard complete with numpad, but the arrow keys bracket the shift key and abut the bottom row of the numpad. It makes for a very tight layout that isn’t hugely conducive to typing accuracy. The touchpad is large and responsive, and the speakers do a surprisingly good job of pumping out the noise, albeit with a slightly lacklustre bass. The Helios 300 also boasts some impressive battery life (so long as you’re not gaming of course), working solidly for around 6.5 hours playing movies.
The biggest problem with the Helios 300 is heat. While the top surface of the laptop doesn’t get as uncomfortably
the red details and prominent branding really label the machine as being designed for gaming
hot as that of the more powerful Acer Predator Triton 700, the base certainly does, so you will want to think twice about gaming on your lap. The heat is a minor problem in the grand scheme of thing. For an asking price of $1899, the Helios 300 offers remarkable value. It’s a machine capable of delivering excellent gaming performance, is VR ready and portable enough to be a practical alternative to a mainstream work laptop. DANIEL WILKS