Acer Predator Triton
Acer’s latest gaming laptop is taking a three pronged approach to be the best professional gaming ultrabook, but is it sharp enough to cut through the competition?
One of the most striking features of the Triton 500 is just how thin it is. With a closed profile of just 1.8cm it’s knocking on the door of ultrabooks despite being a 15.6-inch performance gaming laptop. The sleek Triton 500 can be configured to have an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, 32GB of RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage. This is a surprisingly powerful set of components to conceal in such a sleek form factor.
The metallic clamshell comes in a subtle blue-black colour and while it does have angular bevelled edges, powder-blue rear exhaust vents and a unique mosaic topside fan inlet, overall, its understated and classy design would slot neatly into a business environment. The membrane keyboard is a little spongy for gaming, but it’s fine for typing and while we would prefer a slightly bigger trackpad it was smooth and responsive. With three USB 3.1 Type-A ports, an Ethernet port, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt port and an HDMI out, alongside the regular 3.5mm audio and microphone jacks, there’s ample connectivity on offer.
The Triton 500 got within 10% of the average raw CPU performance and overall work benchmarks for laptops we’ve tested with the same CPU/GPU configuration. We are starting to see laptops appear with
9th generation Intel Core i7 CPUs (and unusually, Acer actually released a Core i7-9750H model in line with this one), so this device might date a little quicker, but it’s a good value proposition when weighed against performance. The 512GB NVMe SSD was also speedy, offering read and write speeds of 3439MB/s and 3129MB/s respectively. That’s between six and seven times faster than SATA 3 connected SSDs and offers double the write speeds of early PCIe connected SSDs.
Acer’s Predator Triton 500 keeps averages above 78fps on Ultra 1080p settings across all the games we tested, with Middle Earth: Shadow of War running at close to 100fps. This means that there’s more than enough power here to take advantage of the Speedy 144Hz G-Sync screen with almost anything you throw at it. It even manages 50fps averages when using 1080p Ultra with ray tracing turned on in Metro: Exodus.
Despite this heavy load max temperatures were pretty reasonable. The CPU and GPU managed to stay under 97 and 69 degrees respectively, across the entire benchmarking process, and while the fans can get rather noisy at full tilt, the automated settings keep them quiet generally. The RTX 2080 on the Triton 500 is unlocked, so you can even utilise a bit of that thermal overhead on the GPU to push
Acer’s Triton 500 keeps averages above 78fps on Ultra 1080p settings across all the games we tested...
a few more frames per second, if you want.
It’s interesting to compare the Triton 500 to Razer’s 2019 Blade laptop since they have an almost identical spec sheet, weigh within 66g of each other, are no more than 2cm different in shape and offer nearly identical battery capacities. The only differences are that the top Predator Triton 500 model has double the RAM allocation of the Blade, a G-Sync Screen and costs $1100 less.