What is the Acer Predator Helios 300?
The Acer Predator Helios 300 is a surprising slab of a laptop. With its aggressive name, gaming brand and huge screen, you’d be forgiven for believing it was one of the market’s bank-busting gaming systems – but this unit costs a reasonable £1300.
For that mid-range price you get a solid specification, a pleasing design and a 17.3in screen, so there’s certainly a lot of laptop here for the money.
Acer Predator Helios 300 – Design and build
The Helios 300 NH-Q2MEK.004 mixes modern touches with the sort of design I’d associate with more traditional gaming notebooks, which means it more than looks the part.
The Predator’s body is built from black metal, and across most of its surfaces it’s treated with a matte finish – aside from the lid, which has a subtle brushed effect. It’s reminiscent of its nearest rival – the Asus ROG Strix GL702VM. That system combines dark metal with orange, and it too banishes outdated and glossy metal for a more subtle approach.
That’s not to say that Acer’s machine is reserved. Its lid features red slashes and a bold logo, and the back edge houses dramatic air vents with red borders. There’s more red around the keyboard and trackpad, and another Predator logo beneath the 17.3-inch screen.
It’s a good-looking machine that weighs just under 3kg and it measures 29mm thick. Those figures aren’t back-breaking, although the Asus was about 300g lighter and half a centimetre thinner.
Build quality is one area where the Predator does fall down slightly. The metal on the base of the machine is too thin and depresses easily, and the screen is wobbly. I’d be careful taking this machine out on the road. The Asus system was similarly flimsy.
The Acer has the usual selection of ports, including USB 3.1 Type-C, and two panels on the base allow for access to the hard disk and memory slots – something lacking in the Asus.
Acer Predator Helios 300 – Keyboard and trackpad
The red-lit keyboard is a Scrabble-tile unit afflicted with many of the usual traits that make such units great for typing but only mediocre for gaming.
The Acer’s keyboard has a sturdy base, which is a good start, and the buttons are quiet and consistent, with impressive typing speed. However, they’re soft and offer very little travel, which means they don’t feel firm enough during fast-paced gaming sessions.
The Asus machine has a similar keyboard, albeit with a bit more travel, and so its gaming prospects are just as middling.
The keyboard layout here is disappointing, too. The Acer’s 17.3-inch frame means there should be plenty of room for keys, but the cursor buttons are narrow and cramped, and the situation is the same with both Shift keys and the Return button. It isn’t a big issue, especially once you’ve become used to the keyboard, but it’s a little puzzling.
The trackpad is certainly large enough, but its buttons let it down. They depress too far, and the action isn’t consistent – there’s a noticeable “bump” half-way down the mechanism. Ironically, that’s what some people prefer in mechanical keyboards, but the Acer’s soft and bumpy button presses are a long way from the fast and shallow action that I prefer for mobile gaming.
Acer Predator Helios 300 – Screen and sound quality
The Predator’s 17.3-inch screen dominates a desk. It has a 1080p resolution, which is fine for a laptop this size, although getting close to the panel does reveal the lack of sharpness. This was seen on the Asus too.
The refresh rate peaks at 60Hz, which is the same as the Asus, but the latter laptop also had Nvidia G-Sync, so it could synchronise GPU output and monitor refresh rates at up to 60fps. That’s ideal for a GTX 1050 Ti machine, but the Acer misses out – even though it costs about £200 more than the Asus. As a result, gaming won’t be quite as smooth on the Predator.
The Acer’s benchmarks are solid and consistent. The brightness level of 397 nits is one of the highest figures I’ve seen from a gaming notebook, and the black level of 0.47 is fine – a tad high, but not so bad that it’s going to cause issues.
Black shades will look dark enough, and those results create a contrast ratio of 845:1. That’s a middling result and, again, it won’t interfere with games. That said, the Asus offered a better contrast ratio and black level, making it look a little broader and more vivid.
The Acer’s Delta E of 2.86 is good, and beyond the Asus’ result of 3.43, and the Predator delivered a colour temperature of 7180K – around 500K closer to the 6,500K ideal than the Asus could manage. The Acer rendered 86.5% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is ample.
Viewing angles are good on this IPS panel, and there were no serious uniformity issues. The Acer’s screen is a little better in terms of colours than its rival but a little poorer on contrast – the lack of G-Sync. The Acer’s panel isn’t bad, but I reckon the Asus’ screen is just that bit better.
The speakers offer up plenty of volume, but the range is dominated by the vocals, which managed to sound a bit flat while pushing every other noise into the background. The mediocre audio output can’t be managed or tweaked by software, either –so I’d definitely switch to a headset.
Acer Predator Helios 300 – Performance
Despite its size and design, the Acer is relatively affordable. The Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti featured here is one of the more modest GPUs from the mobile Pascal roster, offering 768 stream processors, 4GB of memory and a 1,493MHz core clock. That’s enough grunt to run games at 1080p – but that’s about it.
The Asus ROG Strix GL702VM has a GTX 1060 core. That’s only one jump in the range, but a big leap in the real world: it has 1280 stream processors and 6GB of memory.
The Acer’s Shadow of Mordor result of 59fps is good, but the Asus machine blasted beyond 60fps. And while the Predator scored 6688 points in the 3DMark: Fire Strike test, the Asus hit 8456 points.
The Acer’s scores are decent nonetheless, and the PredatorSense app can overclock the GPU with two 50Hz boosts – the first is called Faster mode, while the second is dubbed Turbo.
The first option boosted the Fire Strike result to 6955 points, while the second level took that score to 7134 points. Faster mode added a single frame to the Acer’s Shadow of Mordor result, while Turbo mode took the original 59fps average to 62fps.
It’s hardly ground-breaking, but it’s a welcome bit of extra power. The Predator didn’t give me any thermal headaches, either – no matter which GPU mode I used, the graphics core never rose beyond a solid temperature of 68°C.
Indeed, the Acer’s thermal performance was consistently good. The body of the laptop became only slightly warmer during stress-tests, with the majority of heat vented from the rear, and the processor’s peak temperature of 87°C is fine. Noise levels were okay, too – a tad louder than the Asus, but still quieter than most gaming machines.
The processor used here is the familiar Core i7-7700HQ, which has four Hyper-Threaded cores and a 2.8GHz stock speed. It’s paired with 16GB of dual-channel memory, and it’s a step up from the Asus’ Core i5 chip.
The better processor helped the Acer return Geekbench single- and multi-core results of 4503 and 13,547. Both results are comfortably ahead of the Core i5-powered Asus, but the Core i7 remains a little redundant in this machine – neither chip is going to cause games bottlenecks or problems with general-purpose computing. I’d have preferred an i5 in the Acer, with more cash for the GPU.
The 128GB Kingston SSD ran through read and write tests with speeds of 506MB/sec and 210MB/sec – both figures behind the Asus. Still, they’re better results than any hard disk will manage, and the Acer is still responsive in general-purpose use.
The final surprise from this machine is its battery life. In the low-intensity PowerMark test, it lasted for a couple of minutes beyond five hours – a great result for a gaming laptop, and almost 90 minutes more than the Asus.
That’s good, but the Acer still only delivered about an hour in a full-brightness gaming test – a result that saw it back on a par with the Asus and almost every other gaming laptop.
Acer sells four other models of the Helios 300. Unusually, the the NH.Q2CEK.003 has a 15.6-inch screen rather than a 17.3-inch unit, and it also drops down to a Core i5 processor. You’ll have to spend an extra £100 to get the NH.Q29EK.002, which has the same GTX 1060 as the cheaper Asus machine, and there’s an even pricier model with a GTX 1070.
At the bottom end is the NH.Q2MEK.005, which costs £999 since it has half as much memory as the other Acer machines and the Core i5 processor.
Why buy the Acer Predator Helios 300?
Acer’s latest gaming laptop is an impressive and well-balanced machine. The GTX 1050 Ti has ample power for 1080p gaming, there’s a Core i7 processor, and its battery life is better than most gaming machines. The screen is solid, and its design is attractive.
Ergonomically, it’s middling, but most gaming laptops fall foul of the same issues.
It’s a shame, then, that it’s scuppered by outside forces – most notably the Asus ROG Strix GL702VM. That system offers similar design and ergonomics alongside an Nvidia G-Sync screen. Crucially, it has the edge in gaming because of its GTX 1060 GPU, and it’s a couple of hundred pounds cheaper to boot, although that machine was made at a time when PC component prices were lower and more stable. As the GL702VMs gradually run out of stock, the Helios on review here will look like a good deal.
The Predator is a good laptop that doesn’t really put a foot wrong, but there’s no compelling reason to buy it when the Asus is faster in games and lighter on the wallet.
Verdict
Acer’s latest machine offers solid 1080p gaming performance, good design and a decent screen, but it’s outpaced by its key rival from Asus, which offers a beefier graphics core and Nvidia G-Sync for less cash.
THE END I NEED COMMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment