Acer Predator Helios 300 Gtx 1050 Ti Review

The Acer Predator Helios 300 is the first mid-range laptop in the Predator range. This serial used to be filled with laptops designed to bear witness off the latest hardware, complete with trackpads and keyboards designed for the hardcore oversupply.

This new Helios 300 model tones everything down a bit, mainly for those who don't accept a couple of thousand to spend on a new laptop. The trackpad is disappointing and the battery life poor, but if you want a home gaming laptop with which you'll apply a mouse, the Helios 300 is a cracking choice.

There's a new Helios 500 for 2018, aimed at those with a bigger budget.

How much does the Helios 300 cost?

The Predator Helios 300 slides in just under the £1000 mark with a model that has a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics carte, Core i5 CPU, 128GB storage and 1TB hard drive. You can buy it for US$999 from Amazon.

The best United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland deal at the time of review was £899 from Amazon.

As you upgrade the graphics to a GTX 1060 and the CPU to a Core i7 and the price gradually rises to £1399. Asus currently charges roughly £200 more for an Asus ROG GL702VM with a similar spec.

Our review sample is not ane you'd buy if you intendance more about gaming than productivity power, though. It has a Core i7 CPU, 16GB RAM and a GTX 1050 Ti, and costs £1299.

We'd recommend putting your money into the GPU rather than CPU at this level: something to bear in mind.

These laptops come with a 2-twelvemonth return-to-base warranty.

For more alternatives, check our listing of the best gaming laptops.

Acer Helios 300: Design

The Acer Predator Helios 300 has a lot of the design motifs of the full-blooded Predator models, such as the gamer give-abroad Predator logo and ruby strips across the back. However, the build is solid rather than flop-proof.

This is an all-plastic laptop, including the brushed metal-effect lid. To confuse things, Acer makes variants of the Helios 300 laptop with a metallic lid, although at the time of writing these are only available in the US.

The lid flexes a little more than than a top-tier gaming laptop and there's a hint of flex to the surround below the keyboard. There are no shortfalls that really impact utilize, though, every bit the keyboard itself is stiff.

Information technology's besides around nine.5mm thinner and ane.2kg lighter than the Predator 17, merely at 3cm thick and 3kg, this is not a portable gaming laptop. But what 17in model is?

Connections

Cutting out the optical drive is ane reason the Acer Predator Helios 300 is a lot slimmer than its large blood brother. And the connections are also cutting-down, primarily in spec rather than number.

There are three standard-size USBs, only one of them is a USB three.0. Information technology seems odd to take a £1000-plus laptop that nevertheless has USB 2.0s, but if you're plugging in a mouse the added bandwidth of USB 3.0 is wasted anyway.

The 300 also has one USB-C port, which is specced to the USB 3.1 Gen ane standard rather than the much faster Thunderbolt 3.0.

Other connectors include an RJ45 Ethernet port, HDMI and SDXC carte reader. There's everything the boilerplate gamer needs, but if you want top-spec ports you lot'll have to look at a more than expensive model.

Keyboard and touchpad

Some of the key appeals of the full-fat Predator laptops include a fairly chunky keyboard and a good trackpad with buttons that aren't built into the pad. With a Acer Predator Helios 300 the setup is more conventional.

There's a soft-action chiclet keyboard gratis of macro buttons and a trackpad with integrated buttons. The hardcore gamer crowd may turn their nose upwardly at these, but we think the keyboard is generally fine.

Activity isn't super-deep or notably well-defined among gaming laptops, just information technology's comfortable to use. Like the USB two.0 ports, the prosaic keyboard is merely something you accept to counterbalance upwards confronting the relatively competitive price.

At that place are also some typical gamer aspects to the keyboard too, including a red backlight and highlighted WSAD keys.

Nosotros're less keen on the trackpad. Its action is too deep and the feel of the pad too stiff. Information technology'south not great for quick-fire double taps, which is bad news for whatever sort of competitive gaming. Acer probably thinks most will plug in a mouse.

Predictably, given the focus on affordability, it'south a plastic pad rather than a textured glass ane too. This offers a less smooth feel, simply information technology's not light years away from a glass pad in utilize.

Screen

The display is i of the Acer Predator Helios 300'due south strongest elements, and a strike confronting a popular smaller-screen alternative similar the Dell Inspiron fifteen 7000 Gaming (which has a fairly poor TN screen). This is a 17.3in 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD screen with a matt finish.

Viewing angles are good, colour reproduction is solid and contrast is laudable in a mid-range model too. While the large surface area shows off the express pixel density of the 1080p console, making text look a bit blocky, this is a screen that would't expect out of place in a meridian-end gaming laptop.

The screen  covers 85.iii percent of the sRGB colour spectrum, and has dissimilarity of 838:1. These may not be perfect scores, merely to the naked eye are good plenty to make the screen appear rich and well-saturated.

For the screen obsessives, information technology manages 62.four per centum of Adobe RGB and 71.7 percent of DCI P3, the cinema standard.

Maximum brightness is almost unnecessarily high too, at 385cd/m². To go to the 120cd/thousand² nosotros use for screen testing, as the kind of effulgence you lot might employ indoors, you only need to set the brightness to 25 percent.

This is one of the better screens you'll find in a mid-tier gaming laptop. Like other models in this class, though, it doesn't have a touchscreen.

Acer Helios 300: Functioning

Every bit we noted at the start of this review, the Acer Predator Helios 300 spec nosotros're reviewing is probably not the one we'd buy. Information technology has a slightly odd mix of a high-end Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU with a pocket-size 128GB SSD and an entry-level Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti.

Those who care near gaming performance above all else would be better served by a Core i5 Acer Predator Helios 300 with a GTX 1060 GPU. And a 128GB barely leaves room for one very storage hungry games subsequently a Windows x install, such as Deux Ex: Manking Divided, which we use for testing. A 256GB SSD is recommended.

At that place'due south also a 1TB 5400rpm hard drive, but equally this is rather slow compared with the SSD you'll desire to install games in the SSD if you can to avoid long load times.

Complaints about this particular spec aside, the Acer Predator Helios 300 gets you lot very good performance for your coin.

The Core i7 CPU results in a PC Marking 10 score of 4206, which will be comparable with an Alienware 17. A Geekbench 4 score of 14479 flattens whatever slim and low-cal laptop. Such a punchy CPU makes this a very versatile automobile, able to have on serious jobs similar video editing.

We did notice that on occasion elements didn't popular upwardly in the Windows 10 Start bill of fare as quick as expected. Merely with this scale of PC it'south more likely to exist down to a small-scale software outcome.

The Acer Predator Helios 300'south GTX 1050 Ti is about as low-end a card we'd recommend for a large gaming laptop like this. And if you tin afford the GTX 1060 model, get it. Still, as-is this is nonetheless a very capable 1080p gaming auto.

It sails through Alien:Isolation, managing an average 95fps with all the graphical effects switched on and resolution at native 1080p. This rockets upwards to 209fps at 720p, low graphics.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a skillful argument for that GTX 1060 upgrade, as the Acer Predator Helios 300 averages 26.5fps at 1080p, Ultra settings. That's also low for an ideal experience when the "min" frame rates are going to be a lot lower.

Even so, the 720p Low result shows the laptop can still handle only well-nigh any game as long equally you're willing to sacrifice the odd element of visual gloss. Deus Ex runs at an average 92.3fps at this setting, so y'all merely have to find a middle ground that you lot, and the laptop, are comfortable with.

The Helios 300 doesn't have quite every bit big a cooling system equally the Predator 17, merely nosotros haven't noticed any specially worrying estrus problems when gaming with the laptop. Its underside tends to get warm, thanks to the only mid-size "exhausts" on the dorsum. But the passive cooling is good enough to let the fans switch off when the laptop is idling or performing ultra-low need jobs.

Under pressure the fan noise naturally becomes quite obvious: time to put the headphones on. Withal, the racket is not obnoxious.

As with nigh gaming laptops, the  speakers haven't quite fabricated the aforementioned kind of improvements nosotros've heard in some much thinner lifestyle laptops. While at that place's majority to the sound, information technology lacks clarity or any real bass power, instead relying on the mids to make it appear "full".

Dolby Atmos software is used to eternalize this farther, although the audio often seems congested. You can switch to the "speech" mode to tone down the furnishings of the signal processing, but this also reduced perceived loudness.

Battery life

The speakers are just passable merely battery life is really quite poor, and nowhere near the claimed seven hours. Playing a 720p moving picture on loop, the laptop only lasts 2 hours 30 minutes. This is with the effulgence at just 25 pct too.

It'southward a result so poor we ran the examination a few times just to make sure something hadn't gone wrong on the initial attempt. Yous'll get well nether an 60 minutes of GPU-testing gaming out of a charge.

You'll have to weigh up the importance of this yourself. It's a poor result only as the Helios 300 is clearly a somewhat affordable gaming laptop not a portable one, nosotros haven't let it touch on the overall score too much.

Specs

Acer Predator Helios 300: Specs

• 17.3-inch (1920 x 1080) 1080p 127ppi IPS LCD matt anti-glare
• 2.8GHz Intel Cadre i7-7700HQ (iii.8GHz boost) 4 cores, 8 threads
• Windows 10 Domicile 64-bit
• Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti GPU with 4GB RAM
• 16GB DDR4 RAM
• 128GB SSD
• 1TBt 5400rpm HDD
• 802.11b/g/n/ac single-band 2x2 MIMO
• Bluetooth 4.1
• 1x USB three.0
• 2x USB 2.0
• 1x USB-C
• HDMI
• Kensington Security Slot
• SDXC card slot
• Ethernet
• stereo speakers
• Hard disk drive webcam
• unmarried mic
• iii.5mm headset jack
• UK tiled keyboard with numberpad
• 2-button trackpad
• 48Wh lithium-ion battery, removable
• 432mm x 290mm 10 29mm
• 3000g
• 2-yr render-to-base of operations warranty

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Source: https://www.techadvisor.com/review/acer-predator-helios-300-review-3668149/

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