Cooling issues have plagued Acer’s gaming brand for many years. Especially with the previous Predator Triton 700, Acer packed desktop level graphics into a laptop but ended up with very loud fan noise. Thankfully, the latest Predator Triton 500 fixes this issue with intelligent cooling and better fan placement.
The latest Predator laptops in the Triton series, the 500 and 900, were unveiled at CES last month, and will shortly be available in South Africa. Gadget was supplied with an advance unit to review.
The Triton 500 is an all-metal laptop with sharp edges, coming in at 17.9mm thick and weighing 2.13kg. The design follows that of traditional gaming PCs, with a multi-colour backlit keyboard. Echoing the Apple logo on a MacBook, a backlit Predator badge shines on the back of the laptop lid in a neon light-blue. While the black metal body is not a unibody, the removable under panel allows for easier upgrades than other recently launched gaming computers.
We found that the body gets warm in all the right places. While there’s no stopping the heat with a gaming laptop, Acer has designed the Triton 500 to ensure that all the heat is above the keyboard. This means that Acer has packed all the processors and the relevant cooling into a tight space at the top of the keyboard, ensuring cool wrists when typing or gaming.
Click here to read about the graphics performance, the processor’s speed and the ergonomic experience of the computer.
The computer houses the latest Nvidia RTX 2080 Max-Q 8 GB graphics, as well as separate Intel HD 630 graphics for better on-the-go battery performance. The laptop has a full HD screen, which is standard on many but cranks the frame rate up to 144 frames per second (fps), where most displays output around 60 fps. This means that games run much smoother, reducing motion blur in graphically intensive games for a visually stunning gaming experience.
We tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, with the built-in RTX 2080 using DirectX 12, setting the game to its highest preset graphics, and enabling temporal anti-aliasing. The game’s frame counter was used. The game peaked 90 fps with an average frame rate of 85 fps with 10 minutes of gameplay. With the same settings in overclock mode, the maximum frame rate was 97 fps with an average frame rate of 91 fps.
Other graphically intensive games ran well, with Doom reaching the display’s maximum potential of 144 fps, running on the game on the “Ultra” graphics setting.
The processor is an 8th Generator Intel Core i7 CPU (8750-H), which provides snappy performance. We noted a start-up time from shutdown to desktop in 8 seconds. This was made possible by a combination of the fast processor and the two solid state drives, configured in RAID 0. Starting applications is a pleasure on this machine, with Chrome starting in 1 second and MS Word starting in 2 seconds.
Click here to read about the ergonomic experience of the computer.
The keyboard features Acer’s classic deep key travel, with quiet keystrokes, but shows off some gaming enhancements. From a normal viewing angle, the WASD and arrow keys are slightly brighter than the rest of the keys, making it easier for gamers to spot movement keys after using other keys.
A dedicated “Predator” button on the keyboard brings up stats about the computer, such as the temperatures of the processors and overclocking status. Tabs in the program allow for the keyboard’s backlight colour to be changed, of the fan speed, overclocking of the graphics processor, and custom game profiles to configure games that need specific hardware settings.
The trackpad is fairly standard, and won’t be used for gaming. That said, it has a smooth scroll on documents and multi-touch capabilities. Gamers will likely use a third party mouse and disable the built-in trackpad.
The gaming laptop’s battery is 82 Wh, fairly standard for laptop’s in this range. Switching to the power-efficient Intel HD graphics is recommended to maximise the laptop’s battery when on-the-go. We used the computer for three tasks on battery: word processing in Google Docs, watching and running less-graphically intensive games. The computer allows for just over three hours of typing in Google Docs in Google Chrome, or just under three hours of watching Netflix in the Windows app, or under two hours playing Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 (2009).
The computer’s sound was disappointing, as Acer doesn’t allow its TrueHarmony enhancements to be disabled. These enhancements work well with games, but make intense echo and reverb on other types of audio, such as streaming video and music playback.
Overall, this laptop proved to be a gamer’s dream as almost every point of its configuration ticked the box of a perfect gaming laptop.
* The Predator Triton 500 will be available in South Africa from April 2019.