ACER HELIOS 300 4K GAMING SOFTWARE
ACER HELIOS 300 4K GAMING PLUS

In the case of the Acer Predator Helios 300, that's very respectable performance at a very respectable price. The good news is that there aren't many bad or even average laptops around at the moment – most models will give you exactly what they're advertising. Even then, the right pick can quickly change as prices shift up and down. The gaming laptop part of the market is more competitive than ever before, and to really find the best model for you, you need to spend a lot of time looking at specs and benchmarks. Treat yourself to one of the best laptops currently availableĪcer Predator Helios 300 review: price and verdict.Audio from the DTS: X Ultra stereo speakers, meanwhile, is decent without in any way setting new standards for laptop sound. It didn't seem to make too much of a difference during our testing, but if you're looking for something with this sort of basic tweaking capability, it's another nice extra to have.īattery life, meanwhile, isn't top priority on a gaming laptop, but in our one-hour video streaming test (with the screen at maximum brightness and the volume low), the laptop went down from 100 percent to 68 percent – not a fantastic result but not surprising considering the raw power of the computer (and with some brightness tweaks you could stretch that out). One of the more notable features on this model is the single-button Turbo overclock mode, which lets you instantly push the CPU harder if you are prepared for extra fan noise to deal with the excess heat. While more expensive laptops will beat those figures, the performance of the Helios 300 certainly isn't disappointing. In the widely used 3D Mark Time Spy test, the Predator Helios 300 logged a very decent score of 6,032, putting it slightly above the 'gaming laptop' average (5,730) but some way short of the 'gaming PC' average (9,216). With GTA V running close to maximum graphics settings, the laptop consistently managed frame rates of between 80-90, and sometimes higher. You'll notice they're there, if you try and do anything beyond just streaming videos or sending emails, but the whirring isn't massively off-putting (and no worse than other gaming laptops we've tested. We didn't notice any stuttering or slowdowns in the games we played on the Acer Predator Helios 300, which coped well with everything we threw at it – even if the fans did often ramp up to compensate for the demanding performance.

All the best lightweight laptops on the market right nowĪcer Predator Helios 300 review: performance and features.We found the typing experience a little on the soft side, but again it's a minor point, and the trackpad is nice and responsive.

ACER HELIOS 300 4K GAMING SOFTWARE

The keyboard and lid backlighting, and the different ways you can configure it, are all really impressive – the cursor and WASD keys get an extra brightness boost so you can find them more easily, and the supplied customisation software gives you a wealth of combinations to play around with.

ACER HELIOS 300 4K GAMING PLUS

In terms of ports, you get 3 x USB-A, 1 x USB-C, 1 x HDMI, 1 x mini DisplayPort and 1 x Ethernet, plus a headphone jack, so there's plenty of room for expansion.

The bezels around the display are relatively chunky for a modern-day laptop, and we would have liked to see the Predator logo on the chin of the display made a little bit smaller, but these are all minor complaints that don't really affect the overall appeal of the laptop. The air vents are quite dramatically styled, but everything else is relatively subtle, and that includes the thin lighting strips and the Predator logo on the back lid. It's a bold look but that tends to be what gaming laptops go in for – when you weigh it up against the rest of the gaming laptop market, it's actually one of the more modest models available right now in terms of aesthetic flourishes.

Design-wise, the laptop doesn't feature much in the way of curves: it's quite an angular, uncompromising look, but that doesn't mean it's unappealing.

Acer helios 300 4k gaming