Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition review: Paint it white - ballstwitir

Acer's Predator Helios 300 Special Edition adds a affect of class to the bang-for-buck $1,100 gaming laptop we fell in love with earlier this year.

The baseline Marauder Helios 300 screams "GAMER" with its aggressive red-and-black design and chunky frame. The Especial Version shows what a difference a fresh cake of paint seat make. Acer gowned this version in white with gilt accents, and information technology's an absolute head-turner. Literally. My wife wandered into my office and stopped speech me mid-sentence, snapping her promontory to drool at the Special Variation when she saw information technology sitting on a table. She's been begging to use IT, bu to pinch it, ever so since. It's a real looker.

This laptop ships with a matched mouse mat, mouse, and earbuds, and Acer gave the Specialized Variation a faster processor and blazing-fast-paced 144Hz exhibit upgrade. But the base shameful-and-red Predatory animal Helios 300 received the same internal upgrades—and IT costs importantly less on the street. At $1,400 on Newegg, can the Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Variant silent be considered an likable bang-for-buck gaming laptop computer? Let's entrench.

Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Variation eyeglasses, features, and price

acer predator helios 300 special edition lid

The Extra Edition remains largely the unchanged under the hood, delivering tidy sum of power for 1080p gaming. Here's what's indoors:

CPU: Pith i7-8750H
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
RAM: 16GB DDR4/2666
Storage: 256GB M.2 SSD
Wireless: 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Display: 15.6-inch 1920×1080 144Hz IPS
Ports: 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C, HDMI, SD card reader, ethernet, headphone labourer, lock slot
Weight: 5.95 pounds
Dimensions: 15.4 x 10.5 x 1.1 inches
Webcam: 720p
Price: $1,400

Acer crammed a couple of leading light improvements into the Extraordinary Edition. The laptop got a computing boost courtesy of Intel's to a greater extent-core 8th-gen processors: While the Helios 300 we reviewed earlier this yr packed a and then-flagship Intel Core i7-7700HQ with quaternion cores and eight threads, the Special Edition hums on with a 6-meat, 12-thread Burden i7-8750H. It's faster, too, top-flight out at 4.1GHz turbo speeds.

The 1080p reveal also received an upgrade, going from 60Hz up to a buttery-smooth 144Hz, though the GeForce GTX 1060 GPU inside won't comprise able to push most games anywhere near that fast. If you don't mind bumping artwork settings from Ultra down to High to derive more speed, information technology'll represent a welcome upgrade, though, and the IPS display offers wide viewing angles. The Acer Predator Helios 300 Exceptional Edition's screen shines brighter than its predecessor, excessively, rated for up to 300 nits compared to the 230 nits we measured on the standard model.

I regard the keyboard backlighting were brighter, though. Andbettor.

backlit keyboard — White backlighting on. If you click to expound the image you tail end see the inconsistency of the backlighting (look atEnter, Backspace, Alt Gr, B, N,and more).

backlit keyboard disabled — Ah, it's much amend with the backlighting off whole.

Every last the keys are white except for WASD, which ship with golden caps. But Acer also decided to use a white backlight on the keyboard, and it's uneven at that, with the letters on some keys alternating betwixt backlit patches and worthless dark blobs. Unless you're in a dark room the white-happening-white frame-up proves illegible, frankly, and the keyboard's much more usable if you disable the backlighting completely. I've never had to recommend that for a laptop before. It's pleasant to use up when you can figure out which keys to click, though.

A precise golden trim runs close to the edge of the laptop and the edge of the clickpad-flair trackpad, which performs fortunate disdain the lack of physical buttons. Most of the chassis is plastic, though, which is a moment of a bummer.

acer predator helios 300 special edition keyboard

The $1,400 Especial Edition costs a full $300 more than the standard model we reviewed earlier this year, and while the Special Edition forthwith packs a break processor and display, so does the updated first version of the Vulture Helios 300, which we found for $1,100 on Amazon. Pairing an all-antimonial design with the light-and-metal key caper would've made the Special Edition's price superior seem more powerful. Likewise, while we overlooked the standard exemplar's thick plastic bezels due to the laptop's overwhelming respect proposition, we'd have liked the Limited Edition to slenderize those down to make it finger many, well, special.

Flipping the laptop over reveals an teemingness of ventilation to help the heavy-striking gaming hardware stay cool. A few simple-minded Phillips screws are all that's keeping you from the storage and memory lurking inside the Special Edition. That's a good thing, because like the touchstone edition, the Helios 300 Special Edition's Achilles Heel lies in its scant memory capacity. You only when get 256GB of SSD storage in the laptop, or about enough space to hold two or leash of nowadays's bloated AAA games and your Windows install. Acer also includes a moderate amount of bloatware on the Special Edition, not counting its PredatorSense app, which advance grub into your available repositing.

acer predator helios 300 special edition upgrade — Replacing the Special Edition's SSD and memory is unproblematic-peasy.

Plan on buying a collateral SSD and installing it in your laptop if you're considering buying the Predator Helios 300 Special Edition. That 256GB precisely doesn't cut it in a gaming rig.

Acer Vulture Helios 300 Extra Edition performance

Entrepot capacity aside, the Acer Piranha Helios 300 Peculiar Edition packs hardware with some serious game. To see how it handles, we'rhenium comparing information technology against similarly priced laptops in a bevy of benchmark tests, including the $1,500 Dell XPS 15 9570 with a Gist i7-8750H and a GeForce GTX 1050 Te; the $1,200 Dingle G7 15 7588 (phew!) with an 8750H and a GTX 1060 Max-Q; and Acer's experient Helios 300 with a quad-core Heart and soul i7-7700HQ processor. The Dell XPS 15 isn't technically a gaming laptop—it's more of a mainstream workhorse with a splash of gambling on the pull.

Maxon's Cinebench R15 measures raw CPU performance, and testament happily use as many an threads as you can bemuse at IT. As you'd expect, the cardinal extra cores and four extra threads give the Special Edition a big protrusion up over the older Helios 300 in multi-rib performance, though it's just a hair slower than Dell's duo. The newer 8750H chip also packs a slight sole-sum performance extrusion.

But Cinebench's bench mark runs in a short duration. The file we encode in our C.P.U.-intensive HandBrake test (which uses an older version of the software) takes around 45 minutes happening a space-meat processor, operating room as you can see from these benchmarks, honorable complete a 30 minutes on the revolutionary breed of Intel hexa-core chips. HandBrake loves the additional ironware inside Intel's 8th-gen chips.

Gaming laptops need noticeable graphics capabilities, of course. We run their comprehensive gaming prowess in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, a a posteriori test that focuses on boilersuit gaming performance.

Here, you experience the difference the Specialized Edition's GTX 1060 makes, because it packs the Lapp Effect i7-8750H processor as the Dell duet. It leaves the Dell XPS 15 and its GTX 1050 Ti in the dust and clocks in a bit ahead of the Dell G7 15's more energy-economic (translate: slower) GTX 1060 Scoop-Q. The older, slower quad-pith chip in the preceding Helios 300 drags its score bolt down to the Dingle G7's level despite packing the same GTX 1060 as the Primary Edition.

But let's get to the actual games! We compare laptop gaming performance at 1080p resolve to standardise results across the board, using the in-game benchmarks included with each title. We rely on older titles, arsenic newer games frequently receive updates that can wreak mayhem connected operation comparisons.

The GTX 1060 inside the Unscheduled Edition easily clears 60 frames per secondly crosswise the display board, and the overall results show how your graphics card is usually the main differentiator in games. The older Helios 300 keeps step with the newer Special Edition despite having a much slower CPU, while the little-powered GPUs in the Dingle laptops don't quite. The Dell G7's energy-efficient GTX 1060 Soap-Q is only when a hair bottom, though.

We also ran the Acclivity of the Tomb Raider benchmark incessantly for an 60 minutes, and performance stayed ordered inside a margin of error. That means the Predator Helios 300 Special Edition's cooling system solution is doing what information technology's supposed to, rather than opening soured strong and then dropping execution off a drop-off ascribable overheating. You can definitely tell it's a gaming laptop under freight, though. The fans aren't quiet.

The Extraordinary Version disappoints when IT comes to shelling liveliness, though. Despite having the exact Same barrage capacity of the older Helios 300, it died about 3 hours sooner than its predecessor our battery run-down test (which consists of iteration a 4K video in the Windows 10 Movies and TV histrion with sound at 50 percent until the motorcar gives up the spectre). The Special Edition solely lasted 3 hours and 47 minutes total, and I ran the examine multiple multiplication to confirm IT. The Dell G7 and its GTX 1060 Max-Q lasted 100 minutes longer, and the Dell XPS 15 lasted a whopping 14-addition hours total (though information technology's not really a consecrate play laptop).

You can probably tally the vastly decreased battery life to the vastly increased CPU core count and video display speed, and the fact that the groundbreaking Helios 300's screen is exceptionally dim—information technology can't even reach the 250 to 260 nits we standardize around in our examination. But sighted where Dell's 8750H-equipped laptops Trygve Lie, the showing from Acer's Predator Helios 300 Specialised Edition is…not so special.

Should you buy the Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Variant?

It depends on how more value you put option in aesthetics.

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition ($1,400 on Newegg) is a gorgeous laptop and a decent value in the wider gambling laptop landscape. IT doesn't offer anywhere good the jaw-dropping bang-for-buck as the ultimate-gen standard edition we to begin with reviewed, even so. And while the Special Variation's CPU and 144Hz display are welcome indeed, the recently upgraded non-special Helios 300 packs the same upgrades and overall pattern for $1,100 on Amazon. The Special Edition bolsters its selling price by throwing in a "free" duplicate mouse mat, mouse, and earbuds, but there's a yawning $300 gulf between the standard and Special Edition Helios 300.

That cost chasm makes other than acceptable drawbacks in the Helios 300 to a lesser extent palatable in the Special Edition. The light 256GB of storage is a letdown in both models. Dumpy bezels, some impressionable design materials, and a comparatively dull reveal aren't major compromises when you're getting the Helios 300's heavenly body gaming performance at a just-equally-stellar price. When you'atomic number 75 gainful an extra $300 for a unused paint job, though, the inside information substance. And the Special Version's white keyboard with white backlighting is awful.

acer predator helios 300 special edition accessories — The mouse and mousepad that ships with the Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition. It also comes with earbuds.

We haven't formally reviewed the upgraded Helios 300, but with what we know about its predecessor and this identically spec'd glammed-out Special Edition, I'd definitely recommend picking that ahead. At $1,100, you're acquiring much for your money.

I wouldn't spend the extra $300 for the Acer Marauder Helios 300 Peculiar Edition, just your gas mileage may vary. My married woman is utterly enchanted away its white-and-gold colour scheme, and when I told her you could get the one laptop in evil and red-faced for $300 less, she same she'd hush up choose for the Special Variation bu for its aesthetics. No matter which version you bribe, you'll be getting a great gambling machine. Sportsmanlike be sure as shootin to budget for an unnecessary SSD.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/402643/acer-predator-helios-300-special-edition-review.html

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