Intel announced its 8th-gen Core i9 processors for laptops earlier this year in April and soon thereafter, a majority of laptop manufacturers started releasing top-of-the-line machines powered by the impressive processor. Jumping onto the bandwagon, Acer has launched the Predator Helios 500 in India, which packs in an 8th Gen Intel Core i9-8950HK processor, an Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU and 32 gigs of RAM. The laptop is available in two configurations – one with a 1080p 144Hz display and another with a 4K 60Hz display. Here, we’ll be taking a close look at the absolute top-end variant of the new Predator Helios 500 (Rs. 2,49,999), which features a bright and vibrant 4K display, along with the aforementioned internals.
Before we go any further with the review, let’s get the specifications out of the way. For the purpose of this review, we received the top end variant of the Acer Predator Helios 500, which features:
Design & Build Quality
At first glance, the Predator Helios 500 looks a lot like a bigger version of the Predator Helios 300 with a different color scheme. Instead of the Predator Helios 300’s red and black color scheme, Acer has gone with a blue and gray color scheme for the Predator Helios 500 which, in my opinion, makes it stand apart from most other gaming laptops in the market today. Beyond that, the laptop has a full plastic shell, which is quite disappointing for a laptop at this price range, and it has a very aggressive gamer-y design, so it isn’t an ideal office laptop (not that you could bring it to work everyday in the first place due to its sheer size and weight).
Ports & Connectivity
In terms of I/O and connectivity, the Predator Helios 500 has been packed with everything that you’d expect from a modern gaming laptop and then some more. The laptop has plenty of USB ports and they’ve been spaced out quite well so you won’t face any trouble plugging in all your peripherals, even if they have slightly larger USB connectors.
On the display front, Acer offers two options with the Predator Helios 500, a 17.3-inch full HD IPS LCD with an impressive 144Hz refresh rate and a 17.3-inch 4K IPS LCD with a 60Hz refresh rate. Our unit featured the latter and I was completely blown away by the display quality at first. However, upon careful inspection I found that the display wasn’t as color accurate as I expected. Pictures and videos appeared quite warm and upon comparing them with our in-house 5K iMac, I found that the colors were way off.
I tried calibrating the display using the Nvidia Control Panel and the Windows screen calibration tool, but no matter what I did, the screen just remained warm. Don’t get me wrong, the display is good enough for games and media consumption, but it just doesn’t cut it if you’re looking to get the laptop for video/photo editing. Other than that, the IPS LCD has great viewing angles and it can get fairly bright at max brightness. I would’ve loved it if Acer had kept the bezels thin, but since Acer is going with a big and bulky design for the entire laptop, I’ll let that pass.
My typing experience on the Acer Predator Helios 500 was quite enjoyable to say the least. The keys are well spaced out, the key travel is satisfactory and the keyboard backlighting is just about right. The arrow and WASD keys have a blue outline which makes them stand out, much like the Predator Helios 300’s red outline, and the arrow keys are offset to the bottom which is a nice touch.
Coming to the backlighting, the keyboard is divided into four customizable zones which can be individually configured using the Predator Sense software, but there’s no option to individually customize each key and no way to change the brightness of the backlight. One thing that did bother me about the keyboard is that the buttons in the top most row are significantly smaller than the rest of the keys, which makes it a bit difficult for me to hit the correct key at times, thanks to my fat fingers.
The Predator Helios 500 has a rather decent touchpad which tracks quite accurately and has great gesture support, all thanks to Windows Precision driver support. The trackpad is framed in a blue border which lights up and it features two dedicated buttons, which I personally prefer over trackpads with in-built buttons.
The touchpad on the Predator Helios 500 lies a bit offset to the left and I often found myself accidentally hitting it while playing games which was a bit annoying, but I gradually got used to it. The surface of touchpad is quite smooth and it works flawlessly with slightly moist or oily fingertips. All-in-all, the touchpad on the Predator Helios 500 was quite satisfactory, but I’d liked it even more if it were a bit bigger and placed in the center of the palm rest.
The sound system on the Predator Helios 500 consists of two speakers and two subwoofers which can get fairly loud at max volume but lack bass. The sound reproduction was pretty clear and natural sounding, with crisp highs and punchy mids, but the lack of bass made the system sound a bit hollow.
In all honesty, I was a bit disappointed with the audio performance, because the large and prominent ‘Subwoofer’ written on the underside of the chassis gave me a bit of false hope to begin with.
The Predator Helios 500 comes with Acer’s Predator Sense software which offers a bunch of customizations, allowing users to keep a check on the laptop’s internal temperatures in real time and tinker with the keyboard lighting, overclocking, fan control, etc.
The software has a dedicated overclocking section which will allow you to overclock the GTX 1070 on the laptop using three presets – normal, faster, and turbo. While the normal setting keeps the GPU at an ideal state for when you’re not gaming, the faster and turbo settings will allow you to push the limits of the graphics card while you’re playing any graphics intensive games.
Performance
Coming to the section of the review that you’ve probably been waiting for, the laptop’s performance. In order to test the Predator Helios 500’s performance, I ran a bunch of benchmarks which push the hardware to its limits and I played a few games, of course. In my experience, the laptop had absolutely no difficulties handling both the benchmarks and the games and I was pleasantly satisfied with the overall performance.
To begin with, I ran a couple of benchmarks on the Predator Helios 500, including PCMark 10, PCMark 10 Extended, 3DMark Time Spy, 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and Cinebench R15. As you can see in the screenshots below, the laptop performed wonderfully in all the tests, scoring 5698 and 6886 in PCMark 10 and PCMark10 Extended, respectively. As expected, the GPU also performed quite well in the graphics focused benchmarks, scoring 6001 in 3DMark Time Spy, 4434 in 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra, and 145.72fps in Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test.
In order to further test the Intel Core-i9’s performance, I also rendered a 4K video using the Predator Helios 500 and to my surprise, the system only took 12 minutes and 14 seconds to render the entire clip. As opposed to our regular editing rig, which took 20 minutes and 4 seconds to render the same clip. Just for context, here’s the configuration of our dedicated video editing rig: Intel Xeon E5-2620, 32GB DDR4 RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080.
Gaming performance on the Predator Helios 500 was quite predictable. While the laptop easily powered through most AAA games running at high with a 1080p output, changing the output to the laptop’s native 4K resolution resulted in some problems. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 on the laptop isn’t powerful enough to run all games at max graphical settings in 4K resolution and it showed.
The laptop was comfortably able to run PUBG and GTA 5 at 4K max settings, just crossing the 60fps threshold, but it struggled to run Far Cry 5 at max settings in 4K. Switching the output to 1080p yielded even better results in both PUBG and GTA 5.
Far Cry 5’s native benchmark resulted in an average of 35fps in 4K, reaching as high as 43fps and dropping low to 29fps. However, changing the output resolution to 1080p had a significant difference on the performance and the laptop was easily able to reach up to 100 fps, running an average of 87fps in 1080p at all times.
The machine had absolutely no problems running lighter titles like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends, as expected, pushing over 200fps in League and around 180fps in CS:GO. It’s worth noting that the laptop crashed a couple of times and rebooted while I was playing league, but that was probably an issue with the graphics drivers and was subsequently fixed when I downloaded the latest drivers for the card.
The thermal performance of the Predator Helios 500 was satisfactory, to say the least. On idle, the CPU ran at a comfortable 39 degrees and the GPU rested at around 42 degrees. While performing everyday tasks like watching videos or working on the system, neither the CPU or GPU crossed the 45 degree mark and the fans ran quietly on the auto setting. To my surprise, while I was running the benchmarks the fans didn’t pick up any pace and the temperatures remained quite respectable, with the CPU running at around 68 degrees and the GPU at around 59 degrees. Even under an intense gaming load, neither the CPU or the GPU crossed 70 degrees, which is pretty great compared to systems that go as high as 90 degrees during intensive tasks.
The Predator Helios 500 packs in a 74Wh battery which is larger than most other competing gaming laptops, but it just isn’t enough to power the 4K monitor along with the processor and GPU combo of this caliber.In normal use, which included surfing on the web and watching videos, the laptop could only last around 2 and a half hours on a single charge with the screen at 50 percent brightness and the battery saver setting turned on, which is quite disappointing.
Considering the laptop’s sheer size and weight, it’s quite obvious that you won’t be using it on the go as often. With that in mind, the battery backup is enough to allow you to complete and save whatever you’ve been doing in case of an emergency. It’s also worth noting that unlike most other gaming laptop, the Predator Helios 500 doesn’t switch to the more power efficient integrated Intel GPU when it’s running on the battery, which also has a significant impact on the device’s battery life.
Cons
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Well, that rounds up our review of the Acer Predator Helios 500 which offers some very powerful hardware in a not so portable package, making it one of the best desktop replacements out there. The laptop performs quite well, has a decent display, an okay-ish battery life, and exceptional thermals. However, on the downside, it’s rather large and heavy, doesn’t sound very good and has a very cheap plastic-y design. In case you’re looking for a powerful Windows system, but don’t have space enough for a desktop, you can surely invest in the Predator Helios 500. But, if you’re looking for something more portable, then the laptop wouldn’t be your best bet.
Having said that, if you want to buy the Acer Predator Helios 500, it’s available at exclusive Acer malls and with exclusive e-tail partners in India.
