During today’s Acer’s hour-long next@Acer global press conference, the company has launched nearly 20 new laptops, an impressive line-up by any metric. Among these, there are a couple that I find particularly interesting, namely the Predator Helios 500 and the ConceptD 7 Ezel, two very powerful laptops priced at ~$2499 and aimed at slightly different users.
The Acer Predator Helios 500 (model PH517-52, official page) is a 17.3-inch gaming laptop. As such, it comes with a 144Hz 4K mini-LED display option that has superior micro-dimming and brightness (“comparable to HDR 1000”, says Acer).
If you are more into extreme refresh rates, the 1080p 360Hz display option will provide minimum latency (~3ms) and insanely smooth motion. Personally, that’s what I would go for!
The laptop features an 11th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU a very powerful combo for gaming for maximum performance. We have not seen a Core i7 option, but if there’s one when this system becomes available (in August), you could save a bit of money without hurting the gaming performance too much.
This laptop can pack up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, so it could eventually serve as a video-editing workstation. It has become a popular use case for gaming laptops among pro-influencers.
The new 15.6-inch Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel (model CC715-72G, official Series page) also features the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics processor but comes by default with an 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11800H CPU.
That said, there’s also a ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro (model CC715-72P, official page) configured with “workstation” hardware in the form of an Intel Xeon W-11955M CPU and NVIDIA RTX A5000/A3000 GPU, which have drivers optimized and certified for various professional applications. This option makes ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro much different from your typical “gaming rig.”
The chassis design and the e-Pen support in the ConceptD 7 Ezel Series is also a very distinct touch aimed at “Creative” users. The swivel stand Is fantastic to get the display’s surface to the perfect angle for viewing and writing.
Finally, the display options include a 4K Pantone-validated touchscreen with excellent color accuracy: Acer mentions a Delta-E inferior to 2.0, which means that it can reproduce colors with near-perfection.
While very well ventilated, it is evident that the chassis does probably not offer the same cooling efficiency as a larger gaming laptop.
Laptops in the Gaming and Creative segments have gained impressive computing power over the past year and represent one of the most exciting technologies, in my opinion. Never before so much compute power was packed in such small volumes, which matters a lot when people work away from the office or on the go.
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