Acer has announced a hardware refresh of some of its most popular gaming laptops. I’ve previously reviewed the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE, so you can read what that model is capable of prior to this update.
The freshly announced Intel 12th gen Core processors for laptops is the primary reason for this hardware refresh. In our Intel coverage, we’ve pointed out that Intel expects significant game performance gains with the new CPUs (if you’re playing at 1080p resolution), so that’s good news.
Overall I expect these processors to behave very much like the desktop versions we reviewed recently, minus the performance to du power and cooling constraints. For more information about the changes and benefits of the Alder Lake 12th generation Core processors, read our Intel Gen 12 Alder Lake overview.
According to Acer, buyers of the new Predator Triton 500 SE can select between Core i7 and Core i9 (the most powerful) while Predator Helios 300 (15.6” and 17” as featured in the first photo of this article) models have Core i5 and Core i7 CPU options. Processor aside, the DDR5 RAM also greatly contributes to the extra performance. Although DDR4 is technically supported, I haven’t yet seen system shipping with it.
The NVIDIA RTX GPU options remain the same, and in the past, I was very impressed with the RTX 3080’s performance and I’m very curious to see how high these new laptops can score in benchmarks.
The new Triton 500 SE will be available in March starting at $2300 while the new Helios 300 will arrive in May starting at $1650.