The Dell G7’s energy-efficient GTX 1060 Max-Q is only a hair behind, though. The older Helios 300 keeps pace with the newer Special Edition despite having a much slower CPU, while the lesser-powered GPUs in the Dell laptops don’t quite. The GTX 1060 inside the Special Edition easily clears 60 frames per second across the board, and the overall results show how your graphics card is usually the main differentiator in games. Brad Chacos/IDG Brad Chacos/IDG Brad Chacos/IDG We rely on older titles, as newer games frequently receive updates that can wreak havoc on performance comparisons.
BUY ACER PREDATOR HELIOS 300 GAMING LAPTOP 1080P
The older, slower quad-core chip in the previous Helios 300 drags its score down to the Dell G7’s level despite packing the same GTX 1060 as the Special Edition.īut let’s get to the actual games! We compare laptop gaming performance at 1080p resolution to standardize results across the board, using the in-game benchmarks included with each title. 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-efficient (read: slower) GTX 1060 Max-Q. Here, you see the difference the Special Edition’s GTX 1060 makes, because it packs the same Core i7-8750H processor as the Dell duo. We test their all-around gaming prowess in 3DMark’s Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, a synthetic test that focuses on overall gaming performance. Gaming laptops need strong graphics capabilities, of course. HandBrake loves the extra hardware inside Intel’s 8th-gen chips. The file we encode in our CPU-intensive HandBrake test (which uses an older version of the software) takes around 45 minutes on a quad-core processor, or as you can see from these benchmarks, just over a half-hour on the new breed of Intel hexa-core chips. Brad Chacos/IDGīut Cinebench’s benchmark runs in a short duration. The newer 8750H chip also packs a slight single-core performance bump. As you’d expect, the two extra cores and four extra threads give the Special Edition a big bump up over the older Helios 300 in multi-threaded performance, though it’s just a hair slower than Dell’s duo. Maxon’s Cinebench R15 measures raw CPU performance, and will happily use as many threads as you can throw at it. The Dell XPS 15 isn’t technically a gaming laptop-it’s more of a mainstream workhorse with a splash of gaming on the side. To see how it handles, we’re comparing it against similarly priced laptops in a bevy of benchmark tests, including the $1,500 Dell with a Core i7-8750H and a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti the $1,200 Dell G7 15 7588 (phew!) with an 8750H and a GTX 1060 Max-Q and Acer’s older Helios 300 with a quad-core Core i7-7700HQ processor. Storage capacity aside, the Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition packs hardware with some serious game. It’s pleasant to use when you can figure out which keys to click, though.Īcer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition performance I’ve never had to recommend that for a laptop before. Unless you’re in a dark room the white-on-white setup proves illegible, frankly, and the keyboard’s much more usable if you disable the backlighting completely.
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 between backlit patches and ugly dark blobs. Brad Chacos/IDGĪh, it’s much better with the backlighting off completely.Īll the keys are white except for WASD, which ship with golden caps. If you click to enlarge the image you can see the inconsistency of the backlighting (look at Enter, Backspace, Alt Gr, B, N, and more). I wish the keyboard backlighting were brighter, though.
The Acer Predator Helios 300 Special Edition’s screen shines brighter than its predecessor, too, rated for up to 300 nits compared to the 230 nits we measured on the standard model. If you don’t mind bumping graphics settings from Ultra down to High to gain more speed, it’ll be a welcome upgrade, though, and the IPS display offers wide viewing angles. The 1080p display also received an upgrade, going from 60Hz up to a buttery-smooth 144Hz, though the GeForce GTX 1060 GPU inside won’t be able to push most games anywhere near that fast.
It’s faster, too, topping out at 4.1GHz turbo speeds. The laptop got a computing boost courtesy of Intel’s more-core 8th-gen processors: While the Helios 300 we reviewed earlier this year packed a then-flagship Intel Core i7-7700HQ with four cores and eight threads, the Special Edition hums along with a 6-core, 12-thread Core i7-8750H. Ports: 2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C, HDMI, SD card reader, ethernet, headphone jack, lock slotĪcer crammed a couple of notable improvements into the Special Edition.
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