A notebook with desktop performance, the Helios 500 is even more powerful - and overclocking is also on the cards
Professionals
The most powerful laptop we've tested
Unique 4K HDR Mini LED display
Overclockers are welcome
Disadvantages
The weight is like a small bungalow
Minimum battery life
Requires two PSUs for Turbo mode
The Helios 500 is the pinnacle of Acer gaming notebooks. It is the largest, heaviest and most powerful notebook made by a Taiwanese hardware company and can best be imagined as a desktop computer powered by a laptop. To hell with such conceivable concepts as portability or battery life - the name of the game is perfect here.
Review of Acer Predator Helios 500 (2021): What you need to know
This 3.9kg plate on the machine costs Prince £ 3,799, but the details are designed to reduce the pain of your credit card. On the front and center is a 17.3-inch Mini LED 4K HDR display with a refresh rate of 120 Hz and under the cover is a strong alliance between the 5GHz Intel Core i9-11980HK processor, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia RTX3080 GPU and dual PCI. -E 4 SSDs are combined in a RAID array. This hardware caliber is enough to get most games out of the box - and even up to 4K - but Acer is also putting the new laptop beast into overclocking. This is not a false statement: the Helios 500 has several power supplies that provide the power needed to push the CPU and GPU out of storage speeds. If you are the type of person who normally prefers gaming laptops because overclocking is not on the table, then it can make you dizzy.
Reviews: Acer Predator Helios 500 (2021): Price and competition
The new 17.3-inch Helios 500 is only available in one model and will return you with a royal value of GBP 3,799, which includes a GBP 200 discount offered by all retailers in the UK. No wonder all the competition is less or cheaper.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 G733 is another huge 17.3-inch gaming beast and has a good mechanical keyboard, a Full HD display with a maximum refresh rate of 360 Hz and an overclocked AMD Ryzen 9 processor. At 3,500 pounds, it's not much cheaper than the new Helios, but at 2.7kg it's a bit lighter.
The first named here holds the trophy of the most powerful laptop in Expert Reviews. The Alienware x15 R1 is almost as powerful as the Helios 500, but half the weight, half the length and 1,500 pounds cheaper, although that's true for the Core i7, the 15.6-inch version we have. testing. . A 17.3-inch machine with a Core i9 CPU, 32 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD will cost you £ 3,149 (Dell currently offers from £ 3,749).
Slightly larger than the x15, but compared to the Helios 500, it's still a small Legion 7 from Lenovo. For less than £ 2,000 you get a very good display and sound system and GPU RTX 3080. The model we tested has 1 TB of storage and 16 GB of system RAM, but you can easily lower the bottom and upgrade both to be compatible with Helios.
If you want a little less Windows, then the new MacBook Pro 16 from Apple is worth considering. We call it "just amazing" when we examine it and not without reason. The Mini LED display is a pleasure to look at and the battery life is epic on a powerful engine. There is almost nothing else for everything. Review of Acer Predator Helios 500 (2021): Design and quality of workmanship
The Helios 500 is a USS Iowa laptop; big, good and very hard. Weighing 3.9 kg, I would describe it as more portable than mobile, and the dimensions of 400 x 319 x 35 mm firmly planted it in a large area of a laptop. If you plan to carry it, you will need a backpack large enough to fit in and two large 750g PSU stones.
In addition to the cover, which is aluminum, Helios is more of plastic, but it still looks great. It's an absolutely solid activity and even the lid is impressively tight for anything that needs to be placed on a 17.3-inch display, but is only 5 mm thick. The design is more limited than I expected, similar to the new Legion machines from Lenovo. Turn off the unique Close Encounters light show - all four edges have RGB LED strips around the trackpad and each key can be assigned its own RGB color - and it doesn't look much like a stereotypical gaming notebook other than one of the cheaper Acer Nitro engines. The black design is a bit stimulating, with a large blue LED button on the top of the keyboard and the same backlit Predator logo on the lid that the game plays.
Connectivity is more generous. You get two USB Type-C ports and three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, HDMI 2.1 and Mini DisplayPort 1.4 video channels, an RJ45 gigabit connector and separate 3.5 mm microphone and headphone connectors. The icing on the cake is that both Type-C ports support Thunderbolt 4. The two DC-in jacks are carefully located at the back dead center and two in the Helios 500 have access to 600W. To keep your desk clean, Acer supplies a rubber stand for two PSUs. It may seem like a trivial supplement, but trust me, you will appreciate it.
Wireless communication is controlled by the AX1650i Wi-Fi 6 module as well as a gigabit Ethernet switch manufactured by Intel's Gaming Networking Killer. I record network speeds averaging 1.5 Gbit / s, which is more than fast enough for any gaming need. The pre-installed Killer Control Center gives you granular control over your network suite that ordinary Windows users can only dream of. Bluetooth 5.1 radio is a matter of course.
The three things missing in the Helios 500 are a memory card slot, each type of biometric login and a touch screen. The center is most surprising because the 1080p webcam is so good and represents a huge improvement over the 720p shakes you often find on the top screens of gaming laptops. After unpacking Helios, you will find a mounting frame for a 2.5-inch HDD. Removing the first part of the base is very easy and provides good access to two SSD slots, a Wi-Fi module, two RAM cards and the previously mentioned HDD bay. The back half of the base consists of a cooling system and is clearly not designed to be removed by an occasional home thinker or an interesting hack.
The Helios 500 uses two 1TB PCI-E 4 SSDs in RAID0 configuration for storage and is really fast: sequential read and write speeds of 6.939 MB / s and 6.864 MB / s, respectively.
Review of Acer Predator Helios 500 (2021): Keyboard and trackpad
The Helios 500 keyboard may not have the mechanical strength of rivals such as 17.3-inch Alienware machines such as the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17, but it is very good. It is quiet and robust to operate, the keys have a large stroke and there is a fully numeric keypad. The large Power and Turbo buttons sit at the top of the keyboard, and above the numeric keys is a dedicated key to launch Predator Sense.
The party piece on the keyboard is an option to exchange WASD and darts for aluminum MagForce and Racing. I made the best use of the previous one, which has a bump button that moves 3.1 mm and you can move faster or slower, depending on how hard you press the button. Acer packs spare wrenches and a plastic disassembly tool in several hard zip cases so you don't lose them, which is nice. The trackpad with dimensions of 105 x 65 mm is not the largest in the area and is covered with plastic instead of glass, but it is perfectly sensitive and the separate click bars at the bottom are flawless.
Review of Acer Predator Helios 500 (2021): Display and sound
The Helios 500 is equipped with a 4K (3,840 x 2,160) Mini LED IPS panel with a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz. Mini LED technology uses thousands of LEDs to illuminate the screen, and the Acer screen has 4,608 LEDs grouped into 512 zones, each of which can be turned on, off, and on independently. This is the same technology that Apple uses on its iPad Pro and MacBook Pro screens, with the benefit of a much improved High Dynamic Range (HDR) display and a much brighter display. Thanks to this, the IPS display also looks like an AMOLED panel with dark black and a higher contrast ratio.
The panel on the Helios 500 is completely clear. We recorded a maximum brightness of 656 cd / m2 in standard mode and 853 cd / m2 in HDR. The contrast ratio measured 3,753: 1 in SDR, but jumped to 10,908: 1 in HDR. Not surprisingly, the panel effortlessly contains sRGB root colors - 99.8% coverage is as good as it can be - and it's also able to do a good job in the DCI-P3 color space, which includes a respected 92.3%. With the typical Delta E 5.02 color variation, the screen is not as colorful as it could be, but working calibration may not be an issue if you want to make a professional image or video. .
A potential disadvantage of Mini LED technology is that it can cause a mixed effect around bright objects when they are visible against a dark background, but I can't say I noticed this when watching videos designed to have an effect mark. I've noticed that at 255 dpi, the Helios 500 is one of the sharpest large laptop screens. On paper, the Apple MacBook Pro 16 even has a few pips in an email with a 16.2-inch display with a resolution of 254 dpi.
Together with the Alienware x15 R1, the Helio 500 is one of the few gaming notebooks equipped with Nvidia Advanced Optimus technology. Standard Optimus systems will have to leave G-Sync support from Nvidia or will require a multiplexer (or MUX) switch to restart the system. Advanced Optimus allows you to turn Optimus on and off for entertainment, and allows users to choose between G-Sync support and improved performance, as well as the improved battery life provided by Optimus. The refresh rate of the 120 Hz panel may not be as impressive next to the 360 Hz panel of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17, but it is obviously a Full HD display. There is no list of 17.3-inch 4K 120Hz laptops
BUY YOURSELF A NEW GAMING LAPTOP