That lid, as you can see from the pictures, is a fingerprint magnet – and it doesn't feel super sturdy. The body itself is plastic in some places and an alloy for both the lid and the keyboard plate. Acer sticks an HDMI, two USB Type-C ports and a charging port on the back of the protruding wedge, which keeps cables out of sight and stops everything getting tangled. On the sides are a combined three USB ports for connecting your peripherals along with Gigabit Ethernet, a microSD slot, a headphone jack and a Kensington security lock slot. The large footprint also gives you pretty much every port you could want. The body of the laptop barely got hotter than luke-warm when powering through recent games at max settings, and perhaps wouldn’t work as well without that roomy chassis.

The fans are loud to the point that in “turbo” mode you can hear them clearly from two rooms away – but it’s worth the noise. Plus, that extra space has a practical purpose: It houses some of the Predator Helios 16’s immaculate cooling system. It stands out, and the wedge has fully customisable RGB lighting as well as removable, spray-paintable vents so you can make it your own. It makes an already chunky, heavy laptop (2.7kg, or more for some variants) feel even more unwieldy, and if I needed this laptop for a work meeting I’d feel self-conscious taking it out of my bag.īut I can also recognize that this is unashamedly a gaming laptop, and Acer is differentiating itself from the recent stream of sleek matte black gaming laptops that some find boring.

Its diagonal lines and glossy finish look like something a committee might design to look futuristic – in other words, I hate it. The big wedge that sticks out the back of the laptop was the first thing that drew my eye. There are a bunch of things I like about the Predator Helios 16’s design, and a shorter but substantial list of things I don’t.

Dimensions – 14.1(W) x 11 (D) x 1.1 (H) inches, 35.8 x 27.9 x 2.8 cmĪcer Predator Helios 16 – Design and Features.

Battery: 90Wh (Max 330W power supply from adapter).

Display: 16” 2560 × 1600p mini-LED display (IPS LCD), 240 Hz refresh rate.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (12 GB GDDR6, max power 165W).

It's a machine with flaws – but its blistering performance is enough to land it among the best gaming laptops.

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