This here is
Acer's Helios 500
It's a kind of the bigger brother
to the Helios 300
And it's a device that
almost replaces the Predator 17
and the Predator 17x from last year
So those were really popular gaming devices
This is kind of like the successor to it
It looks quite different though
Instead of the black and red
It's predominantly blue
And I like the look of it
The design is obviously very gamer-oriented
It's got angular trim pieces
And the whole design language does feel appropriate for the Predator name tag
So the build quality feels good
It is plastic, there's no aluminum at the top or the bottom or any where on exterior
But it feels well-built
In comparison to other gaming laptops of this caliber like 17-inch gaming laptops
that often have aluminum around it
The big advantage is price obviously by using polycarbonate
Or just other plastic materials that be able to keep the cost down
But also weight
This is a lighter laptop to something like the Alienware device
It's not as tanky as Alienware like if I throw both of them off the stairs
This would probably crack before an Alienware did
But it's still a really solid machine
In terms of the ports, it's got plenty of i/o
Display outputs on the back and USB ports on the sides
There's three USB-As and two USB-Cs
Both of them support Thunderbolt-3
Now to access the inside it's not super difficult
There's actually hatch on the bottom, it's got two screws and that's it
The rest of the back panel does come off but it's a little bit more work
Now inside you get access to the WiFi card this one is the Killer 1550
It's an Intel-based card it's a fast one, I like it
You also have four RAM slots, there's only two easily accessed
You can remove everything to get to the other two
But you have to easily access once
You've got three drive base, two of them NVME, one of them SATA
The battery in here isn't small but it's a pretty serious laptop
I'm really getting around 3 hours of battery life that's with screen at 250nits
And that's not playing games that's just like regular use
If you're playing game, expect 45 minutes to an hour of battery life
But that's just what it is, that's what gaming laptops are like
Okay, the screen is really nice
This is the 144hz panel made by AUO
It honestly looks really similar in image quality to the 15inch 144hz screen
that we've seen on a lot of high-end gaming laptops right now
But this screen also has G-SYNC
Not only it's bigger the 17.3inch screen
but it also has G-SYNC and it looks really nice when you're playing games
The unfortunate thing is that because of G-SYNC you don't have access to Nvidia Optimus
so you don't have the power savings from that, you have a really short battery life
The brightness is good and the color accuracy is respectable
It's a very nice screen.
The keyboard is pretty comfortable
It's a big laptop so the whole typing surface is elevated a little bit
But once you get used to it, it's a nice keyboard
The layout is spacious, the key structures are nice
And it also has programmable macro keys up top
I like the track pad
It's a glass surface, Windows precision drivers, blue lighting on the perimeter
And hardware buttons below it
These buttons have quite a bit of travel when you press it, but it's a good track pad
Now the performance in this device is excellent
We're talking just straight-up excellent
Now this unit has an overclockable i9 and that's a chip that can get pretty high
But the thermals on this device are really well-done
Five heat pipes, big fans, big heat sinks
and blue heat sinks for extra bonus points (chuckles)
It's a great thermal design
The fans are quite on idle but they can get loud especially if you spin them up fast
You wanna use headphones when you're playing games
The GPU is an overclockable GTX1070
and again, pushes out really good performance
This is a GPU that I think will last several years in terms of gaming life at 1080p
It's just a really good combination
The speakers are located on the bottom but they sound really good
despite that imperfect location
They get loud but a still clean sound and there's a sub on the bottom
It's nothing crazy, but it gives a little bass or just some body to the audio
So my overall thoughts on this bad boy
It is a powerful laptop. I think for the 6 core CPU and the GTX1070
are gonna last quite a while
The components they have in here are smart
It's overclockable, very well cooled, and upgradability is good
It's easy to access, a little bulky and heavy
I mean it's a 17inch gaming laptop right?
So if frequent transportation is a thing for you, then I will consider something thinner and/or lighter
But if you don't need crazy portability, this is a pretty cool pick up
It's powerful, it's well-cooled, overclockable GPU, overclockable CPU
They did a lot of stuff right on this thing
Now there's another variance to this that is gonna come in AMD
like Ryzen and Vega for the CPU and GPU
and that's pretty promising, I'm excited for that
I don't know if I'll do a full review on it because it's gonna be very similar to this
But I'll probably post something on Twitter or maybe Instagram
to kind of compare the two
Uh, but that's basically it
Okay, hope you guys enjoy this video. Thumbs if you've liked it, sub if you've loved it. I'll see you guys next time.