The Acer Predator Helios 500 is a fairly powerful gaming laptop, so let’s find out what it’s
got to offer and see how well it performs in this detailed review.
Starting with the specs my unit has an Intel i7-8750H CPU, although it’s also available
with the overclockable i9 too.
I’ve got 16GB of memory running at DDR4-2666 in dual channel, but the 4 slots can support
up to 64GB in total.
For the storage there’s a 256GB SATA SSD in one of the two M.2 slots, although faster
NVMe storage is supported, and there’s a 1TB hard drive in the single 2.5” drive
bay.
As for graphics there’s an Nvidia 1070 with 8GB of GDDR5 memory, that’s the full 1070,
no Max-Q here, and this powers the 17.3” 1080p 144Hz IPS panel.
For network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, support for 802.11ac WiFi and
Bluetooth version 5.
The Helios 500 has a black and blue theme to it, the lid and interior are a dark matte
blue plastic, and the keyboard also has blue accenting, even the air exhaust vents match
the colour scheme.
Overall the build quality feels really solid, despite the primarily plastic exterior.
The dimensions of the laptop are 42.8cm in width, 29.8cm in depth, and 3.8cm in height,
so it’s approaching the larger side for a gaming laptop, but as we’ll see later
this space results in great cooling capacity.
Acer have the weight listed at 4kg on their website, and in my own testing my unit came
in under 3.8kg.
With the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging the total weight increases to 5kg,
so on the heavier side.
The 17.3” 144Hz IPS panel has Nvidia’s G-Sync.
The viewing angles were quite good, colours looked perfectly clear to me on any angle,
side to side or up and down.
At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 327 nits in the center, and with a 770:1 contrast
ratio.
I’ve measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
97% of sRGB, 69% of NTSC and 74% of AdobeRGB, so not bad for a gaming laptop, I’d have
no problems using it for light content creation too.
I’ve taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test,
and my panel didn’t look too great here, I could only see this myself looking at it
directly front on in the dark room, but I never noticed any bleed during normal usage
or in games, but this will of course vary between laptops.
Screen flex was on the lower side as it’s fairly thick plastic, overall it felt pretty
sturdy due to the hinges that are found toward the far left and right corners.
Due to the weight it can easily be opened with one finger, demonstrating a fairly even
weight distribution, so you could use it on your lap without it falling off.
Above the display in the center is a 720p camera.
The camera looks alright, no terrible but still grainy.
The microphone sounds above average, but you'll be able to judge both for yourself.
I didn’t have any issues with the keyboard, it’s good to see the space being utilized
well with no small arrow keys or smaller numpad.
The backlighting can be customized in 4 separate zones using Acer’s Predator Sense software,
so you can change the colours but there don’t seem to be any effects built in, and as the
WASD and arrow keys have blue sides it did look a little strange using non blue backlighting.
Overall it was nice to type with, here’s how the keys sound.
There was a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard, but this was never an issue while
using it normally.
Just above the keyboard towards the left are 5 programmable macro keys, these can be modified
to do built in tasks such as apply a GPU overclock, change fan speed, launch an app, or any other
key macro you want.
You can press the program button on the left to toggle through 3 groups of macro keys,
so all up you’ve got 15 custom macro keys here.
The touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked great, it’s got physically separate left
and right click buttons below it.
All edges of the touchpad light up blue and I wasn’t able to find a way of customizing
this colour.
If you’re not a fan you can turn it on or off using a button on the keyboard, and this
lets you toggle lighting to have both keyboard and touchpad lighting on together, one or
the other, or both off.
For the IO on the left just after the large air exhaust vent is the gigabit ethernet port,
USB 3.0 Type-A port, and two USB 3.1 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 ports.
On the right there’s separate 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks and two more USB 3.0
Type-A ports, followed by another large air exhaust vent.
On the back there’s the power input, as well as HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort outputs.
There is a warning noting not to touch it as it may be a hot surface, but I didn’t
personally think it was too bad even after extended stress test.
There’s nothing at all on the front, it’s just completely smooth.
On the back of the dark blue plastic lid there’s the Predator logo in the center, with a brushed
silver finish and blue trimming.
Fingerprints are hidden a little by the matte finish of the lid and interior, and they’re
easy to wipe away anyway as it’s a smooth surface.
Underneath there's some rubber feet which did well at preventing sliding, as well as
air intakes toward the back.
The subwoofer is also underneath, along with two speakers towards the front left and right
corners.
The speakers sounded pretty good, still clear at high volumes and there was some bass present
thanks to the subwoofer.
Speaking of sounds, when you boot it up it makes this sound out of the box.
Thankfully you can disable it in the BIOS though.
The laptop can be opened up easily with a phillips head screwdriver.
The first panel is removed by taking out two screws, and this gives you access to the battery,
two of the four memory slots, and the two M.2 slots.
In order to get to the 2.5” drive bay the battery needs to be removed as it covers it.
The M.2 drives also need to be removed to take the rest of the bottom panel off, but
this only gives us access to the WiFi card.
The other two memory slots are found on the other side of the motherboard.
Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 74 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching
YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 3 hours and 5 minutes.
It was using the Nvidia 1070 graphics for this whole test, I wasn’t able to use the
Intel integrated graphics even after disabling G-Sync and trying to manually install the
drivers for it, which failed.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 8 minutes, and was able to sit at 30 FPS the entire test
without dipping.
Overall the battery life isn’t amazing, not too bad considering the specs, but it
would have been good if it could swap over to Intel integrated graphics to save power
outside of games.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celsius, it’s
cold here at the moment as it’s winter in Australia, so expect warmer temperatures in
a warmer environment.
The heatpipes were shared between the CPU and graphics, so a change in one component
may affect the other.
At idle both the CPU and graphics were a little warm, as shown by the light blue bar towards
the bottom, but that’s just because the laptop was completely silent at idle, as you’ll
hear soon.
The gaming tests were completed with Watchdogs 2 at high settings as I find it to be a CPU
demanding game, and we can see that the temperatures shoot up in the green bar, but no issues at
this point other than running hot.
If we manually max out the fans, as shown by the yellow bar above we actually drop the
temperatures of both processor and graphics by around 20 degrees, an impressive result.
If we instead go back to leaving the fans on the automatic profile but apply a -0.150v
undervolt to the CPU we’re still seeing a little temperature improvement, as shown
by the orange bars.
Again if we manually max out the fans, shown by the red bar, the combination of high air
flow and undervolting gives us quite cool temperatures in gaming.
Just to clarify only CPU undervolting was done here, but this generally affects GPU
temperatures a little due to the shared heatpipes.
The stress tests were done by running Aida64 and the Heaven benchmark at the same time
in order to attempt to fully utilize both the CPU and graphics.
Moving up in the graph and starting with the dark red bar we’re actually power limit
throttling on the CPU with an average of 91 degrees celsius.
Once again when the fans are manually maxed out in pink even with the stress test we’re
lowering temperatures by 20 degrees, really impressive stuff, but that doesn’t affect
the power limitations.
With the fans back on the auto profile shown in the purple bar even with the -0.150v undervolt
applied to the CPU it was still hitting the power limit, and with the fans maxed out and
the undervolt applied in the top dark blue bar we’re seeing the best results under
this full load stress test.
These are the average clock speeds for the same temperature tests just shown, you might
need to pause and refer back to the previous graph to get the full picture.
First off starting down the bottom in the gaming results we can see that once we apply
the CPU undervolt the average clock speed of the CPU rises quite a bit, closer to the
3.9GHz all core turbo speed of the 8750H, so not only does the undervolt improve temperatures,
we’re also seeing improved performance, and the increased fan speeds provided just
a little boost, as shown by the yellow and red bars.
I wasn’t actually seeing power limit throttling in this particular game, but that will vary
between games and their specific workloads.
Moving up into the stress test results the clock speeds in the dark red bar are the lowest
due to the power limit throttling, and with the fan maxed out in pink this doesn’t really
change anything as it’s not a thermal issue.
Once the CPU undervolt is applied in the purple bar we’re getting much better performance
on the CPU, but with the fans maxed out this appears to increase just a tiny bit, so the
power limit is preventing us from reaching the 3.9GHz all core turbo boost speed of the
8750H CPU in this particular stress test workload, although it’s getting close.
These are the clock speeds I got while just running CPU only stress tests without any
GPU load.
Power limit throttling was always present in this test even without the GPU load, and
even with the CPU undervolt applied.
Intel XTU showed it sitting on a 45 Watt TDP in a full multicore stress test, and I wasn’t
able to change this by modifying the values in XTU, so I’m guessing it’s defined at
a lower level and can’t be changed.
Here are the GPU only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test.
Acer’s Predator Sense software lets you apply GPU overclocks easily in two different
levels known as faster and turbo.
The “Faster” profile overclocks the GPU core by 75MHz and the memory by 150MHz, while
the “Turbo” profile doubles this to 150MHz on the core and 300MHz on the memory.
I was able to get a little further improvement by manually overclocking it with MSI Afterburner,
as shown in red, but this will probably vary between laptops as it depends on the particular
chip.
I suspect the baked in faster and turbo options probably work on all laptops, so they probably
don’t push things right to the limit and stick to the safer side for compatibility
reasons.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle the
body of the laptop is sitting in the low 30s, fairly cool.
While gaming this increases to the low 40s towards the center of the keyboard.
As kind of a worst case these are the results under full stress test with the fan on the
auto profile, getting to the mid 40s, still not too bad.
For comparison this is the same test, but with the CPU undervolted and with the fans
maxed out, back into the low 30s, quite a huge difference.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop, I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was completely silent, which explains the slightly warm idle temperatures noted
earlier.
While gaming with the auto fan profile it was actually fairly quiet, at least compared
to many other less powerful gaming laptops, which seems to explain the warmer temperatures.
With the fans maxed out it gets very loud, but as we saw earlier the temperatures drop
down a lot, I don’t don’t think I’ve ever seen maxing out the fans make such a
big improvement, and you’ve got the option of setting the CPU or graphics fan speeds
through Acer’s Predator Sense software, so you should be able to find a good balance
between temperatures and fan noise that works for you.
Overall I was really impressed by the cooling solution, but would like to see less power
limit throttling in multicore workloads, especially when it can clearly take it in terms of temperatures,
the limitation appears to be in the power delivery, perhaps it will be something that’s
improved in a future BIOS update.
Just to be clear, this isn’t an issue unique to the Helios 500, I’ve seen this in pretty
much every i7-8750H laptop I’ve tested, but as covered here there are steps we can
take to mitigate this and improve performance.
Finally let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks, all games were run at 1080p with
the latest Windows and Nvidia driver updates installed.
Fortnite was running very well regardless of setting level, even at epic settings it
played great.
High settings or below were needed to average above the refresh rate of the panel, with
low settings giving us 1% lows above the refresh rate for really smooth gameplay.
Overwatch was tested playing with the bots, and again really nice results.
Although the 1% lows are a fair bit behind the averages here it didn’t really matter
as they’re still quite high.
Even at epic settings to me the game played great.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and we’re getting pretty good results even
at ultra settings, definitely playable which usually isn’t the case for many laptops,
thanks to the 1070 graphics.
CS:GO was tested using the Ulletical benchmark, and the results were pretty good.
Quite high average frame rates and even the dips in performance in this test weren’t
that bad compared to other laptops.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark, and even at ultra settings the
1% lows are only just behind the refresh rate of the panel, so it should work very well
regardless of setting level.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and we’re seeing fairly high
frame rates in this test compared to most other laptops, the 1070 is really helping
out a lot here.
Assassin’s Creed Origins was another that was tested with the built in benchmark, and
yet again pretty good frame rates for this test as this tends to be a more intensive
title.
Dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay, so this should be a worst case scenario,
realistically you’ll probably get better results than this while actually playing,
and despite this the frame rates here are still pretty good for this benchmark.
Testing Battlefield 1 in the first campaign mission ran great even at ultra settings,
although the 1% lows are a fair bit behind and don’t change too much between setting
levels I didn’t personally notice any dips in performance, it played great.
Rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and even at max settings
we’re able to average above 100 FPS in this test which is quite good for a laptop.
Ghost Recon was also tested with the built in benchmark and is a more demanding game,
unfortunately not excellent performance at ultra but that’s just the nature of this
game, it runs pretty well at any other setting level though.
Watchdogs 2 is also on the more demanding side, however I personally don’t think it
needs a high frame rate to play, but even at ultra settings the averages are fairly
high for this title, I can play it no problem with a solid 40 FPS but that’s just me.
DOOM was tested using Vulkan, and we’re seeing high average frame rates even at ultra
settings, no problems at all playing this game and it ran smoothly the whole time.
I’ve got a few more games covered in the gaming benchmark video if you’re interested.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
While the Nvidia 1060 is a sweet spot for 1080p 60 FPS gaming with good settings, I
think the 1070 is a great choice for taking things to the next level if you’re looking
at a laptop with a 144Hz display.
It of course depends on that games that you’re playing and the settings that you’re comfortable
with, however as we’ve seen many of the games tested here are getting pretty high
frame rates due to the Nvidia 1070 graphics.
As we saw earlier we’ve got the option of undervolting the CPU and overclocking the
graphics, so let’s see how this actually helps improve gaming performance.
In the games tested the exact same Windows updates, game updates and Nvidia drivers were
installed so there shouldn’t be any changes other than the CPU undervolting and graphics
overclocking.
The same -0.150v undervolt to the CPU was applied as before, along with a manual 200MHz
GPU core overclock and 100MHz GPU memory overclock.
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and at ultra settings we’re just seeing
a little 5% boost to the average frame rates, but a larger 8% improvement at very low settings.
Far Cry 5 was tested using the built in benchmark, and at ultra settings there was an 11% improvement
to the average frames rates and a 7% improvement to the 1% lows.
Rainbow Six Siege was also tested with the built in benchmark, and at ultra settings
there was an 8% improvement with the undervolt and overclock applied, which increases to
10% at low settings.
So we’re seeing some good performance improvements, although it depends on the particular game
in question, unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to test any others.
I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here, and we can see that we get a nice boost in
performance with the -0.150v undervolt applied at the top of the graph, as mentioned earlier
power limit throttling was present in all CPU only stress tests, so we’re still not
getting full performance here.
To be honest I was hoping for better results, an 8750H without any limits should be able
to pass 1200 points in this test with no throttling, so although single core workloads are fine
if you need heavy multicore use you’re probably not going to get full performance of the processor,
but this can be improved by undervolting.
In Crystal Disk Mark the 256GB M.2 SSD was getting around 550MB/s in sequential reads
and 260MB/s for the writes, but keep in mind you can upgrade to faster NVMe storage.
The 1TB 5,400RPM hard drive was getting expected speeds, over 100MB/s for both.
As for the price here in Australia it appears to go for around $2800 AUD with these same
specs, or $300 more for double the memory and larger hard drive, or $2000 USD in the
US with these same specs but with an NVMe SSD, check the links in the description for
updated pricing and to see the other configurations available such as the i9 model.
So what did you guys think of the Predator Helios 500 from Acer?
Overall it was quite a nice gaming laptop, I personally liked the design, build quality,
and the specs which as we’ve seen hold up very well in games, when paired with the 144Hz
display it’s a great all round gaming experience.
It would have been nice to get full performance of the 8750H CPU under multicore workloads,
but as discussed basically no laptops seem to be able to handle that, which realistically
in games is less of an issue anyway.
Otherwise it had a great cooling solution and the only other negative was that I couldn’t
use the Intel integrated graphics to save battery outside of gaming.
Let me know what you guys thought down in the comments, and leave a like to let me know
if you found the review useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one.