The Acer Predator Helios 500 is a gaming laptop with some pretty nice specs inside, but just
how hot does it get and is there any throttling that affects performance? In this video I’ll
perform some in depth thermal testing and show you what can be done to improve gaming
performance.
In my configuration here I’ve got the Intel i7-8750H CPU, a pretty decent option for gaming
if we’re able to properly utilize it. For the graphics it’s got the Nvidia 1070, and
that’s the full 1070, no Max-Q here, so we’re looking at a pretty powerful gaming
combination. It’s also available with the overclockable i9-8950HK CPU, so expect different
results in that model.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celcius, it’s
cold here at the moment as it’s winter in Australia, so expect warmer temperatures in
a warmer environment.
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.
I was actually able to remove the power limit throttling in the stress test with both Aida64
and heaven benchmark running with a -0.190v CPU undervolt, but the stability was a bit
dicey. I didn’t do in depth testing at that level as in my experience -0.150v seems to
be pretty common with the 8750H in terms of stability, so the fact that I could go higher
here might just be pure luck and may not be very reproducible in every processor.
So how does this performance boost actually translate in games? 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 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.
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.
The laptop has a 230 watt power brick, a bit higher than many other 8750H laptops I’ve
tested, so I’m guessing it’s capped due to the higher powered 1070 graphics, still
it would be cool if Acer could only limit if it was needed, I doubt the CPU needs to
be capped this way in a CPU only workload for instance, but I guess this just may not
be possible as no one else seems to do it either.
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.
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, 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 might 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.
These differences in performance shown aren’t hard and fast rules, there are different factors
which will vary results, primarily the temperature you’re running in, application of thermal
paste, and even the specific hardware which comes down to the silicon lottery. You may
not be able to undervolt or overclock your hardware the same as me, it depends on the
chip and its specific power requirements, so don’t just blindly copy my settings and
do some testing to find out where your stable point is for best results.
While you could probably improve the temperatures by swapping out the thermal paste, based on
my results here it’s not really required, as shown with the fans going it gets quite
cool, but doing this may mean less fan speed required to achieve the same temperatures.
The thermals aren’t an issue anyway and we start to hit power limit throttling. In
any case this isn’t something I can test with in a review unit, the laptop needs to
work in the same way for the next person to receive it. If I go ahead and remove the stock
thermal paste and replace my own, I can't put the old paste back, so the next reviewer
would experience something different from what you'd actually see with the product and
unknowingly report incorrect information due to what I’ve done.
Undervolting on the other hand isn't physically intrusive, and as we've seen it did improve
the performance and temperatures in this particular unit with no downside once you’ve got a
stable undervolt. It’s a great way to get back some performance if you’re running
too hot or facing power limit throttling like we were here.
Let me know how much of a performance boost you’ve found by undervolting your hardware
and what you thought of the improvements here, and don’t forget to subscribe for the full
review of the Acer Predator Helios 500 gaming laptop, as well as future tech videos like
this one.