The Acer Predator Triton 500 may not be the largest laptop in the world, but it’s certainly rather heavy. It has a full metal chassis design that looks absolutely stunning. However, this is then combined with some very powerful hardware and the cooling that requires, as well as a fairly significant battery. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not so heavy it’s impractical, but it’s obviously not meant for all-day on-the-go workflow. This is a gaming laptop, you get where you need to be, you unpack it, you plug it in, and you play for hours on end.
The branding is minimal, just a slick little badge milled out of the aluminium here, which looks great.
Ventilation on the left side, allowing the fans to pull cool air into the system. There’s a USB 3.0, USB Type C, audio and LAN ports here, as well as the power line-in. Sucks if you’re a lefty though, as the power cable will be in your way.
Down the right side, there’s an SDCard reader, another USB 3.0 and Type C, and an HDMI 2.1. The HDMI is nice, as you can hook up a 120hz/4K display and with an RTX 3080 inside, it’ll be able to use it well. There’s also another air intake here.
As you can see, there’s a LOT more ventilation at the back, with some larger fins that will help steer the airflow up and away from the system.
Those heatsinks are PACKED with fins, and overall, it’s clear this is where most of the weight of the laptop is coming from.
What does surprise me is how few vents there are on the bottom. Most gaming laptops are virtually open-air they have so much mesh on the bottom. However, this system clearly favours a more focused airflow, and it’ll be interesting to see how warm it gets in my testing later.
That’s a pretty hard rubber foot on the bottom, and it gives the bottom ventilation quite a lot of ground clearance.
Opening it up, wow, the 500 SE really does look like it means business. That all-metal body just oozes premium quality, and it feels rather exquisite to the touch as well.
The keyboard is a fairly standard looking laptop design, but there are some really nice caps on there. They’ve got a very smooth and polished feel to them that makes them a joy to type on. It’s also got a very smooth and quiet action. It’s hard to really nail down the finer details of how, but it just feels a bit more premium than most laptop keyboards, despite looking fairly standard.
The mouse touchpad is massive, allowing for clean and accurate movement. It supports multi-touch and even has a built-in fingerprint scanner for added security.
Along the back row, there’s a nice angular pattern and mesh, where you’ll find the built-in DTS:X Ultra speakers and hardware. Honestly, for a laptop, this thing packs a punch. Obviously a little lacking in bass, but the overall volume and clarity is sublime and doesn’t end up in a soup of distortion when you crank it.
There are a few shortcuts built into the keyboard, allowing you to disable/enable the touchpad, Wi-Fi, sleep mode, backlight, etc.
You can adjust display outputs, brightness, and more here.
While there’s no dedicated number pad, this does mean the main keyboard has a standard keyboard spacing. I like that they went with this rather than a more compact design, as it’ll be more comfortable to type on and most importantly, game on. However, there are some dedicated multimedia keys for play/pause/skip and they have a secondary function for controlling the volume too.
The keyboard has a nice backlight too, and I like how it surrounds the switches
The large custom font offers a nice clean illumination too.
The panel is gorgeous, offering blacks that are as good as you could hope for without moving over to OLED. It handles reflections very well too, as it’s pretty bright in here today, but that doesn’t seem to be throwing it off at all. Plus, if it does get too bright, the overall max brightness is powerful enough to shine through.
