ACER Predator Triton 500 SE Laptop Review

ACER is such an interesting brand, as while their main brand name sparks a vision of more mundane systems (sorry ACER, but it does), as soon as you add the word PREDATOR on the end, you immediately think of some of the finest, fastest and coolest hardware on the market. It just amuses me that a single brand name can spark two completely opposing visions. For today, it's all about PREDATOR though, and that whole finest, fastest coolest thing seems like it'll hold up too, as the Triton 500 SE is just about the best-equipped gaming laptop I've ever seen, and it's sitting in front of me right now... oh yeah, this is going to be a good one. ACER Predator Triton 500 SE The feature list is jaw-dropping, taking all the best laptop technology options and ticking all of the boxes. A flagship Nvidia RTX 3080 mobile GPU, paired with the performance beast that is the 11th Gen Intel Core i9. That's paired with a huge amount of DDR4 memory, two RAID configured M.2 NMVe drives, blazing-fast networking hardware. If that's not enough, you've also got a high-refresh-rate high-end display, and powerful DTS:X Ultra audio. I don't know about your home computer, but this laptop no doubt beasts the heck out of what most people would consider a decent desktop, let alone a laptop. Right, let's get into it! Features NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 30803rd Gen MAX QDynamic Boost 2.0DLSSIntel 11th Gen Core i95GHz Turbo8 Core16 Thead64GB DDR-3200MHz2 x 1TB NVMe M.2 RAID5th Gen Aeroblade 3D Fan TechIntel Killer E3100GIntel Killer AX1650iDTS:X Ultra165 Hz Display16:102560 x 1600G-Sync12 Hour Battery Life What ACER Had to Say "This slim, spartan-styled Triton has one place—at your side, at all times. Infused with the latest 11th Gen Intel® Core™ processors and cutting-edge GeForce RTX™ 30 Series graphics, this thin PC was forged to obliterate your games, empower your creativity and inspire envy from friends and family alike." - ACER 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. Testing & Methodology To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system. We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of system performance. Games Used All games are tested at both 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 3840 x 2160 (4K) (where supported). *Please note that for systems which do not support a particular resolution, such as 1080p laptops, or affordable systems, we will not test the higher resolutions on those devices. In an attempt to bring our games more into line with modern releases and specifically those that offer Nvidia RTX/DLSS features, we have decided to update some of our games accordingly. Please note that not all games listed below may be used in our tests. Games and Settings Used Shadow of the Tomb Raider DX12 Medium Preset - Includes Separate RTX/DLSS Tests - Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p*Rise of the Tomb Raider Medium Preset- Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p*Metro Exodus DX12 Medium Preset - Includes Separate RTX/DLSS Tests - Epic Games Link1080p1440p*2160p*World of Tanks enCore Medium Preset - Official website1080p1440p2160p Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download)FireStrike (1080p) BenchmarkUnigine Superposition (download)1080p Extreme BenchmarkPCMark 10 Professional (download)Express BenchmarkWPrime (download)32M and 1024MCineBench R15 (download)CPU MultiCPU SingleHandbrake (download)Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below)AIDA64 Engineer (download)CPU-Z (download)HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the “normal” profile. 3DMark Firestrike Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme PCMark 10 WPrime 32m and 1024m Cinebench R15 Crystal Disk Mark World of Tanks enCore Metro Exodus Metro Exodus RTX Shadow of the Tomb Raider Shadow of the Tomb Raider RTX Ultra Final Fantasy XV CPU Temperatures GPU Temperatures How Much Does it Cost? Unfortunately, I couldn't quite find the exact price of this model. The nature of laptops are that there are some variations in CPU, GPU, storage, memory, display, battery, that all change the price. However, it is going to be pretty expensive. The model down from this with the RTX 3070 and the i7 is the best part of £2500. However, this isn't your run of the mill laptop, it's a flagship piece of hardware, with stunning attention to detail, so while you'll pay a big fat premium for one, you'll be getting a LOT of laptop for your money. Overview This clearly isn't a laptop for everyone, albeit, it's one that everyone will likely want if they could afford it. It's a premium product, delivering top-end hardware and the performance that goes along with it. So as I said, you'll pay a premium, but really you get what you pay for. What did amaze me is that I tested a laptop with the same CPU/GPU recently, but this ACER Predator one just wiped the floor with it. The bigger and faster memory configuration, the RAID hard drives, the powerful cooling system, and more. It all adds up to a much higher performance system and that's pretty clear in the benchmarks. This isn't just "fast for a laptop" as it'll outpace plenty of high-end desktops easily enough. Build Quality A lot of laptops stick to more traditional plastic chassis designs to save weight and money. There's certainly nothing wrong with that either, it's worked well enough for decades. However, ACER has gone for a much more premium full-metal chassis, and while that does add some weight, the overall durability and feel of the laptop is propelled so much higher as a result. Of course, all that extra tool time and material come at a premium, but it's worth it. Hardware The build quality is seen in the component choices too, with basically the best of the best used for everything from the RAM to the RAID M.2 NVMe SSDs. They've added the biggest batter they can too, with a 99.9Wh unit that will keep you running for half the day with regular usage and the power saving turned on. However, you'll be looking at under 2 hours if all you want to do is rag it in the latest games, so keep that in mind. Still having an i9 processor and RTX 3080 with you where you go is a pretty cool thing to have. Usability It's an easy laptop to live with, albeit it's more a desktop replacement than a truly portable powerhouse. It's a little heavy and the power cable will need to travel with it if you plan to play lots of games. Given this is a super expensive gaming laptop, I'll assume you will want to. However, the no-compromise performance meant I didn't have to compromise on my workflow, and I could easily edit videos and other CPU intensive files. Plus, the RTX 3080 within meant games can be pushed to their max fairly easily, making use of the increased resolution and refresh rate on offer. Not forgetting that having read speeds of over 12500MB/s means files load in a flash, and I'm sure going to miss that going back to my own computer after this review. Should I Buy One? If money is no object, and performance is the absolute objective, then there's simply no competition. A machine that's greater than the sum of its parts. With premium components and its stunning build quality, it delivers remarkable gaming performance with ease, making it one of the fastest systems I've ever reviewed.