ACER Predator Triton 500 SE Laptop Review

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.