First, the bad news. While Acer’s Predator Helios 300 – the entry-level configuration of its popular gaming laptop line – was available for $999 during Black Friday sales, the price (on Amazon) has since crept back up to $1159, technically making it no longer a gaming laptop under $1000. That said, it’s still instructive to see what an extra $159 over that budget will get you – or what you’ll be able to get if you wait for another sale.
Design
The Predator Helios 300 certainly looks the part, right from the start. The chassis design is moderately angular, and it’s coupled with bright red and shiny silver accents along with trim that mimics diamond plate industrial flooring. It absolutely screams gamer. Both the lid and palmrest are crafted out of brushed aluminum, while the LCD frame and bottom of the chassis are made of plastic. The spacious keyboard is backlit in red, though the numeric keypad and arrow keys collide awkwardly on the right side of the machine. The WASD keys – the most essential buttons for any gamer – are outlined in red for better visibility. One downside: At 5.5 pounds, it was the heaviest laptop in this roundup; and its 30mm thickness tied it for the largest girth.
Features
The Predator Helios 300 features Dolby Audio Premium sound, which was appropriately loud and accurate in my testing. That’s good, because you might need it to combat the Acer Aeroblade fan, which can get a bit loud when cranked up to full blast. (The fan speed is user-controllable through a custom app available in Windows.) I had a good experience with the Helios’ keyboard, but as with most laptops it was no substitute for an external one. The trackpad, slightly depressed into the palmrest, is spacious and easy to work with. Finally, there’s the screen. While it’s a standard 15.6-inch model (at 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution), it was the brightest I tested in this category, standing out nicely against the field.
Specs
As noted, Acer’s Predator Helios 300 is (usually) a more expensive laptop, and that is almost exclusively due to one component upgrade: the inclusion of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU instead of a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti or 1050, which the other four laptops in this category include. That upgrade may sound small, but it’s hugely significant when it comes to graphics capabilities, as we’ll see in the next section. Other components include a standard 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H CPU (eighth generation) CPU and 16GB of RAM. The only miss here is the inclusion of only a 256GB SSD. With no secondary hard drive, storage on the Helios is limited. Port selection is however fairly good: Three standard USB ports, a USB-C port, full-size Ethernet, and HDMI output are all included. Unfortunately, there is no card reader slot included; also note that two of the USB ports are throttled down to USB 2.0 speeds.
Performance
The Predator Helios 300 gave me some concerns in the realm of stability, though it was ultimately able to complete all the benchmarks I ran on it. As expected, it topped the board on every test I ran, besting the field by up to 20 percent on general applications (which includes web page rendering, business productivity applications, and digital media creation work) and up to 50 percent on graphics and gaming-oriented tests. Again, this is almost exclusively due to the upgraded graphics card as discussed above. A representative selection of benchmark scores can be found below.
Battery
At just 2 hours, 28 minutes of run time playing back full-screen video, the Predator Helios 300 had the worst battery life in this group. That benchmark isn’t atrocious, since the laptop’s beefed-up components suck up a lot of juice, but it’s something that mobile gamers should definitely be aware of before soldiering out to the LAN party.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, unless you’re diligent, you probably won’t find the Acer Predator Helios 300 for under $1000, though the march of time and progress will inevitably push down the price of this machine – and all the laptops on this list. That said, budget gaming laptops often require a bit more compromise than a hardcore gamer is willing to give. If you can find an extra $159 in the budget, the performance boost is arguably worth the price.
