I had been looking around for a while at many different gaming laptops, planning to get one for sure, but was really on the fence about which one to get. I looked at all of the MSi, Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sabre, etc. and to be honest, all these companies had great gaming laptops to offer for around the $1000 price point I was looking for. And I would hope that anyone looking for a gaming laptop in this price range would understand that companies are going to make compromises to reach that price range. All of the gaming laptops from all of these companies are great for this price range, and they all make their compromises in different areas of their laptops to reach that point. Ultimately though, most all of the other ones I looked at for this price were making their compromise in the the form of the GPU, stepping them down to the GTX 1050ti instead of the 1060 to try and cut costs. This was the only one that I found that still included the GTX 1060, and a 6gb one at that! No, it doesn't have the Aeroblade fans like some of the more expensive Predator line, and doesn't have a Thunderbolt port, but it does still have a USB-C 3.1, and the dual fans that it does have are still very good. I'll try to spare the more specific details on the specs on the laptop, as you can simply read those yourself on the main page here for the Helios 300, so I will move on to the concerns I had and what I think of the laptop so far now that I've had it for a few weeks and had plenty of time to run it through the mill.
There was another reviewer on here that had purchased the Helios 300 as well, and in his review stated that once he got it, Acer did not have the current driver software update on their site for the GPU, so his GTX 1060 in it was useless at that time. He updated his review a few weeks later stating that Acer did finally update their driver software support to the most current version, but I was still concerned about this at the time of my purchase. Needless to say, my concerns about this were immediately alleviated once I got the laptop, as I opened the GeForce Experience program the laptop comes installed with and was easily able to update the driver software within the first 10 minutes of turning it on. Now to my second concern I had, which was heat and cooling
I do plan to use this laptop for gaming, and although I don't plan on doing extremely heavy gaming on it, as I have a PS4, Xbox 360, 2 ps vitas, and a Nintendo Switch, all with plenty of games on them to which are my primary gaming platforms, there are just some games you cannot get on consoles, especially indie games that are offered on Steam, and this is my main use for this laptop, but I did want to see what this thing is capable of, so I purchased The Witcher 3 and Far Cry 4 to really test what it can do. I'll say, between those two games, and above all my other indie games and older, easier to run games that aren't near as taxing on the hardware, The Witcher 3 is the ultimate test to see what a system can do, as it runs it HARD, pushing the CPU and GPU to their limits as is, but it does run the game EXTREMELY well, keep in mind you HAVE to be plugged in to the power supply for these particular heavy running games to perform adequately, as if you try and unplug and run them solely on the battery power, both Witcher 3 and Far Cry 4 will instantly cut down to 9fps and are completely unplayable in that manner, and this is NOT something that can be changed, it is just the way the BIOS is set up. Trust me, I tried messing with all of the regular settings to which none of them changed this at all, the only way I found that you could possibly get those type of games to run at full 60+fps on the battery alone would be to go into the BIOS and turn up the voltage, but I DO NOT recommend even trying that, as it is just not worth potentially melting your computer just to do this, so settle on knowing you will need to be plugged in when playing PS4-era games. All of my other games, however that are xbox 360-era games, such as dark souls and payday 2, and ALL of my indie games, run a smooth 30-60+ fps in battery only mode. So, back to the heating and cooling, even though it doesn't have the Aeroblade 3D fans, the dual fans it does have work very well and are much quieter than I expected them to be, only really being noticeably audible when turned up to max speed. The rest of the time, they are barely a whisper. I want to note, that I HIGHLY recommend always running the PredatorSense application that comes built in to the laptop, as it is very simple and works great, giving you a very nice window that gives you a live feed of your individual CPU and GPU fan speeds, as well as current temperature/loading monitoring for both the CPU and GPU as well, and records all of that data on a second-by-second basis from the time you open the app to current. It also has very easy settings to use, have Auto, Max, and Custom fan speed controls, as well as having something called CoolBoost which I will get into in a moment.
So, while running either The Witcher 3 or Far Cry 4, I noticed that after extended periods of play (1+ hours), on the auto setting and with CoolBoost off, CPU temp was staying around 90 Celsius, and 80 Celsius for the GPU, and there were short spikes that would last a few seconds at a time where the CPU would actually jump up to 97 Celsius, which was enough to concern me, so I tried messing with the settings more, and concluded that if you are going to play any heavy games that tax the hardware this much, I HIGHLY recommend that you turn CoolBoost ON, as once this was on, on the Auto fan setting, playing The Witcher 3 or Far Cry 4 for extended periods, it considerably helped to cut down these max temperatures, where now the CPU max was at 87 Celsius, and the GPU at 78 Celsius max. Much better. Now, as for all of my indie games and Xbox 360 era games, this ran considerably cooler, with Dark Souls pushing the CPU to 72 Celsius max, and GPU 61 Celsius max. So, in conclusion, cooling is definitely more than adequate for light to medium gaming, but to remain adequate cooling on heavy games, I recommend you always turn on CoolBoost first, but once you've done so, it is adequate.
In conclusion, I am extremely happy with the performance of this laptop! It hits all of the right marks for someone like me who does do medium and some occasionally heavy gaming on it. As far as all other uses, for web browsing, video streaming and similar tasks, it is more than enough to easily perform well, with web browsing specifically being very fast. It may even be enough to say it is overpowered for such tasks, which is fine by me. The ISP screen is beautiful to say the least, with very good viewing angles, having a VERY slight loss in brightness at about 50+ degrees onward, but it is so slight it is still viewable. The keyboard is very solid, and the keys have good travel and resistance, not too much, not too little. The only qualm I might have regarding the keyboard is the fact that you only get one color on the back lighting for it, red, as I understand that may bother some people, but again for the price point, some compromises are to be expected, and the red backlighting really does not bother me, and actually has really good lighting, not being too overpowering but giving you enough light to be able to easily see all keys well. The touchpad is very good, having smart gesture capability, and the left and right clicking work well on it, as well as tapping the touchpad to click. Battery life overall is actually much better than I anticipated for all the hardware it has, being able to get upwards of 8 hours with light to medium use for surfing the web and doing other things, with gaming obviously draining it much quicker, but I've been able to get up to 2 hours on some games on just the battery alone without even trying to turn any of the settings down and actually having the screen brightness all the way up. The 256gb ssd that it comes with is blazing fast and I absolutely love it, but I do recommend you consider getting an additional hard drive for it as I did, as it does come with an extra 2.5" slot on the bottom to put an additional drive in it, which I ended up throwing my old 500gb PS4 hard drive in, which was an extremely easy thing to do since they made a simple door on the back that comes off after just removing one screw and is super easy to do yourself, just don't forget to make sure the hard drive you put in it is already formatted or empty, as I forgot to erase all my old PS4 data off the one I put in it, and ended up having to go into the Disk Management settings and delete all the partitions (save files essentially) one at a time before the computer would even recognize the hard drive, but once I deleted all of the partitions, it easily recognized it.
In summary, I would definitely recommend this laptop for anyone that is looking for something similar to what I was looking for that wants to get the absolute most performance they can for a price point of $1099 and that isn't concerned too much about being bothered by having a laptop that looks like a gaming laptop.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 3.8 GHz core_i7 |
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Memory Speed | 3.8 GHz |
| Hard Drive | 256 GB SSD |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 6 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
| Average Battery Life (in hours) | 7 Hours |
