The Gentleman Magazine Issue 14 | April 2019 | Page 72

ACER HELIOS 500 REVIEW:
“PORTABILITY AND PERFORMANCE, WITHOUT COMPROMISE”
Acer’s gaming division; Predator are renowned throughout
the gaming industry for delivering high quality products to
gamers and media professionals around the world with a focus
on performance in mind. The Acer Predator Helios 500 is no
exception to this rule, in fact it rewrites what is capable for a
high-performance gaming laptop.
The other masterpiece that Predator has brought to the table
with the Helios 500 is their superb Dual AeroBlade™ 3D metal
fans, these are outstanding and quite possibly the best fans and
cooling setup I have seen on a gaming laptop.
The Helios 500 stands out in the market because you can
configure it with either Intel or AMD. My review unit was from
the Intel family equipped with the powerful and overclockable
8th Generation i9 8950HK processor with a base speed of
2.90GHz and turbo boost of 4.80GHz as standard, alongside
its 6 cores and 12 threads, this CPU can handle the most
demanding tasks for gamers and video editors. Under heavy load running games at ultra-settings the
CPU rarely went over 65 degrees, whilst the entire system
temperature stayed at a consistent 45 Degrees throughout
our tests. However, it should be noted that for this excellent
cooling you are compromising thinness over performance as
the Helios 500 is a little on the chunky side but, this does not
put me off this gaming laptop at all and I am personally happy
compromising on thinness for this tremendous cooling system
and performance it provides.
Along with this powerful CPU you are given an overclockable
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070 that is more than capable of
powering the crisp NVIDIA® G-SYNC® enabled 17.3-inch
1080p 144hz screen and delivering amazing frames-per-
second. We tested the Helios 500 in games such as, Apex
Legends, Battlefield, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege and other
AAA titles and were amazed by the performance of this laptop. Aside from gaming this laptop also provides more than enough
performance for the most demanding video editor whilst on
the go, we tested the Helios 500 in the latest edition of Adobe’s
Premiere Pro software with our 4K RAW footage shot on our
RED camera. We were able to edit and scrub through the
timeline in real time and exporting files to RED’s native format
and MP4 was a breeze.
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