Acer Predator Helios 16 Review

To some extent, you know what you’re getting with the Acer Predator Helios 16 when you read its spec sheet: raw gaming power. The high-end processor and RTX 4080 graphics card combo will chew through AAA games on their highest settings. But the specs sheet doesn’t tell you everything, good or bad. 

It doesn’t tell you just how colorful the display is, how massive and precise the touchpad is, or how the numerous fans stop the laptop getting hot when pushed to its limits. Nor does it tell you about its heavy, boxy body, the slightly-too flimsy lid, or its inexplicably small shift key.

It’s a machine with flaws – but its blistering performance is enough to land it among the best gaming laptops.

Acer Predator Helios 16 – Specs

• OS: Windows 11 Home
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 (12 GB GDDR6, max power 165W)
• CPU: 13th gen i9-13900HX processor (2.2 GHz, up to 5.4 GHz)
• RAM: 16 GB DDR4 (4800 MHz)
• Storage: 1 TB SSD
• Display: 16” 2560 × 1600p mini-LED display (IPS LCD), 240 Hz refresh rate
• Battery: 90Wh (Max 330W power supply from adapter)
• Dimensions – 14.1(W) x 11 (D) x 1.1 (H) inches, 35.8 x 27.9 x 2.8 cm
• Weight – 5.95lb (2.7kg)

Acer Predator Helios 16 – Design and Features

There are a bunch of things I like about the Predator Helios 16’s design, and a shorter but substantial list of things I don’t.

The big wedge that sticks out the back of the laptop was the first thing that drew my eye. Its diagonal lines and glossy finish look like something a committee might design to look futuristic – in other words, I hate it. It makes an already chunky, heavy laptop (2.7kg, or more for some variants) feel even more unwieldy, and if I needed this laptop for a work meeting I’d feel self-conscious taking it out of my bag.

But I can also recognize that this is unashamedly a gaming laptop, and Acer is differentiating itself from the recent stream of sleek matte black gaming laptops that some find boring. It stands out, and the wedge has fully customisable RGB lighting as well as removable, spray-paintable vents so you can make it your own.

Plus, that extra space has a practical purpose: It houses some of the Predator Helios 16’s immaculate cooling system. 

The fans are loud to the point that in “turbo” mode you can hear them clearly from two rooms away – but it’s worth the noise. The body of the laptop barely got hotter than luke-warm when powering through recent games at max settings, and perhaps wouldn’t work as well without that roomy chassis.

The large footprint also gives you pretty much every port you could want. On the sides are a combined three USB ports for connecting your peripherals along with Gigabit Ethernet, a microSD slot, a headphone jack and a Kensington security lock slot. Acer sticks an HDMI, two USB Type-C ports and a charging port on the back of the protruding wedge, which keeps cables out of sight and stops everything getting tangled.

The body itself is plastic in some places and an alloy for both the lid and the keyboard plate. It doesn’t scream expensive or premium. That lid, as you can see from the pictures, is a fingerprint magnet – and it doesn’t feel super sturdy. If you try to shut it by pulling down on one corner, it’s not rigid enough to close uniformly. Instead, the other corner lags behind, and doesn’t lie exactly straight if you leave it halfway closed. Not a good look.

It isn’t a fatal flaw and it’s not bad enough to have me worried about the Helios 16’s lifespan, but if you’re paying $2,500 for a laptop, you want it to feel expensive.

Two things that do feel premium, though, are the keyboard and touchpad.

The touchpad is one of the biggest I’ve seen in a laptop, so you can move your cursor around the large screen without having to lift your finger. I also like that the area you can press for a left or right mouse click is correspondingly giant, extending two-thirds of the way up the pad. I never had to look down to see where my finger was before trying to click.

Most importantly, it’s ultra responsive to movements, taps, and zoom swipes. Not once did my tap fail to register, and not once did it mistake a tap for a mouse click.

The one imperfection is that it doesn’t feel smooth to the touch. I felt like I had to drag, rather than glide, my finger around it.

On the keyboard above it, the keys press and rebound with the right level of tension, and they’re stiff enough to avoid accidental presses. Each key dips in the middle, and more than on most laptops, guiding your fingers into position during hectic gaming sessions. 

It jams more keys in than other laptops this size, with a full set of function keys, play/pause and rewind/forward buttons, a compact number pad, a dedicated button for Acer’s control center, and an in-line power button, which frees up space beneath the screen for a key that you click to switch between performance modes. 

One negative: Some important keys for gaming are too small. The left shift – the one you might use for sprinting in a first-person shooter – is about half the size of a normal shift key, and far smaller than the right shift key, which is less important for gaming. Tab is similarly stunted, and the bottom row of keys is slightly shorter than the others, which includes left control (which I always assign to crouch). It’s a design choice I don’t understand.

As you can tell, on the design front the Predator Helios 16 is far from perfect. 

But that can’t be said of one huge selling point of this machine: The delightful 2560x1600p display, with a refresh rate of 240Hz.

The variant I tested didn’t have the mini-LED display that the most expensive version of this laptop has, but the IPS LCD screen still felt bright, detailed, and colorful, with pin-sharp faces, crisp particle effects, and suitably foreboding dark areas.

Whether it was orange fires dancing and casting shadows in Diablo 4, lightsabers clashing in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor or red neon signs reflecting in the streets of Cyberpunk 2077, every game I tested looked as good as I’ve seen it on a laptop, clear and vibrant, and a noticeable step up from the 1080p laptop gaming I’m used to.

Acer’s brightness promises – 500 nits for my display – appear true, too. I play most of my games next to a large window that lets in a lot of light, and I could comfortably play at around 60% brightness. When I cranked the brightness up during the day, the screen was dazzlingly bright. I could use the laptop outside on a sunny day with no trouble, as long as I avoided the direct reflection of the sun on the screen.

Acer Predator Helios 16 – Software

Apart from the free version of McAfee antivirus – which you can delete easily if you want to – Acer handles all its pre-installed tools through one central app called PredatorSense. It’s mostly useful, but some of the programs that come attached are less so.

I mainly used PredatorSense to switch between different performance modes, of which there are four. Quiet is for light work that keeps fan noise down, Performance overclocks both your CPU and GPU for extra power, Turbo pushes both components to the max and sounds like a jet taking off, while Balanced is for everyday use.

A dedicated button above the keyboard makes it easy to switch between modes with one press without opening the full app. I pressed it often, mainly to switch to Performance for gaming, or Turbo if I wanted extra juice. Turbo gave me, during testing, roughly a 5-10% framerate boost over Performance.

PredatorSense also lets you quickly switch between audio modes – music, movies, voice, etc – with a few clicks. It’s reassuringly simple, but I didn’t find the modes markedly improved the sound quality, so I kept it on the default setting most of the time.

The final use for PredatorSense is to customize RGB lighting. The software is both detailed and easy to use. You can change individual keyboard keys to any color you want (each has its own LED), and the back wedge has three distinct areas that light up. Or, you can just pick a premade pattern for the entire machine. It’s a flexible system, and my only criticism is that the colors on screen don’t always match the RGB key colors. Reds show up pinkish on the keyboard, for example.

Unfortunately, the whole thing is made more complicated by an extra layer of customisation in PredatorSense called “scenarios”. They’re basically profiles you can set up, each of which has a set performance mode, fan speed, and RGB lighting associated with it – and then you switch between them in the app. So you might have one for work, one for gaming, one for everyday use, and one for night-time, with dimmed RGB lighting.

It’s powerful when you set it up but fiddly to get it all right. I preferred to just pick RGB lighting that worked any time and then flick between the performance modes when I needed to.

PredatorSense has other apps bolted onto it. I didn’t find any of them very helpful but they at least don’t get in the way, and it’s easy to forget they’re there. They include DTS X, where you can adjust equalization settings to get the exact sound you want, but I’m not sure the speakers are good enough to warrant this level of fine control.

Acer Predator Helios 16 – Gaming and Performance

As you’d expect from this combo of CPU and GPU, the Acer Predator Helios 16 is a gaming beast. You’ll be able to play the latest games at the highest settings with smooth frame rates – and they’ll all look gorgeous on the 1600p display.

Plus, the 240Hz refresh rate screen makes anything you run at high frame rates feel flawless. I ran Diablo 4, for example, at frame rates of more than 200, and it all felt fluid, each flashy animation flowing into the next without a hitch.

On the more demanding end, I got between 45 and 60fps in the famously choppy Star Wars Jedi: Survivor at the highest possible settings.

I ran Cyberpunk 2077 on its Ultra Ray Tracing settings and averaged a solid 60fps, rising to roughly 100 with frame generation, which is one of the big selling points of the latest Nvidia graphics cards.

Frame generation, as I wrote in my review of Gigabyte’s G5 laptop, is a marvel. It uses AI to create new frames in real time and insert them in between regular frames, effectively boosting your fps. In testing, it regularly boosted my frame rate by 25-30% and made everything feel smoother.

It’s still a work in progress and it’s still only supported by certain games. And just because a game has frame generation doesn’t mean it’ll work perfectly right away without updates. Take the recently released Diablo 4, for example: Frame generation gave the game a hearty boost, but only if I turned off every other feature of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling, the family of tech that includes frame generation plus other AI tools that improve performance.

The good thing is that Nvidia is constantly working with developers to bring frame generation to new games, and it’s now publicly available to all developers who want to use it. So you can expect the list of games that support it to quickly grow.

With or without it, the Predator Helios 16 stacks up well against its closest competition in benchmark comparisons.

The Predator Helios 16 stacks up well against its closest competition in benchmark comparisons.

As you’ll see from the table, it outperforms the more expensive Razer Blade 16, which houses the more powerful RTX 4090, in some of the TimeSpy graphics tests and in-game benchmarks. You’re basically getting comparable performance here for a fraction of the price. Impressive.

It tracks close to the Lenovo Legion Pro i7, which is considered one of the best new gaming laptops and has near identical specs as the Acer machine I tested, except for an extra 16GB of RAM, for 32GB total. That extra power seems to just win out in benchmark tests such as PC Mark, which tracks performance in everyday non-gaming situations. But in most tests, the Predator Helios 16 keeps up and in two of the four in-game benchmarks it wins by a substantial margin. That might be because Acer allows the GPU to draw more power (165W maximum) than Lenovo (150W).

Now, these benchmarks should only serve as a guide – updates to games and to Nvidia drivers mean that scores change over time. But the benchmarks back up what I felt in real-life testing: This is a blazing-fast laptop that will chew through whatever you feed it, gaming or otherwise.

The sound is also impressive – to the extent that gaming laptop audio can be. 

Built-in speakers are never going to be a match for either a headset or a dedicated sound system, and so it proves here. In loud, hectic firefights, sounds tend to blur into one, and lack clarity. When you play music, bass-y songs lack punch and vocals aren’t as crisp as you might be used to. And on podcasts, voices lack the depth or complexity of the real thing, and switching to the pre-programmed “voice” setting just creates a booming, echoing mess.

However, the speakers are still solid as far as laptop speakers go – and perhaps more importantly, they’re louder than most. They’ll drown out background noise if you’re watching a TV show and they’ll maintain a low-key party if you’ve forgotten to bring your sound system.

Acer Predator Helios 16 – Battery Life

We benchmark using PC Mark 10’s Modern Office battery test, which simulates real-world use, on default power modes. The Predator Helios 16 lasted four-and-a-half-hours on the test. It’s acceptable, but certainly not impressive – and it falls short of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i.

It is, however, quite easy to squeeze more juice from the battery if you want. Switching the variable refresh rate screen to 120Hz, turning down the brightness, toggling to quiet mode and turning off RGB lighting will buy you a bit more time, and I could get it to last well over five hours with light browsing. Not bad.

Acer Predator Helios 16 – The Competition 

It’s worth spending just a little more time comparing this laptop with the Lenovo Legion Pro i7, another excellent RTX 4080 laptop. The Lenovo has the edge – just barely – in gaming performance, likely because of its extra 16GB of RAM, and it also has a slightly better battery life. 

But it’s also quite a bit more expensive.

The model I tested has an RRP of $2,299/£2,799.00, while the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is $2,649/£3000 (as an aside, UK buyers are really getting a raw deal here because of the current exchange rate).

You might say that’s fair enough – you’re paying for an extra 16GB of RAM with the Lenovo. But in the US you can buy a 32GB RAM version of the Acer for $2499.99, a full $150 cheaper than the Lenovo equivalent. That feels like a no brainer, and that extra RAM should close the performance gap. 

UK buyers have no such luck: If you want extra RAM you’ll also have to upgrade your SSD to a 2TB version and your display to mini-LED, inflating the price to £3,300.

When it comes to choosing between the two, it feels to me like a dead heat. If both suit your needs and you can get a good discount on either, grab it.