Acer Predator Triton 500 gaming laptop review

When shopping for a gaming laptop, there are always compromises you need to make. Some laptops will give you the components you want, but have a mediocre display. Others have the power you need but weigh 14 pounds. The Acer Predator Triton 500 tries to give us the best of both worlds by packing an RTX 2080 Max-Q in a lightweight chassis, with a 300Hz IPS display that could provide the Razer Blade 15 a run for its money. 

That said, not much has changed design-wise from last year's model aside from some updated components. To be fair, it's a hell of an upgrade. This review sample is an absolute beast, sporting a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 10750H CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and Nvidia RTX 2080 Super with Max-Q Design. 

Costing around $2,600, the Triton 500 sells itself as a powerful premium laptop that doesn't need to weigh as much as a cement block to get the job done.  You could opt for a cheaper model starting at $1,700 with a 512GB SSD, 16GB RAM, and RTX 2060 and still retain the CPU performance and 300Hz display, which is not a bad option, even if the GPU might feel a little lacking at that price.

Sitting at only 0.7 inches thick and weighing less than five pounds, Acer manages to pack a lot into such a thin, sleek chassis, including three USB 3.0 ports, USB-C, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Acer's Triton 500s have always straddled the line between looking fresh and professional, though chances are if people see you using this machine in public, the Predator logo is a dead give away you're using this thing to play video games and not writing up a report or just being snarky on Twitter. 

I would have loved to have seen a model offering a 1440p (or even 4K) display, but the 15.6 inch, 1080p IPS panel itself is a gorgeous, bright screen that's incredibly fast, which more importantly supports a 300Hz refresh rate. A 300Hz screen might seem a bit of overkill, but don't say that to anyone playing Valorant or Call of Duty: Warzone competitively. 

I have trouble telling much of a difference above 240Hz, but I like having that option considering the hardware is capable of it. Though I will say, it was tough to go back to playing Call of Duty on a 120Hz monitor after living in the buttery smooth world of 300Hz. That IPS panel technology also ensures that the color range is good, useful if you're one who edits photos and videos and needs decent color accuracy. 

The battery on the Triton 500 gave us a little over an hour of gaming at around 77 minutes. While it was no surprise, considering the hardware under the hood, it's a bit of a let down because of the Triton 500's otherwise extremely portable nature. It gives you the scale and power you want in a premium gaming laptop, but all of that is pretty moot if you're getting less than 90 minutes of uptime. So, keep the power adapter within arm's reach. 

The Triton 500 brings the heat in terms of gaming performance, both figuratively and literally. On Metro Exodus, it landed 61fps on High settings with DLSS and ray tracing turned on. That's higher than the similarly specced Razer Blade 15, its closest competitor in size, power, and price. It also blew away many of our gaming benchmarks, which hit nearly 100 fps on Far Cry New Dawn and 112fps on Gears Tactics. This makes it safe to say that you could probably play most of your favorite games in the highest settings without much of a problem.

But invest in a good pair of headphones because this thing gets loud. It's still quieter than a workstation, like the MSI Titan, but runs insanely hot when it's going. So much so you can feel how hot it's getting as you type, which is a weird yet concerning sensation. You can combat the high temps by hitting the Turbo button (essentially the overclock button) on the laptop, and it'll crank up the GPU performance to the max but, more importantly, provides maximum cooling for your system. 

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On the performance front, we saw a minimal increase of frames per second in games like Resident Evil 2 Remakes and Gears Tactics and more substantial performance boosts on Tom Clancy's Division 2, which was running at 75 fps normally, jumping up to 87 fps during our testing with Turbo on. It's more important use was to keep the heat in check, especially when the temperature hit well into the triple figures Fahrenheit. 

The Acer Predator Triton 500 is a decent gaming laptop that won't disappoint if you just want power and plug-to-plug portability. The short battery life, loud fans, and high heat, however, keep the Triton 500 from being the perfect gaming laptop.