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Acer Predator Triton 500 (NH.Q4WSA.006-C77)
ACER’S LATEST GAMING LAPTOP IS TAKING A THREE PRONGED APPROACH TO BE THE BEST PROFESSIONAL GAMING ULTRABOOK, BUT IS IT SHARP ENOUGH
TO CUT THROUGH THE COMPETITION?
ONE OF THE most striking features of the
Triton 500 is just how thin it is. With a closed
profile of just 1.8cm it’s knocking on the door
of ultrabooks despite being a 15.6-inch
performance gaming laptop. The sleek Triton
500 can be configured to have an Intel Core
i7-8750H CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
GPU, 32GB of RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD
storage. This is a surprisingly powerful set of
components to conceal in such a sleek
form factor.
The metallic clamshell comes in a subtle
blue-black colour and while it does have
angular bevelled edges, powder-blue rear
exhaust vents and a unique mosaic topside fan
inlet, overall, its understated and classy design
would slot neatly into a business environment.
The membrane keyboard is a little spongy for
gaming, but it’s fine for typing and while we
would prefer a slightly bigger trackpad it was
smooth and responsive. With three USB 3.1
Type-A ports, an Ethernet port, DisplayPort,
Thunderbolt port and an HDMI out, alongside
the regular 3.5mm audio and microphone
jacks, there’s ample connectivity on offer.
The Triton 500 got within 10% of the
average raw CPU performance and overall
work benchmarks for laptops we’ve tested with
the same CPU/GPU configuration. We are
starting to see laptops appear with 9th
generation Intel Core i7 CPUs (and unusually,
Acer actually released a Core i7-9750H model
in line with this one), so this device might date
a little quicker, but it’s a good value proposition
when weighed against performance. The
512GB NVMe SSD was also speedy, offering
read and write speeds of 3439MB/s and
3129MB/s respectively. That’s between six and
seven times faster than SATA 3 connected
SSDs and offers double the write speeds of
early PCIe connected SSDs.
Acer’s Predator Triton 500 managed to keep
averages above 78fps on Ultra 1080p settings
across all the games we tested, with titles like
Middle Earth: Shadow of War running at close
to 100fps. This means that there’s more than
enough power here to take advantage of the
Speedy 144Hz G-Sync screen with almost
anything you throw at it. It even manages
50fps averages when using 1080p Ultra with
ray tracing turned on in Metro: Exodus.
Despite this heavy load max temperatures
were pretty reasonable. The CPU and GPU
managed to stay under 97 and 69 degrees
respectively, across the entire benchmarking
process, and while the fans can get rather
noisy at full tilt, the automated settings keep
them quiet generally. The RTX 2080 on theTriton 500 is unlocked, so you can even
utilise a bit of that thermal overhead on the
GPU to push a few more frames per second, if
you want.
It’s interesting to compare the Triton 500 to
Razer’s 2019 Blade laptop since they have an
almost identical spec sheet, weigh within 66g
of each other, are no more than 2cm different
in shape and offer nearly identical battery
capacities. The only differences are that the top
Predator Triton 500 model has double the
RAM allocation of the Blade, a G-Sync screen
and costs $1,100 less.
[ JOEL BURGESS ]ACER PREDATORTR
$3,999
http://www.acer.com
CRITICAL SPECS
Windows 10 Home 64
display @ 1920x 1080presolution;IntelCorei7-8750H
CPU; Nvidia GeForceGT X 2080 GPU;32GBRAM;512GB
NVMe PCIe SSD; 81.5Wh battery (2h 36min 1080p
movie playback); 35.9 x 25.5 x 17.9 cm; 2.1kg.WINNERED’sCHOICE
AWA RDTESTBENCH
RADARGENERAL
PERFORMANCEMEDIA ENCODING
PERFORMANCEGRAPHICS
PERFORMANCEBATTERY AND
STORAGE
PCMARK 8 - HOME
(SCORE)HWBOT X265 1080P
(AVG FPS)CINEBENCH R15
MULTI-THREADED CPU3DMARK FIRE STRIKE
(SCORE)THE DIVISION 2 - ULTR A
1080P (FPS AV.)PCMARK 8 - HOME
BATTERY (H:MIN)CRYSTALDISKMARK
READ/WRITE (MB/S)4693 31.649 1032 16,097 84 03:22 3439/3123
ITON 50 04 -bit; 15.6-inch G-Sync 144Hz LCD5