T3 - UK (2022-01)

10 T 3 JANUARY 2022

Horizon

KEY FEATURES

Acer’s keyboard

is a bit special.

Switch out the

Helios 500’s

WASD cluster for

the company’s

special MagTek

keyswitches,

and you can get

analogue control

perfect for racing

games or minute

FPS adjustments.

The best new tech heading your way

“ Pricey,but mini-LED’s

arrival on mainstream

laptopsis big news”

Josh Russell,Editor

TECH-O-METER

ACER

PREDATOR

HELIOS 500

£4,000, acer.com

Let’s start with a question: why on earth would
Acer choose to dub its ultra-premium laptop
Helios? The ancient Greek sun god is not, by
any means, the deity anyone wants brought to
mind in the context of a bundle of top-of-the-
line components crammed into a stiflingly small
space. This is particularly true here, because
Acer has brought its VortexFlow cooling to the
party, which should keep the monstrous RTX
3080 graphics and overclockable Intel Core
i9-11980HK plenty frigid. Perhaps next time
invoke the name of Boreas, the bringer of the
cold north wind? We’ll give you that one for
free, guys.
There’s an arm-long list of killer features
alongside that core package including, er, Intel
Killer Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6, as well as a pair of
NVMe SSDs running in RAID 0, a separate
spinning drive for mass storage, DTX:Ultra
audio and a ludicrous-even-in-this-context
64GB DDR4 3200 RAM. This is portable PC
gaming done to the extreme.
A real heavy hitter, then, but those internals
don’t entirely explain the top-end Helios 5 00’s
slightly astronomical asking price. Look up a
little, though, and you’ll see where the rest of
your money goes. It’s the screen. Panels don’t
really come much more top-end than this
17.3-inch display, a mini-LED number that can
run at 1 20Hz in 4K and sports AUO’s AmLED
tech. That means full-array local dimming as
well as colour and contrast matching VESA’s
Display HDR 1000 spec – plus, fingers crossed,
none of OLED’s potential for screen rot.