The Acer Predator is a Skylake gaming laptop with the suitable moniker “Predator,” and it weighs 7.5 pounds despite having a ton of cutting-edge hardware within. Even though this fully equipped gaming laptop costs $2,499, every single part is either top-of-the-line or extremely near to it, leaving us mostly baffled as to how Acer might have improved its performance. Although we’re looking at the Predator’s 15″ little brother, Acer also offers it in a 17″ variant.
Before we jump in, let’s take a peek at the Predator’s vitals:
Next-Gen Everything
As said, this laptop is equipped with an Intel Core i7-6700HQ, a member of Intel’s new 6th Generation Core i7 processor family, also known as Skylake. It is a quad-core, hyper-threaded processor that operates at 2.6GHz but has a boost speed of 3.5GHz. Also, it has 32GB of DDR4 RAM, which is a staggering amount of memory for a laptop (although 16GB configurations are also offered).
On the storage front, it has an unidentified PCI-Express SSD that employs the new NVME interface, which replaces the outmoded AHCI protocol and provides for improved performance in some applications. When we looked at it, there were no indications of who made it. Instead of being constrained to SATA’s 600MB/s interface limit, this 512GB SSD can run approximately three times as fast.
Not only that, but it also features a nice USB 3.1 Type-C port that is marked as a Thunderbolt 3 port. t be the holder of theleereet the the the the the the the a the the time arially the…….
It includes wifi AC and a Killer NIC for networking purposes. You can connect to the Internet using either sort of connection, and its powerful software will prioritize traffic.
The last thing we’ll cover for the hardware section is that the Predator includes a removable fan that slides into the bay occupied by the Blu-ray drive. Acer FrostCore is its name (who comes up with these names?). and it’s a Cooler Master fan assembly that essentially aids in cooling the internal parts. Since it is bundled with the laptop, it is not an expensive extra.
Buzzword Mountain
Although they all appear to be pretty useful and none of them are the bloatware we’ve come to anticipate, the Acer laptop also comes with a bevy of proprietary applications with aggressive-sounding names. The first is DustDefender, which can be manually enabled and rotates the internal fans in the opposite direction every three hours to stop dust from collecting in the heatsinks. The next feature is CoolBoost, which uses software or a keyboard hotkey to manually increase the fans for better cooling. Bluelight Shield is another option that lessens eye tiredness by lowering the quantity of blue light emitted by the display. PredatorSense is the last option; it shows fan speeds, system temperatures, and allows you to set lighting and active hotkey assignments. In addition to controlling the keyboard’s illumination, which is unobtrusive despite being red and blue, it is handy for quickly scanning objects.
Lastly, in case you hadn’t had enough buzzwords yet, the built-in speakers and subwoofer are named SoundPound, and it actually sounds pretty damn good, with more than enough volume and bass you can feel when the notebook is in your lap.
The Keyboard
The full-sized island-style keyboard contains a numberpad, and there’s a huge trackpad that’s very accurate. With a push on a luminous button to its right, you can turn off the Windows key and trackpad. Five illuminated hotkeys are located at the top of the keyboard, and because each key can be a part of three different groups (red, green, and blue), a total of 15 macro keys can be created. These keys can trigger personalized macros or predefined actions, such as turning up the fans. Additionally, the keyboard is divided into four illumination zones, which you can disable independently. In contrast to the traditional scissor-switch design, the keys on the keyboard have “long travel” to resemble those on a mechanical keyboard, according to Acer. We really enjoyed it and felt at ease with it right away.
Performance
We put the Predator through a series of challenging games to assess its gaming prowess, and we compared it against the similarly equipped Origin EON15-S, which also has a GTX 980. However, the Predator has a slight advantage due to its more recent Skylake architecture, whereas that laptop is a Haswell-based model.
Overall the Predator represents what seems like the best performance available currently from a single-GPU notebook due to its Skylake CPU and GTX 980M GPU. It was able to hit the fabled 60fps on Ultra settings even with 4XMSAA enabled in Bioshock Infinite, Shadow of Mordor, and Batman: Arkham Origins, while still offering totally playable framerates in Tomb Raider and Heaven 4.0. With sophisticated PhysX enabled, it could only manage 36.3 frames per second in Metro Last Light Redux, but that game is a ball-buster. Overall, it’s quite good for 1080p gaming, and you can turn off AA for faster performance.
Battery Life
Acer promises that the massive 6000 mAh battery included with the Predator will last up to six hours of use. The PC Mark 8 battery test took approximately three hours and 58 minutes to complete. Although it was just 10 minutes longer than what we saw with the Origin laptop, it is still excellent for a laptop of this size, so we will conclude that it is about average for this class of notebooks. The laptop’s battery lasted one hour and ten minutes during our stress test. The battery life was remarkable for a gaming notebook at six hours and 23 minutes when we simply let it play a movie until it ran out of power.
Verdict
A laptop with this level of performance comes with a hefty price tag that will hurt both your wallet and your back. It is large, heavy, and costly. The Predator would undoubtedly be on our purchase list if we were looking for a rarely-moved laptop to take over gaming responsibilities because this degree of girth is necessary for maximum performance. It’s a beautifully crafted and well designed notebook with excellent functionality. The primary disadvantage, in our opinion, is the two-year warranty; a product this beautiful ought to be protected for at least a few years.
