Acer Predator Helios 18 Review

Excuse me if you’re feeling a sense of déjà vu, because this 18-inch laptop has almost exactly the same specs as the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and others we reviewed earlier this year. It’s cheaper than the Asus laptop, but it’s also heavier and a tad wider and thicker.

It also has one of the loudest cooling systems I’ve ever seen. There’s a cliché in gaming PC reviews that the machine sounds like a jet taking off, and having been around a few Eurofighters, an F-35C (the loudest plane when it hovered) and a Gripen this summer, I can tell you that’s not the case. It sounds like what it is, a pair of powerful fans doing their best to keep balmy chips in check in a tight space.

While you can keep the laptop still by switching it to Quiet Mode — which produces the expected results — on Balanced Mode and above (Turbo Mode requires the battery to be at 40% charge, even when the laptop is plugged in, which is odd), we heard fans kicking in even while installing games through Steam, while idle with Notepad open, and while in Sleep Mode with the lid closed.

Leaving it in sleep mode overnight completely drained the battery, so perhaps it wasn’t as asleep as it pretended to be. If laptops could sweat, this one would be dripping damp, although all that cooling goes a long way toward keeping CPU and GPU temperatures mostly in the 70s or 80s (°C, though the Intel Core i9 can hit 100°C), but you won’t want to keep it on your lap when it’s working tough, because it gets very balmy underneath.

The payoff for all that heat and noise is some very tasty performance. Although using one of the best headsets is probably a good idea when gaming on this, as the built-in speakers, while generally quite good, will struggle to produce clear dialogue over the fans.

It beats out the Zephyrus M16 (which puts out 25W of GPU power) and the Strix Scar 18 in synthetic tests, but it’s a fair bit cheaper than the pricey Lenovo Legion 9i and the ridiculously pricey MSI Titan GT77 HX, all of which have 175W graphics chips. It’s helped along by a quick SSD that averages higher throughput than anything outside of Lenovo. It almost looks inexpensive compared to those machines, and all of that makes it one of the best-performing laptops we’ve ever tested, a crown it’ll hold for months until the first RTX 5090-powered laptop arrives next year.

The processor is one of those 14th-generation Intel Raptor Lake chips you’ve probably read about recently. As of this writing, it’s still an evolving situation, and all I can say is that in the time I’ve been using it for gaming, VR, innovative software, and synthetic benchmarks, I’ve seen no evidence of instability despite overclocking it to 100% on all cores. Reviewers are only spending a few weeks with the machine at most, and long-term issues that only affect a subset of users are impossible to account for. It’s still an excellent processor. I’ve rarely seen the Cinebench CPU rendering benchmark run this quick. It was a joy to watch… if you’re weird like me.

Although it must be said that the Intel chip does not perform the best. The cooling can be boisterous, but it still works up to 100°C and reaches its limit, and this limit holds back its chip compared to the same processor in the Asus Scar 18.

All that processing power is housed in a fairly plain black casing that’s stout and stiff, and unlikely to bend unless you’re clever enough to hold it by one corner. As an 18-inch keyboard, there’s plenty of room for the keyboard to be there, and there aren’t any hand-bending or muscle-memory-destroying keys placed in awkward positions to save space, and while the WASD keys shine brighter than the rest — and somewhere underneath them is a unicorn that’s constantly vomiting rainbows — it’s not overly aggressive or annoyingly stylised. What it does do is make an awful sound when you first turn it on, something that doesn’t do anything for the user (you know it’s starting because the unicorn immediately starts vomiting) and can (and should) be turned off immediately in the PredatorSense app.

Above the keyboard, you’ll find, as usual, a screen. It’s a 16:10 IPS with a maximum refresh rate of 250Hz, which is… okay, I guess. Nothing special. OLED would be nice. However, this isn’t a particularly portable laptop, so the idea here might be that it spends its time using the HDMI 2.1 or USB-C port on the back to connect to a 4K OLED or an ultrawide external screen, an arrangement that turns it from a laptop into a desktop replacement that’s neat and tidy and doesn’t splatter cables everywhere.

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Further evidence supporting this hypothesis is the placement of the ports, which, like the power and video ports, are located on the rear of the Helios 18’s chassis. These ports could disappear into the desk rather than stick out from the side.

Speaking of power, it’s USB-C rechargeable if you can get enough juice into it, so it could potentially be powered by a single cable with a proper screen, but it also ships with a separate and massive brick that produces 330W and fills the device’s gargantuan battery surprisingly quickly. Unfortunately, that doesn’t translate to the Helios’ battery life, as the power-hungry components mean that while you can get four hours if you’re frugal, turning on the rendering hose sees the battery life drop more towards an hour.

What Acer has created here is an incredible gaming laptop, packed with some of the best components you can get in 2024. It’s ridiculous, and I love that it exists. It’s not portable, you can throw it in your bag, and the screen looks tedious compared to the OLEDs that are starting to proliferate, but if you can stand the noise (and afford it), there are few better ways to play games on a laptop right now.