Acer Predator Triton 14 AI review

Use the charger included in the kit. This is the most crucial thing I will take away from my time spent with Acer Predator Triton 14 AI. Usually I can rely on the USB-C charger on my desk to power almost anything (except Lenovo laptops, which insist on using their own power plug), but that wasn’t the case this time. If the Triton wasn’t powered with the right amount of Watts in the right way, it didn’t give up and didn’t unlock Turbo mode, delivering impoverished benchmark results.

After casting a few runes, talking to the wind, examining the insides of a pigeon eaten by a red kite on the road near my house, and consulting ChatGPT – all of which had roughly the same level of accuracy – it took a consultation with PCG’s own sage and oracle, Dave, to get to the bottom of the problem. There are many lessons from this, one of which is that red kites are bloody brilliant and we should have more of them to keep these pigeons in check.

The Triton (lesser Greek god of the sea, Neptune’s largest moon, Mitsubishi pickup truck also known as the L200) is marketed as a gaming laptop, but comes with an Nvidia Studio sticker on the front and pre-installed Studio drivers for the GPU. There’s also a stylus in the box, suggesting a more original life is intended for this particular computer, although there’s no place to keep it on the laptop’s chassis, so it’s destined for a drawer somewhere and only works on the touchpad, not the touchscreen.

Switching drivers to Gaming takes a few seconds, but in testing it only provided a 2% enhance in benchmark scores. Using the appropriate charger and pressing the dedicated button above the F1 key to put the machine into Turbo mode (the oddly named PredatorSense program will also do this task) proved to have a much greater impact on its performance.

If you can, try to frigid your emotions for a moment, but the Triton 14 AI is the first laptop in the world (as written here) to utilize a graphene-based thermal compound in its cooling system. I know. There’s also a steam chamber and a couple of fans – which make a bit of noise, but that’s to be expected – and it all transfers heat decently, even if there are two vents at the base of the machine that will likely be blocked by your pants. There are also a couple of speakers underneath – diminutive grilles that are part of a six-speaker system that also has diminutive ports on the sides of the laptop. I couldn’t find the other two, but their location on the laptop doesn’t matter much.

While the sound the Triton is capable of producing is okay, with some nice, clear voices, it still suffers from the curse of diminutive speakers everywhere and you’ll be much better off using one of the best headsets or desktop speakers at a reasonable price.

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You get a laptop with good proportions and a 14-inch diagonal, which is not too bulky, has an OLED touch screen and is in a metal casing with flat sides. One of the ports on the outside is a Thunderbolt 4 connector, but you’ll have a demanding time telling which one because Acer has chosen not to put a logo on it and it looks identical to the USB 3.2 port on the other side. One of the Type-C ports – presumably USB 3.2 – is so close to the adjacent USB-A port that if you have an old-style Xbox controller dongle in it, the adjacent port is blocked, which appears to be a design flaw in a gaming laptop.

Speaking of design, it’s disappointing that Acer makes it so arduous to get into the machine, with ten diminutive torx screws acting as a real barrier to entry for the consumer. Sure, you can only upgrade the SSD anyway, but with only the 1TB option in the particular configuration we reviewed and no additional SSD slot available, this is something you might want to do in the future. Although there are similarly priced Triton 14 AI options available with a 2TB drive inside.

There’s no question about the full-size HDMI port though, and while the 2.8K 16:10 OLED is very nice, it hits 400 nits in SDR mode in our tests and delivers quite a wide color gamut, and connecting it to an external display really lets the RTX 5070 shine.

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GPU performance is about what you’d expect from an RTX 5070 laptop – it has a demanding time running Cyberpunk 2077 in ultra mode with ray tracing at native resolution without DLSS and framerate, but if you turn them on the game will be quite polished.

The processor is a second-generation Core Ultra – Lunar Lake – with eight cores divided into four Performance cores for sledgehammer processing and four low-power Efficient cores that gently draw electricity while performing background tasks. Intel no longer offers hyperthreading, and a total of eight software threads on the Ultra 9 chip seems a bit stingy when we got 20 threads from the mobile i9 Raptor Lake just a few years ago. However, the maximum turbo frequency is 5.1 GHz from the P cores, and with 32 GB of brisk RAM it is a perfectly capable processor.

In fact, “perfectly capable” sums up the Predator Triton. This is an 8GB RTX 5070, not a Ti with 12GB VRAM, so while it may produce a good result at 1080p, pushing the screen to its native resolution may be a bit much, although GeForce tricks like multi-frame generation certainly support.

We’ve also come to expect decent battery life from Lunar Lake laptops, and the Triton is no exception, managing to stay awake for almost seven hours while playing a looping video, but for less than two hours while gaming. Not bad for a compact machine, but when unplugged it switches to balanced mode, resulting in a 78% drop in the Time Spy Extreme test score.

We know that the words “compact” and “gaming” don’t always go well together. Hot elements need room to breathe, they want to be fanned like an Egyptian princess surrounded by palm frond helpers. Graphene thermal paste or not, packing heated chips into diminutive spaces rarely results in peak performance, and in the benchmark set the Triton is left behind by the fresh Razer Blade 14, which has a 115W RTX 5070 compared to the Triton’s 110W chip, or the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 5070 Ti. These laptops are, surprisingly, also slightly cheaper than the Triton, which makes them a tough sell.