Customer Ratings & Reviews

This Laptop is a beast! i9 mobile Processor, 16 inch screen at 240 hz, GTX 4080 discrete graphics. It does seem a bit strange that it comes with 16 GB of memory instead of 32 GB given all its other outsize specifications, but I've ran into nothing that it couldn't handle with the 16 GB of memory. The display is bright and clear, the lighted flat area behind the screen when it is up is interesting but hardly seen. The control for the keys is the most granular control I've seen for a keyboard yet, you can set it up exactly how you want. The 1TB Gen 4 PCIE SSD drive is pretty fast, there is room for another one if you want to add it. In a while I will probably add another 1TB or 2 TB SSD to it, and since I'll have the back open I'll upgrade the RAM to 32 GB total. Played No Man's Sky in VR without a hitch. I love that the thunderbolt 4 ports are both in the back with the power connection. Keeps all the connections I use most or all the time (looking at you heavy oversize power brick) back out of the way. Drove 3 external displays just fine. This really is a beast of a laptop. When you kick the fans on high, it gets pretty loud, but does help cool down the CPU and GPU. This think does best on a cooling fan pad at an incline to help with air circulation. Transfering files from external drives is also faster on this than any of my other laptops by far. I can't wait for more games to take advantage of DirectStorage feature in Windows 11. My favorite gaming laptop ever, not even close. This thing will put most Gaming Desktops in their place. Max the settings and enjoy!

The machine just stopped turning on. It ended up being a blessing because the Alienware M16 went on sale and is a much better built machine. My unit had horrible backlight bleed from the bottom. Speakers are some of the worst I have heard.

Worked great for a week. Installed 2 games, worked great. After the week, started to lag, checked the memory usage and it was at 54% with nothing running on the background. Tried to restore to factory settings, unable to. Called Geek Squad, they couldn't figure out, had me exchange it. The second one appeared to have a bad WIFI card. Kept disconnecting me from the internet -_-

I just got the laptop, so far so good but theres no laptop bag included. In the picture theres a laptop bag beside it but when I received it theres nothing

I will rate this computer after you send me a $400.00 gift certificate. The reviews are shocking.

Can’t turn om after update system. Pressing power buttom and screen not tirming up

Did not perform to expections. Constantly crashing. Had to return.

Good laptop but not great. Picture quality when gaming is fantastic, if only i could play games for an extended anount of time. Laptop keeps crashing between 10min to an hour after starting a game. Could be the best bang of buck if it didnt crash.

Let me preface this review with an admission. The last Acer I bought was in 2003 and was an entry-level laptop that felt like it was made of recycled shampoo bottles. It lasted 6 months. This computer feels nothing like that. This has a quality feel to it, and plays every game I’ve thrown at it in ultra quality. Games I’ve tried so far include Balder’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk, Spiderman, Farcry 6, street fighter V, and God of War. All ran flawlessly at maximum settings with Ray Tracing on where applicable. It’ll be hard to ever boot up my Xbox or ps5 again. Computer got warm, so I’d recommend a lap fan or lap desk. Fans are insanely loud when they kick in. Like sitting by a home Air Conditioner vent loud. Thankfully they don’t come on as often as other laptops I’ve had. Upgradability is easy with this. A few T6 screws and a slight pop of the panel and I was able to quickly futureproof upgrade the computer with a 2nd SSD for gaming and 32GB of ram. The included 16gb are more than enough for 99.999999999% of users. Everything on this computer is quality. I highly recommend picking up this computer if you want a great gaming pc that doesn’t look gawdy. It has just enough bling to excite the kid inside you, but still look good in an office environment.

It’s amazing how much has changed in the gaming pc space just in the last couple of years, laptops are no different just a couple of years ago if you had a gaming laptop it was probably humongous and as a loud as an airplane. Now they are much closer in size to normal laptops and much quieter. This Helios predator accomplishes both is it big yes it is but it’s still a very manageable size and give you a great looking big screen. The fan noise is where this laptop really shines. Yes if you have it plugged in and in turbo mode maxing everything out it can get kind of loud. But if your not in turbo mode I found it to be pretty quiet. Which is pretty amazing because the performance you get out of this pc is amazing. even running off the battery I was able to play several game such as Forza horizon 5 at max settings and get a solid 60fps. Battery life is ok this is the one area that it fall short compared to regular laptops even just watching movies and tv shows the battery still drains a bit quickly but with all the power it has it is understandable. If your looking for a powerhouse pc to play anything and everything this is it you won’t be disappointed with a beautiful screen and powerful hardware this is the gaming pc to get

The new computer I bought is so slow that I can't play games at all

Bad driver support. incompatible or incomplete testing

Bad service bronx ny 10458 they didn't help me...

Easy to set up out of the box The laptop set includes the laptop the power block (very large like most gaming laptops) and carrying sleeve. The initial setup is typical for windows systems and walk you through it with voice or written steps. You can choose to setup a new account or transfer from an existing account/device. It took just a few minutes to get up and running. I ran into some issues with one of the software apps but I was able to reinstall it and get my system transferred. The battery life is average for a gaming laptop. There are settings you can adjust to improve the battery life. The casing is high quality and seems to hold up well to the abuses of daily use. The built in camera provided a surprisingly sharp image and the trackpad sensitivity can be altered to an extremely fine degree. Perhaps its most visibly notable feature, the cooling system, is well worth its weight in gold. It's fairly compact, noticeably quiet, and the most effective i've ever seen on a portable device. In addition to all the excellent hardware, included with the purchase was the easy to navigate PredatorSense system monitoring application. This is an easy way to monitor exact gpu usage from specific applications as well as track the cooling system's speed and power usage and customize fun keyboard lighting effects.

To begin, I have been a computer gamer for as long as I can remember. Never, however, have I used a laptop for gaming. They were always too underpowered and lacked the storage I needed to make their use compelling. This unit has changed my opinion and has actually replaced the desktop gaming unit that I have been using for the past few years. With that being said, just because I like this laptop and it checks most of the proverbial boxes for me, that does not mean it is a perfect unit. There are some compromises that must be made if you want to use this computer as your primary gaming rig. So, let's begin with the good. The packaging was nice and the unboxing was a real treat. Acer even included a laptop sleeve along with the unit, which was a nice touch. The laptop is very sturdy and solid with not a lot of flex noted when using or carrying it. The sturdy construction does add some weight, however (more on that later). That weight is beneficial when opening the unit, however, as a single finger is all that is needed to open the laptop. Unlike other PC laptops, trying to open the lid with single finger did not cause the entire laptop to lift up. The base of the laptop stays firmly planted on the desk (or whatever surface it is on). This reminded me of my MacBook Pro, which can also be opened with a single finger (although my MacBook Pro does not weigh as much as this unit). The 16" screen is very vibrant with a high resolution and good contrast. I know some people would say that there are better screens out there, but unless I am literally comparing screens side-by-side, those differences are not something I would typically notice. The keyboard is LED RGB back-lit with each key having its own light that can be customized. There is also a LED RGB feature on the "back" of the unit at the top behind the screen when it is open. Nicely done for a computer to show off to others. Interfacing with the computer is important and, in this regard, I was pleasantly surprised. In full disclosure, I use a MacBook Pro as my daily computer and absolutely love the touchpad on that unit. It is silky smooth to use and is quite large. I have always hated PC touchpads in comparison because the left click and right click features are mechanically linked to the lower part of the touchpad, even if the touchpad is one seamless unit. While this touchpad suffers from that same flaw, I have found the surface to be very similar to that on my beloved MacBook Pro and, over time, I have actually retrained myself to tap, rather than click, which has actually solved one of the biggest shortcomings I have had with PC-based touchpads. (As a matter of fact, this practice led me to change the settings on my MacBook Pro and allow clicks via taps as well.) In addition to the touchpad, the unit features a full size keyboard with a numeric keypad. The numeric keypad, however, is not full size and I have found it somewhat difficult to use, especially given the reduced size of the zero key to accommodate other keys on the keyboard. Still, I am not used to having a numeric keypad on a laptop and I find it to be a convenient feature. There are ports-a-plenty on the unit, including a Thunderbolt 4 port, a USB-C, and a few USB-A, along with an SDXC card reader and a HDMI port. With bluetooth and wireless built in, I have more than enough ports to do whatever I want to do on this laptop. The storage in the unit I received was 1 TB with 16 GB of DDR5 RAM. Unlike my MacBook Pro, however, opening up this laptop and upgrading the storage and RAM was a piece of cake! There are two SSD PCIe ports on the motherboard, along with two DDR5 slots that can accommodate up to 32 GB of RAM. I wasted no time at all upgrading my storage to a whopping 8 TB using two 4 TB SSD sticks. I also upgraded my RAM to 32 GB. Now, with that being said, these upgrades come with a caveat. First, when upgrading the RAM, I initially thought the RAM I purchased was incompatible because, after swapping out the ram and turning on the laptop, nothing happened but a blank screen and, after a while, the computer turned itself off. My impatience got the better of me as I pulled out that RAM and replaced it with the stock RAM and the computer booted right up as it always did. I purchased different RAM and tried again with the same outcome. This time, however, I was doing something else so, when I turned on the laptop, and it was apparent that it wasn't working, I let it sit there for a while to finish up the other thing I was working on. That happy accident wound up doing the trick as the laptop, after about four minutes or so, finally booted itself back up and registered 32 GB of RAM. Every time after that, the computer has booted normally without any delay. At best I can figure, the BIOS was doing something automatically in the background to accommodate the new RAM. Weird (at least in my experience building PCs). Additionally, the computer supports RAID 0 storage through the Intel Rapid Storage Technology built into the chip. Unfortunately, getting the RAID 0 up and working was not an easy feat as the RAID is not built through the BIOS. Rather, the RAID must be built through the operating system and then the resulting volume must be expanded after that to take advantage of all the storage space. It took me several frustrating days to figure this out. There is very little information on the internet that I could find, Intel's directions were less than helpful, and Acer's own technical support was not able to help. (They actually suggested that I ship the brand new unit back to them so that their technicians could fix it.) (I would provide the details here on how to make it work, but there is not enough space available for me to do so.) Once I was finally able to figure that out, I was able to see and use my RAID 0 array to have a whopping 8 TB of storage all accessible through a single drive letter. Awesome! No more storage restrictions on laptops. All my games fit with plenty of room to spare. So, with my storage and RAM issues solved, just how does the laptop perform? For this, i used 3DMark to compare my previous desktop to this laptop. My desktop has a 3.0 GHz Intel Core i7-9700 and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super. I have been happy with my desktop and have not experienced running any of my games with all of the visual effects turned up. My 3DMark score was 10,156 (graphics 11,063 and CPU 6,936). When I ran the same benchmark on this Predator laptop, using the "balanced" profile, the 3DMark score was 14,695 (14,738 graphics and 14,459 CPU). I then turned on the "performance" profile, which cranked things up to a score of 16,967 (17,203 graphics and 15,748 CPU). There is also a turbo mode available, but when I ran that mode, the score actually ticked down just a little bit. Needless to say, this laptop completely crushed my older desktop in performance. When I ran my games on the laptop, they were buttery smooth. Looks like I no longer need my old desktop for gaming. Now, the irony in that last statement is that this laptop is not light, so when I call it a desktop replacement, that does not mean it is the most portable thing in the world. Interestingly enough, while I could probably deal with the weight of the laptop itself, it is the size and weight of the 330 watt AC adapter brick that blew me away. I would say the AC adapter brick is about a third the size of the laptop itself. Therefore, traveling with the laptop is not a light affair as you have to take not only the heavy laptop, but this huge and heavy AC adapter brick as well. That leads to another mark against the unit. While it is a laptop, I do not see a lot of portable gaming with it in my future. When running off the battery, the unit caps out at the "balanced" mode and does not allow "performance" mode to run. Additionally, the battery life is not that great. When I was installing programs, which meant downloading over the internet, saving to the storage, and installing, I got a little over a couple hours of battery life out of the unit. (There is an eco module that would probably conserve battery life in comparison, but I have never tried it.) As a result, unless you are taking a very short trip, you will need to bring the charger and power brick with you. (Seriously, I have never seen a power brick this large before for anything electronic, much less a laptop.) Also, when running on "performance" or "turbo" mode, the fan is pretty loud. Personally, I just tune it out and it does not bother me much, but such a laptop generates a lot of heat that has to be dissipated and the fans are loud when running under a significant load. So, in the end, what is my final verdict. This laptop is indeed replacing my gaming desktop. The upgradability and built-in features are great. The weight of the unit (and its power brick, in particular) mean I will not be traveling with it anytime soon, however. Given the drain on the battery during gaming, there is not a great deal of utility in gaming while on the move. (Innocuous activities, like browsing the web, streaming video, or productivity work is more appropriate for using this unit on eco mode while on its battery.) The fan is also pretty loud, but I just turn up the speakers. Overall, I was impressed and suspect my next gaming rig (down the road) will be a laptop as well. No need to be tied to a desktop for gaming anymore!

With there being a lot of models and numbers out there, this review is on a Predator Helios 16 PH16-71-93FR. Acer has put together one of the best laptops you can find.  Back in the day I wouldn't have even considered a laptop as a gaming device but this laptop has it all. The latest i9 with Max Turbo Frequency 5.40 GHz to get just about anything done that you want. 16" WQXGA 240 Hz refresh rate screen with top of the line NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 that looks stunning and bright for a laptop. Games do not tear, flicker or blur during action scenes. The same goes for movies and can be enjoyed even on this 16" screen. I found no dead pixels. No ghosting or back light issues here. The speakers are just laptop speakers. Nothing great about them. They sound good for their size though. Laptop has 3 USB-A, 2 USB-C and 1 HDMI to connect three monitors so no need for a docking station. Upon delivery Acer really makes you feel like you are getting something special with the packaging. The box it comes in has a special expensive look to it. It is wrapped in a black cloth and is perfectly fitted to the laptop so it doesn't look cheap. The power adapter is huge and heavy but I expect that for what's built into the laptop. When I first turned it on it boots up to a customizable screen with a sound effect that I love.  So you can boot up with your special picture, it just has a size requirement. The keyboard lights up with a special pattern that goes well with the entire boot sequence.  There is an app that you can use to control how the laptop will perform. This makes overclocking, power consumption and lighting effects easy. I actually like the noise that the fans make. It is like pure white noise. You can even set each key to a specific color if you like. It has some predefined color patterns to choose from to start out with. I like the feel of the keyboard too. Keys are quiet and do not make hardly any sound. If you are looking for a top notch laptop in 2023, this is the one you've been looking for.

I bought this laptop in June. I may not use it for its intended purpose, a gaming laptop, but it is absolutely perfect for a college degree in a STEM based field. The battery dies kinda quick if you don't keep it on a charger, however, it has the best storage and keeps up with the high demand. I love this laptop and it is just perfect for what i need it for!

I was tired of not being able to play games on my M1 MAX Mac so I did a lot of research and the Acer Predator Helios was the perfect mix of affordability and performance. It handles EVERYTHING I throw at it. I use the highest graphics settings for Starfield, Jedi Survivor, Blizzard games, etc.

But i had one question because this laptop is remarkable most laptops dont have 12gb vram for graphics those are only seen on desktops but i was wondering does this have dual slots for ram? Like if i wanted to upgrade it to 32gb ram or 64gb ram? This laptop is the laptop im going to get, hands down amazing!

The laptop is great as far as performance. The issue, as pointed out by another review is the screen quality. I purchased one from Best Buy, which I returned, and saw another one. Both laptops had light bleed coming through the bottom of the screen. Poor quality review by Acer.