Acer Predator Greek deity five hundred Review: A rare likelihood to decide on between AMD and Intel-Nvidia versions
The dicot genus Predator Greek deity five hundred provides you one thing few diversion laptops do: selection.
Sure, most let you pick what color to set the LED or the wallpaper, or offer tuning software.
But if you wish a substantive amendment, as in something other than Intel or Nvidia, your options are sparse.
That's not the case with the Predator Greek deity five hundred, though.
This strapping and powerful diversion laptop computer permits you to choose what you wish within, with the distinctive luxury of either going with the standard pair of Intel and Nvidia, or
going all-AMD.
What's on the outside
The outside of the Predator Greek deity five hundred looks just about normal fare for diversion laptops and really, well, Acer Predator.
It has that blend of aggressive lines and exhaust ports that the corporate has been operating toward for the previous few years.
And, like others, anodized cooling fins accent the laptop computer exhaust ports.
It's a very little factor, however the blue heatsinks, sort of a smart carpet, will extremely tie the space along.
Gordon Mah Ung
The Acer Predator Helios 500 features blue annodized cooling fans to give it that extra touch.
Ports
For ports, the Predator Greek deity five hundred options HDMI, DisplayPort, 3 USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit local area network and 2 Thunderbolt two ports.
Power for the laptop is a 230-watt brick that properly plugs into the back of the Helios 500, rather than on the side, where it could interfere with your mouse.
Weight and size
There area unit these nouveau skinny play laptops, and there are old-world hulky, thick laptops.
The Predator Greek deity five hundred clearly falls into the latter cluster.
It weighs eight.8 pounds not counting the 3-pound power brick.
It measures 16.9 x 11.7 x 1.5 inches all around.
There area unit smart reasons for that bulk, though: performance and expansion.
Most thin gaming laptops at best offer you two M.2 drives, but most give just one.
The Predator Greek deity five hundred offers up to 2 M.2 slots and a 2.5-inch drive bay for up to 5TB of magnetic storage.
For RAM, the Predator Greek deity five hundred options 2 memory modules tucked somewhere beneath the keyboard, with an open pair of SO-DIMM slots for another 16GB of RAM if you need it.
You can't do that on a thin and light gaming laptop.
Keyboard and mouse
The RGB keyboard could be a dome-switched selection that does not offend.
When we mean offend, we mean there's no obvious weird placement of keys.
The trackpad additionally options associate junction rectifier define and, again, has no problems.
There's a set of six programmable macro keys along the top as well.
Gordon Mah Ung
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The screen may be a "ComfyView" seventeen.3-inch panel, that dicot genus describes as mistreatment IPS.
Upon diving into the panel employed in 2 of the laptops, we have a tendency to found them to be AU Optronics mistreatment AHVA.
That stands for Advanced Hyper Viewing-Angle, that is AU Optronics' version of Sharp's IPS technology, that some prefer to decision "IPS-like" to avoid violating emblems.
What's likely more important for gamers is the refresh rate, which is 144Hz. And yes, there are two versions.
If you go along with the Intel and Nvidia version you get G-Sync, whereas the AMD version nets you a FreeSync monitor.
Intel and Nvidia power the bulk of gaming laptops today.
What's Inside: Pick your poison
All that leads to the choices of the components you get for the Helios 500. For Intel you get a choice of a 6-core 8th-gen Core i7 8700H with a GeForce GTX 1070, or a 6-core Core i9-8950HK with GeForce GTX 1070.
Go with AMD, however, and you can get an 8-core 2nd Gen Ryzen 7 2700 and a Radeon RX Vega 56.
All three configurations wisely offer 16GB of DDR4—you just don't need more than 16GB for gaming today, and any more is just a waste of money for most.
Where we take issue is with storage. The Core i7 gets you a 256GB M.2 SSD and 1TB hard drive, while the Core i9 configuration nets you 512GB and a 2TB hard drive. When you get to the AMD version, storage gets cut to a single 256GB SSD.
To average gamers, 256GB sounds like a lot. But given that modern games demand in excess of 50GB of storage space, you could run out fast. We're frankly puzzled as to why Acer didn't just install a 1TB hard drive in the all-AMD laptop, because it has space for it.
Gordon Mah Ung
It's been a long time since we've seen so much red.
In fact, if you look into the image below, will|you'll|you'll be able to} can see the open disk drive bay within the Ryzen version (left) is empty, while the Core i9 (right)
has its 2TB drive in place. There's plenty of room.
The Predator Helios five hundred includes a spot for one more M.2 drive below the copper heat spreader on the correct below.
You can also see that there's room to add more RAM on both laptops if you want to go to 32GB.
The easiest upgrade for the AMD version would be to merely add a tough drive, however our unit did not feature the cable (it's proprietary) to hook it up to the motherboard.
Acer client forum posters have same it's within the box.
If you cannot notice the cable, the simplest upgrade would be to feature that second M.2 drive to the laptop.
Gordon Mah Ung
AMD Ryzen seven 2700 and Radeon Vega fifty six on the left with Intel Core i9-8950HK and GeForce GTX 1070 on the correct.
Ryzen 7 vs. Core i9 Performance
We already wrote a a lot of in depth encounter of the AMD vs.
Intel versions of this portable computer, except for people UN agency don't need to click it we'll add it up: The 8-core Ryzen seven 2700 usually has the sting in multi-threaded
tasks like 3D modelling, video coding and something that may very use the facility of sixteen threads of computing.
The Core i9 is favored for applications that use fewer threads, such as photo editing and many other content creation apps that don't reach the level of optimization of
3D modelling or other workstation applications.
You can see this summed up in the chart below.
Using Cinebench R15, we are able to see the performance edges every version has victimisation one thread to sixteen threads.
The left aspect (fewer threads) provides the advantage to the 6-core Core i9.
Get to the so much right aspect tho' (more threads), and also the 8-core Ryzen seven 2700 dominates the work.
If someone tells you one is better than the other, they're giving you the wrong information. The correct answer is: One is better than the other for certain workloads.
Look at what you are doing, and opt for the CPU consequently.
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If your work tends to not use that a lot of threads, you will see a lot of performance out of the Core i9 version of the Predator Helios five hundred.
If however, you propose to shop for the portable computer for thread-heavy tasks, you'll be wanting the Ryzen seven 2700 version.
Radeon RX Vega 56 vs. GeForce GTX 1070
The Predator Helios 500's GPU is that the alternative major thought.
It's actually the first time we've seen a high-end Radeon GPU in a laptop in a long, long time.
We'll purpose you all over again to our AMD vs.
Intel writeup for more details, but we'll break out probably the most relevant chart here, which looks at performance of the newest Shadows of the Tomb Raider at 1920x1080 set to Highest Quality.
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Although the higher-clocked Core i9 sometimes provides the GeForce jazz group an endeavor within the arm, in newer games that are more GPU-intensive and support more CPU cores, the Radeon RX
Vega fifty six and Ryzen seven 2700 commence on high.
To sum up, whereas there area unit games wherever the upper clocks of the Core i9 provides it the sting, the Radeon RX Vega fifty six looks to own constant advantage
over the GeForce GTX 1070 as it does in desktops.
Overclocking performance
Out of the box, the Intel/GeForce version of the Predator Helios 500 supports pre-approved overclocking profiles.
Both components offer up decent performance boosts, with most of the heavy lifting coming from the CPU.
Neither of the overclocking profiles area unit thus aggressive that that may break the portable computer.
To make it even safer, once you revive, your overclock goes away.
Our overclocking makes an attempt victimisation the enclosed Ryzen Master code on the AMD version were less self-made.
It did not embody works overclocking profiles, and manual overclocking did not yield abundant.
For example, we tend to tried to squeeze 200MHz out of all of the CPU cores, and were met with black screens.
We suspect the novelty of Ryzen and Vega to be the basis cause.
Both chips area unit thus new laptops that genus Acer hasn't had time to properly tune for them.
What's truly counter-intuitive, however, is the fan noise.
When you run the Intel and Nvidia configuration of the Predator Helios five hundred arduous, the fans kick up to high levels.
You'd expect the Ryzen and Radeon Vega to be even louder, because they're basically desktop chips, but they're actually very quiet.
In fact, the Ryzen and Radeon configuration is among the quietest we've intimate with during a recreation portable computer.
And no, that wasn't the reason behind our unhealthy luck with overclocking.
We tried overclocking the Ryzen and Radeon version with the fans at most speed and did not get to any extent further.
Gordon Mah UngBattery Performance
We don't really consider battery performance of bulky 17-inch gaming laptops to be a critical consideration, but you still want to gawk at the numbers like you do at a train wreck.
Both area unit essentially not nice, with just over two hours from the Nvidia/Intel laptop.
The AMD laptop is an atrocious 72 minutes.
And we weren't even taking part in a game—this was each laptops taking part in video, which is cruise control for a modern computer.
The battery life on the Nvidia/Intel portable computer is formed worse by the G-Sync panel.
For G-sync to figure, the discrete GPU has to be on all of the time, rather than deferring to the integrated Intel graphics during lighter demans.
The AMD portable computer, of course, has no integrated graphics that the GPU is on all of the time.
In the end, as we said, you really shouldn't care about battery life in this class of laptop. You're always going to be disappointed, and you're always going to be on AC.
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Battery performance isn't good on either, but the desktop chips in the AMD version don't help it.
Should you buy the AMD or Intel Predator Helios 500?
Overall, the Acer Predator Helios 500 is a solid laptop that really takes on different personalities depending on which configuration you buy.
For most people, the Core i9 offers better performance at lighter CPU loads. It's also the priciest of configurations, as we didn't see it for less than its list price of $2,500.
On paper, the AMD configuration seems close at $2,200, but the actual street price of the Ryzen/Radeon version can be found for $400 less. This actually makes it the better buy—if you don't consider the serious storage shortcomings of a 256GB SSD for a large gaming laptop.
The one the one that may actually the *most* sense is the mid-range 6-core Core i7-8750H with GTX 1070 inside. With its 256GB SSD and 1TB hard drive for $1,700, it balances bang for buck pretty well.
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