On the surface, the Acer Predator Helios 300 isn’t a head-turning gaming laptop. It’s a 15-inch system with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and GeForce GTX 1060 graphics, which is a baseline platform for many portable gaming machines. But what piqued my interest was the price: the Helios is basically the cheapest gaming laptop with these specs on the market, at $1,049 on Amazon, and user reviews have been largely positive.

With this in mind, I wanted to get some hands on time with this gaming laptop to see where Acer has cut corners and whether the laptop is actually worth your cash. After all, whenever a laptop strives to be the most affordable in any category, sacrifices are often made to get there.

In this case, the Predator Helios 300 doesn’t compromises on specs. Some gaming laptops ditch the SSD in their budget variants, but the Helios 300 packs a 256GB SSD in its base model. There’s still 16GB of RAM, just like most other GTX 1060 gaming laptops. And the display; again, it’s 1080p, so there is no difference on paper relative to similar products. For the price, it seems like a great deal.

But there are some aspects to this laptop that Acer hasn’t prioritized. The design is one of them. The Helios 300 isn’t slim, at 27mm thick, and the bezels around the display are as large as most budget gaming laptops. It’s also around 6 lbs heavy, which is on the upper end for GTX 1060 laptops of this size; the most portable often shave two pounds off this weight. Despite the weight and size, this laptop only packs a 48 Wh battery, which is mid-tier for this hardware.

Note: This review focuses on the 15.6-inch model of the Helios 300. A larger 17.3-inch variant is also available.

The construction of the Helios 300 is basic, essentially just ticking the boxes for what a modern gaming laptop must provide. There are two brushed metal sections – the lid, and the keyboard surround – but the rest of the laptop is made from matte plastic. Little attention has been paid to keeping the device seamless, so the end result is a combination of several different materials and textures. It works, but only because this is an entry-level product.

There’s no shortage of gamer style around this laptop, particularly on the lid, which features Acer’s aggressive Predator logo along with some red highlights. It’s a similar story when the laptop is open: a massive Predator logo below the display, red highlights around the keyboard and trackpad, plus a generally angular design that’s typically confined to gamer products. Some like this aesthetic; I’m not a huge fan.

The vents along the back have received their dose of gamer style as well, thanks to a massive red outline. It’s interesting to see that half of these ‘vents’ are basically fake, leaving just one half of the total space for actual airflow. These are the only vents around the sides, so all exhaust goes through this one smallish port. This again is Acer opting for a functional, basic design over something more sophisticated, which is fine for a cheap laptop.

The selection of I/O ports on this laptop is, unsurprisingly, basic. The left has Ethernet, HDMI, a single USB 3.0-A port, and a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port, along with an SD card reader. The right gets the power port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and two USB 2.0-A ports. So yes, the Helios 300 only has a single USB 3.0-A port, as Acer presumably believes you will use the right USB ports for an external mouse and perhaps keyboard as well. Ideally all three USB ports would support at least 3.0 speeds.

They keyboard is fairly typical for a laptop: nothing special but nothing bad either. Its travel and tactile feedback is similar to many ultraportable laptops, with a spongy though not unbearable response. Each key is spaced adequately, with Acer managing to cram in full-sized arrow keys and a numpad into this device. The WASD keys are highlighted, and the keyboard has a red backlight. Again, nothing special like RGB here, just your standard gaming laptop keyboard.

You’re going to want to use a mouse with this laptop for gaming, but the trackpad included isn’t terrible for casual use, which is a bit of a surprise considering it uses ELAN hardware. Now, it’s not the best trackpad I’ve used, and tracking performance is only fair, but for web browsing and other light tasks it’s perfectly serviceable.

Up until now, everything is pretty standard for an entry-level gaming laptop; it’s still not clear what hardware Acer has compromised to hit a low price point. I say “up until now”, because I’m about to discuss the display, which is by far the worst aspect to this laptop.

On paper, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the panel. It’s a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS LCD that runs at 60 Hz. There’s no high refresh rate or G-Sync support, which isn’t surprising for a budget laptop, and that’s fine. When you dig in to the performance of the display, however, serious issues are uncovered.

To start with, the panel on my review unit is only capable of 65% sRGB coverage. This is completely unacceptable for any modern display, and quite frankly I was shocked at this result. After checking a few other reviews, it seems this figure can vary a bit, as I’ve seen other tests suggesting up to 85% coverage. I may have a particularly bad review sample, but in any case, anything less than about 95% sRGB coverage should not be tolerated in 2017 for any product category, budget or not. In fact I’ve seen plenty of other low-tier gaming laptops that offer much better sRGB coverage.

This terrible gamut result leads to widespread undersaturation, as the display simply cannot push colors to the required vibrance levels. Images look flat and lacking punch as a result. Put this display next to anything that can produce sRGB accurately – we’re not even talking about wide-gamut panels here – and the Helios 300 display looks underwhelming to say the least.

With this sort of gamut, it’s no surprise to see bad color accuracy. The contrast ratio is okay, at 1160:1, and color temperatures are acceptable for the most part. But the gamut prevents this display from ever hitting even half-decent accuracy levels, and it’s not something calibration can correct. Brightness is also weak, at maximum of only 230 nits.

Will you notice the poor display during gaming? It depends on the game, but as the panel cannot reproduce the bright, punchy colors we expect at the high-end on sRGB displays, particle effects and so forth will be washed out and desaturated.

System Performance

One of the key selling points to the Helios 300 is its standard gaming-grade hardware for its budget price. The laptop packs an Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 discrete GPU, a combination that is used in a wide variety of gaming laptops. It’s nothing new or special, but a really solid duo for near $1,000.

The i7-7700HQ is Intel’s standard quad-core 45W Kaby Lake CPU that’s used in most gaming laptops. It has four cores, eight threads clocked at 2.8 GHz with a maximum boost frequency of 3.8 GHz. The GTX 1060 for laptops is basically the same as the GPU used in desktops, with 1280 CUDA cores and a rated boost frequency of 1670 MHz. To go with the GPU is 6GB of GDDR5 at 8000 MHz.

The rest of the hardware is also typical for a gaming laptop. There’s 16GB of DDR4 as standard, in the form of a single DIMM. As for storage, there’s a range of options, the default being a 256GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive. My review unit came with slightly less SSD storage than the default, at 128GB, but for most people buying this laptop in North America, you’ll get a 256GB SSD instead.

These benchmark results are not surprising whatsoever. The Acer Predator Helios 300 performs within a few percent of other laptops that use the same hardware. So yes, you are getting the same performance as a lot of other, more expensive devices.

The only real performance difference between the Helios and other gaming laptops is in storage. The Helios 300, at least in the case of my review unit, used a Toshiba SSDNow SATA M.2 SSD, which only delivered sequential read/write performance around the 360 MB/s mark. Many other laptops opt for faster PCIe NVMe drives instead, which leads to vastly superior storage performance. Acer is on a tight budget with the Helios, so they’ve used a slower SATA SSD instead. The good news, however, is that having an SSD is still a lot better for general OS operations than not having one, so it’s great that Acer could fit one in this laptop despite its price.

As for the hard drive, it’s a Toshiba 1TB 5,400 RPM drive, which again is a budget piece of hardware. A number of more expensive gaming laptops use 7,200 RPM drives instead, but the Helios’ tight budget has led to a slower drive being used here.

Gaming Performance

Once again, there’s really no surprises here when it comes to gaming performance. The GTX 1060 performs basically exactly as expected, and there’s no real difference between the Helios 300 and a range of other laptops with the same hardware in new-ish titles. This is great news for those that want to save a few hundred dollars compared to other GTX 1060 gaming laptops: you’re not sacrificing game performance.

The cooling solution is decent as well, which surprised me a bit considering its single exhaust vent design. When playing a game like Watch Dogs 2, which hits the CPU and GPU pretty hard, the Helios 300 reached 84°C on the CPU and 74°C on the GPU. This is a respectable result that’s well within the thermal limits of both parts, and allows the GPU in particular to hit its highest possible clock speeds for the longest time.

When punished under an AIDA64 stress test, I saw the CPU climb as high as 91°C and the GPU hit nearly 80°C, but this is a non-standard use case that’s not reflective of real-world gaming scenarios. And even though it’s a torture test, the Helios 300 did surprisingly well here.

The great news is that it’s not outrageously loud to achieve these temperatures either. It’s not a silent laptop by any stretch, but with some headphones or external speakers, it should be fairly easy to drown out the white noise produced by the cooling solution. Laptops such as the Razer Blade are significantly louder under full load.
Killer Specs for the Price, But...

The Acer Predator Helios 300 is the gaming laptop you should purchase if you are on a budget. At just over $1,000, it provides the best collection of gaming hardware available at this price point, matching more expensive laptops in a range of popular games.

And this isn’t a surprise, because a significant chunk of the budget has gone to the Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics: the baseline hardware duo for many popular gaming laptops.

With this hardware inside, the Helios 300 provides a very good experience at 1080p with ultra settings, which is exactly what you’d be hoping for. Despite its low price, the in-game experience hasn’t been compromised.

To my surprise, the Helios 300 also includes a respectable cooler that keeps the components in check during lengthy gaming sessions, without overwhelming you with noise.

There’s also an SSD inside, and while it’s a pretty basic SATA drive, it’s better than having no SSD at all, which is often an option in entry-level gaming laptops. 16GB of RAM further indicates that Acer wasn’t willing to compromise on key hardware for this laptop.

Where the compromises have come is in "less important" areas. The Helios 300 has a rather uninspiring design, which is above average in size and weight. The keyboard and trackpad are okay. It provides only one of three USB-A ports supporting USB 3.0 speeds. Most of these compromises are relatively minor, and don’t affect the gaming experience.

From this regard, the Helios 300 is perfect for those that want a laptop that goes all out on hardware, while still managing to fit into a tight budget. If you want a better design, a faster SSD, or better I/O options, this is where more expensive gaming laptops come in to play.

The only key criticism I have of the Helios 300 is its display, which is terrible. The main issue here is the color gamut, which at 65% of sRGB is well below the standard we’ve come to expect from modern displays, even on budget machines. This leads to undersaturation and an underwhelming display in general.

Whether or not you can overlook the display issues will determine whether the Helios 300 is the right choice for you. But in general, the fact this laptop includes GTX 1060 gaming hardware for a few hundred dollars less than its competitors makes it an option you should closely explore.