Acer Predator Helios 16S AI Assessment: Nice Efficiency, Annoying Crashes

The keyboard options four-zone shade backlighting, tunable by Acer’s in depth PredatorSense system, which controls all the things from battery charging particulars as to if you need to customise the brand displayed because the laptop computer boots. It’s accessible by way of a devoted key above the slim numeric keypad. The opposite bespoke key on the machine is the Mode key, discovered above the highest left of the keyboard. This shifts amongst 4 totally different efficiency/fan operation modes when plugged in; two of those modes can be found when working on battery energy.

Due to the numeric keypad, the keyboard and touchpad are shifted fairly far to the left. This is perhaps a case the place you may adapt to the structure over time, however I discovered it robust to work comfortably when pushed this far to 1 facet, particularly when utilizing the arrow keys, which spill over into each the keyboard and keypad areas.

Ports are distinctive and might be discovered on either side and the rear of the system. These embody two USB-C ports (one with Thunderbolt 4 help), three USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI port, a full-size Ethernet jack, and a microSD card slot. You’ll want to make use of the separate energy jack and 230-watt A/C adapter to energy the system. (The adapter itself is heavy however not notably massive, weighing 1.1 kilos.)

The display screen is without doubt one of the brightest I’ve seen in years, and whereas the audio system aren’t notably nuanced, they’re at the least lots loud. Sadly, they have to be, as a result of when the fan kicks in, which is usually, this can be very noisy.

Laptop Crash

Put collectively the entire bundle, and also you’ve received efficiency to spare on just about something you may throw at this technique. The Helios set information practically throughout the board on my battery of benchmarks, together with (by far) the perfect GPU-related scores I’ve seen to this point, handily beating the MacBook Professional M4 Professional by 50 % on the Geekbench 6 GPU take a look at whereas practically doubling graphics efficiency over methods outfitted with the final era of GeForce laptop computer GPUs.