Review on 💻 Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-54-760S Gaming Laptop: Intel i7-11800H, RTX 3060, 15.6" FHD 144Hz Display, 16GB DDR4, 512GB SSD by Manuel Gfx

This is a very good laptop that can play AAA games on high settings. It was well packaged and sealed to prevent damage in transit. Included was a very basic but free neoprene laptop sleeve. It doesn't come with straps or pockets, but it's padded and will protect your laptop better when traveling than if it were left open, but I'd still suggest getting a tote or backpack if you plan on carrying it around. The package also included a hard drive upgrade cable and screws in case you want to insert your own 2.5" drive into the empty slot on the motherboard. The 1080p, 3ms, 144Hz IPS display looks great and offers excellent viewing angles. If you've never used a 144Hz panel before, you'll never go back to 60GHz monitors for gaming. 144Hz ruined my last gaming laptop because the difference is extremely noticeable compared to 60Hz panels (generally feels smoother when moving around in games). The webcam works in 720p resolution. This is fine for chatting with friends or meeting up on a large scale, but not recommended for anything larger. It also doesn't work with Windows Hello. The 10th Gen Intel i7-10750H processor with a base clock frequency of 2.6GHz is very efficient, powerful and has decent integrated graphics (which the laptop prefers to use if you don't play games or do intensive work that requires more require GPU power ). This laptop has a lot of value considering this processor alone sells for $400 and the laptop also has an RTX 2060 6GB. RTX is the latest architecture with ray tracing capability. If you don't know what that is, these are the realistic lighting effects that developers are currently adding to games, but you need a card that can handle it or you won't be able to take advantage of this feature. The RTX 2060 GPU is very powerful. My average FPS on very high settings in Assassin's Creed Odyssey was 70. In GTA V on high settings it was 115. Interestingly, this laptop has a button called Turbo. Now there's no explicit explanation of what it's doing if you take the laptop out of the box and don't read the manual, but it's essentially overclocking the GPU and running the fans in hyperdrive to offset the extra heat. with its acceleration. In terms of performance, I got an average FPS boost of 10 in the two games I tested the FPS in. But noisy when the fans are running at full speed. I have to mention the fans, which Acer calls 'AeroBlade™ 3D Technology' 4 You can play with it on your laptop while you're sitting and it won't be too uncomfortable. In addition to the Turbo key, the keyboard has a Predator key. Pressing this button will open an application that will show the current CPU/GPU temperature and even the ambient temperature inside the laptop itself as a whole. Here you can customize your lighting profile, overclock your GPU with 3 speeds (normal, fast, extreme) and you can set the fan speed to a custom setting or leave it on Auto. Since Acer has this application that manages these settings from the operating system, the UEFI BIOS is pretty sparse. You can't adjust the voltage or overclock manually, but since the app does everything for you and many gamers don't overclock their system because they find it too difficult or risky, it makes things easier. i.e. with a simple press of the turbo button or drop-down menus in the app. Speaking of the BIOS, you should go in (Spam F2 when turning on the laptop) and turn off that annoying POST sound. By default, when you turn on a laptop, it plays a sound file that for some reason sounds like a jet engine taking off. I turned it off because it really annoyed me, but I appreciate the ability to do this in the BIOS. Other than that, there aren't many settings in the BIOS. It also has Wi-Fi 6! It has 16GB of RAM (two of 8GB), but the DIMMs are user-serviceable, so you can easily install 32GB (two of 16GB) if you want. since the aero design is not used). There is some malware that I recommend removing. As for the build quality, this is where the laptop shows its low price point. The entire laptop is made of plastic and it bends very easily, especially the panel. The plastic trackpad is okay, it works for web browsing and light tasks, but overall it's not that responsive. The two small audio cutouts underneath the laptop is a really bad design flaw that more laptop manufacturers would like to fix. Please just turn on the upward facing speakers. The speakers themselves aren't that great anymore, when they shoot down it becomes even harder to hear some games, even with the game volume set to 100 and the OS volume set to 100 as well. This is why you will want the headphones for a laptop. Available ports: Left side - Kensington lock, Ethernet RJ45, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, 3.5mm audio jack. The right side is Mini Displayport, HDMI, USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port (Gen 2 adds the ability to charge even when the laptop is off), and USB-C 3.2 Gen 2. Behind is the charging port. Kudos to Acer for placing the charging port in the center behind the laptop. Acer claims up to 6 hours of battery life, but don't count on heavy gaming on this laptop when you're offline. I have about 2 hours. with short breaks between games. One thing I want to talk about is the design of the laptop. Looks good but I think Acer needs to think about who is going to buy this laptop. These will mostly be students who need a gaming laptop that they can also use for classes. I don't think gaming laptops need to look like "gaming laptops". A more understated design and the absence of any LEDs on the outside of the laptop will appeal to a much wider audience, I think. Overall, this laptop is an incredible deal. For what you pay, you get an incredibly powerful gaming laptop.