The keyboard has a four-zone color backlight that can be adjusted via Acer’s extensive Predator system, which controls everything from battery charging details to whether you want to customize the logo displayed as a laptop boot. It is available via dedicated keys above the slim numeric keyboard. Another custom key on the machine is the mode key on the upper left side of the keyboard. When plugged in, this changes between four different performance/fan operation modes; two of these modes are available when running on battery power.
Thanks to the numeric keypad, the keyboard and touchpad moved far to the left. In this case you can adapt to the layout over time, but I found it difficult to work comfortably when pushing this side to one side, especially when using the arrow keys, which overflow to the keyboard and keyboard area.
Ports are exceptions and can be found on both sides and at the back of the device. These include two USB-C ports (one with Thunderbolt 4 support), three USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI port, a full-size Ethernet jack and a microSD card slot. You need to use a separate power jack and a 230-watt A/C adapter to power the device. (The adapter itself is heavy, but not particularly large, weighing 1.1 pounds.)
The screen is one of the smartest I’ve ever seen in years, and while the speakers aren’t particularly nuanced, they’re at least loud. Unfortunately, they need to be, because when the fan starts, this is usually very noisy.
Computer crashed
Photo: Chris Null
Put the whole package together and you can discard almost anything on this system. The record set by Helios is almost the best (to date) I’ve seen (to date) with GPU-related scores (including my best scores related to GPU-related so far), easily beat the MacBook Pro M4 Pro 50% in the Geekbench 6 GPU test, and the graphics performance has almost doubled compared to the system compared to the last-generation Geforce laptop gpus.
