GAMING LAPTOPS come and go, but some things stay the same. The combination of a hot CPU and capable GPU, along with plenty of RAM and some fast storage, always adds up to a potent gaming experience that can’t last long away from a wall socket, and so it is with Acer’s latest, the Predator Helios Neo 16.
It’s packing a 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPU, rather than one of the Meteor Lake Core Ultra chips, which means 20 cores (eight of them P cores), a maximum boost frequency of 5.5GHz, and a TDP of as much as 157W. Add to that the 140W that the RTX 4070 GPU is capable of slurping, and this doesn’t go well on the battery, which in our tests can scrape just three hours and 19 minutes, even in our relatively gentle test, which keeps the screen on and subjects it to a series of office tasks.
Still, once you get it plugged in and actually start gaming on it, the Helios Neo is pretty good to use. It’s fairly heavy, which grounds it on your desktop and, as a 16-inch laptop should, it takes over the space you put it in more than a smaller model would. The weight means it’s suboptimal when you put it on your lap, but there’s another reason that it belongs on a hard surface: it gets hot. The fans spin up just from the Windows login page, and it gets warm even when sitting idle. Start pushing up the processors, and the cooling system is called upon to dissipate a lot of heat, leading to plenty of fan noise.