Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-54-760S Gaming Laptop | Intel i7-11800H | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU | 15.6" FHD 144Hz 3ms IPS Display | 16GB DDR4 | 512GB SSD | Killer WiFi 6 | RGB Keyboard

This has been my daily driver computer for almost a year now and I've been very impressed. It's handled every game I've thrown at it and more. GPU: I'm going to do this first since this is arguably the most important part. I have the RTX 3060 version. The important thing to note is that this is the MOBILE 3060, which is slightly less powerful than the desktop 3060. It's nearly equivalent in power to a desktop 1070 Ti. I have been playing some pretty intensive games on it over the last year including, most recently, Baldur's Gate 3 on max graphics. I keep the screen refresh rate at 60Hz instead of the 144Hz that you can use because it saves battery while also allowing your GPU to rest a bit while gaming. I've also capped the FPS at 60 directly through the Nvidia app. Same reason there, I don't need 144Hz. In BG3, It keeps a consistent 50-60fps while using only about 50% of the GPU. I also consistently play games from Xbox Gamepass on here on max graphics with very little stutter or issues. All in all, I'm very impressed by what a mobile 3060 can do. Screen: The screen is a very bright, crisp IPS screen that's capable of up to 144Hz. The viewing angle is good and even from the side you can still make out details (albeit a bit dimmer). It gets very bright at max level, almost headache causing, so I personally keep the brightness at about 20%. Battery: Depending on what you're doing, the battery is...fine. If I'm running a game (not recommended on battery), I can get about an hour out of it. But if I'm just using it day-to-day with my settings (60Hz refresh rate, 20% brightness), I can get 3-4 hours of solid use. CPU: I've never had any issues with it multi-tasking or running any app or game. Even when using CPU intensive programs like Handbrake, it will max the CPU but still give you decent performance to continue using it for web browsing and videos. Cooling: The fans themselves are somewhat loud if you get in to heavy duty gaming and I do recommend getting a stand to prop it up to allow for airflow, which drastically helps. There is a physical turbo button which makes the fans go to 100% and are pretty effective at lowering temps but are also loud, so best to only use that with headphones. Under load in BG3, it will run about 60C, which is fairly low. In a more intense game, I have seen it get to 70-75C which is warmer, but still in acceptable range. Overall, I'd recommend giving this a buy if you want a solid gaming laptop but also a daily driver.

My gaming rig was on its way out, with an outdated i5 processor, GTX 1060 graphics card (which I paid too much for used on eBay) and 16GB of RAM, so my partner and I discussed what our next PC purchase would be. After much research, I found that the Acer Helios 300 provided a decent integrated graphics card (3060) that could play older AAA titles on Ultra, and newer ones on either High or Medium with little overclocking using stock settings most of the time. Most recently I played the Diablo IV Beta & the Resident Evil 4 remake on High settings, and it looked great on the 1920x1080 screen. On occasion I do plug it into my 4K LG Monitor, or the 4K TV in the family room via HDMI port or Mini Display Port (and doing so increasing the screen resolution to 3840x2160). At this point, its when the overclocking tool(s) become most advantageous. Yes, the fans are a bit loud, but that's normal for these devices. To combat this I pair either my Apple Airpods Max via BT or my Razer THX headset when gaming on the TV. I also use a cooling mat that has a couple fans on the bottom that help dissipate heat. I've also been using this laptop for school work which it does in a flash on anything Office 365. Webcam and built-in mic are more than enough for Zoom calls and proctored exams. This thing is overkill for school work. (Which is just an added bonus.) I've also done a bit of video editing using Adobe Premiere and it renders video files much quicker than my old PC. I'm not much of a content creator, but I imagine this computer would be great for extensive 4K video or other more complex projects. Finally, this machine has several options for expand-ability and future-proofing. Since purchasing it, I have upgraded the RAM to 32GB and have installed a second SSD drive (using the included adapter that came in the box). And I'm happy knowing that there is an empty M.2 slot available when I decide to install a third hard drive for when I need to. I have no qualms about the price, and believe it was more than fair for what's available on the market today. It's a solid mid-tier gaming laptop that's more than capable with keeping up with newer titles. With chip shortages, supply chain issues, not to mention the folks who do bitcoin mining grabbing up all the graphics cards, which in turn jack up prices to insane amounts, it was a no-brainer to replace my aging gaming rig with this laptop instead of holding out hope for a better graphics card in the future.

I bought this laptop back in October of 2024 - waited awhile to see how it would go before I left a review. I'm an Apple guy so I was a little nervous going back to Windows. This laptop is very nice. Windows 11 is very nice also. Windows supplies its office suite as a test drive with limited time before they want you sign up for longer periods of time. I'll probably just buy the 1 time deal for 150.00 and then I'll have what I need. I really don't need the 365 suite. The screen is very bright and does not disappoint. It's very crisp with excellent detail and colors and is 18". I have not noticed any backlight bleed whatsoever. I only had 16" on my MacBook Pro. The screen size was a major reason why I wanted this laptop. The keyboard is backlit and you can change the color to whatever color you want the back light to be. It mainly sits on my desk. I moved it upstairs the other day for a bit on the battery. Battery life is not Apple battery life. It drains fairly quickly compared to my older MacBook Pro, but I'm not travelling with it much and it sits primarily on my desk. The power supply is rather large for it. Some people were complaining about the fans being too loud. Well, its a gaming laptop and some fan noise is expected. If I were a gamer the fans would be louder I'm sure, but I'm only using it for daily activities and I can here the fans but I'm not bothered by them as they are fairly quiet. The fans are adjustable via the Predator software they provide with the laptop. McAffee suite comes with it as a trial. The laptop is quick, grant you I'm not pushing to hard, but I have noticed no waiting when it comes to using it, so the processor speed and memory are fine for me. I do watch movies on it and the 18" screen is exceptional. All in all I'm very pleased with it. My only complaint is that at first the trackpad was a bit touchy. There is however an adjustment for this in Windows 11 to adjust the sensitivity. I noticed it's on sale for Black Friday that is a better deal than what I paid for it by probably 100 bucks or so back in October. If you want a big laptop, just buy it - you won't be disappointed.

I like it and for the sale price of $950 it was a bargain. My only complaints are it comes with Windows 11 and the memory is soldered on so if you want more than 16GB you will either have to get the model with the 32GB soldered on, pay someone to do it or be good enough to do it yourself. Out of the box it had 58% memory usage with the 16GB model I purchased. After removing bloatware, unnecessary windows services and components, at idle it runs about 38% usage for me. I kept the Predator apps and what not, they are pretty nifty. It runs games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at max settings at 1080p and can do 4k but I wouldn’t recommend it. We mostly play Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 on it and those can be ran at 4k or 2k and run rather well. The fan does run loud when ya do set to auto in turbo mode so I highly recommend a laptop cooling pad to help. We have not experienced any hot temps even without the cooling pad but better safe than sorry. Not worth buying unless it’s 950 or less, even more less as this model gets older. Was gonna build a portable desktop with a built in display for the case but I have too many projects as it is not to mention I work a lot so this was a nice cheap alternative to get me by until I had the time to build something better that can be upgraded in the future. At $950 on 2024 Black Friday I feel I got what I paid for just wish I had gotten the 32GB model looking back. I am capable of soldering on extra memory myself however so if it becomes a problem in the future it wouldn’t be an issue for my household.

This laptop works amazing! I have not had issues with overheating in the slightest with the ability to toggle between the different modes. The screen quality is so so clear and glorious, I was shocked when I first loaded up a game that takes a lot of graphics. The colors are so vibrant you would think you were using a high end monitor instead of a laptop screen. I have yet to find a game that lags this beast, so I would say the gaming capability is great! The keyboard feels the same as just about any other laptop keyboard. Even setting this thing up was a breeze! I highly recommend this over the neo i9 because I feel like the ability to change and upgrade is one of the most important parts of this laptop. There are two M.2 slots, one taken by the main drive which is 1 Terabyte, the other open and free to add another one, which I took my 2 Terabyte one from my previous laptop and put it in it. The ram is accessible and as long as you use DDR5 and get the correct size, you can upgrade it from what I can tell. You can't upgrade the CPU or GPU but honestly I don't feel like you need to. Unless you are on the drop for brand new games as they are coming out, this beast has plenty of gaming power to go around.

What the title says. It's great for gaming if you want this laptop to never last then go ahead let it push and die in a year. I played games like hell let loose, halo infinite, elden ring, assassin's creed valhalla and also do a lot of rendering work and while it's normal for these games to get these laptops hot, this thing went up to 90c to 100c hot. This is with a cooling pad, and the fan running at turbo and some how managed to hit tjmax. The build is decent and has seen some abuse such as accidentally dropping it a few times and never noticing any substantial drop in performance. On the other hand, too bad it'll drop in performance anyways when the interior gets so hot that it needs turbo on all the time as the cpu gets so hot that it lowers the clock speed to save itself. Also, The predator button is the stupidest design choice i've ever seen and the program itself manages to take 20% of cpu load and make the laptop hotter by having the program running by itself. I don't care if I can change the predator button's settings, as having it where the num lock is annoying and shows how much acer cared about keyboard design when they first made this. Also installing ssd wasn't bad, but the tutorials are much like acer's monitor quality: bad. Didn't show me where to stick the slim thing to open up the laptop so i can install another ssd in there. For what it's worth and almost a year with this thing and I have a lot of resentment with this laptop, and that i'll use it until it dies and then go elsewhere. UPDATE: Oh yeah I forgot about about the overly sensitive mousepad. It's so bad that they thought adding the FN + f2 key would fix an obvious awful design issue that they think a bandage will prevent frustrations. If I Have to press fn + f2 key every time I had to switch from gaming to internet surfing to gaming then why should I even bother buying a laptop to begin with? That thing is neck deep almsot near the space bar that it gets in the way of communication. Meanwhile so many other laptops with similar designs such as small arrow keys to knowing where to place their mouse pad so when you place your hand on wasd, it shouldn't result in an accidental discharge in CS:GO and give away your position.

Nothing much to say, really. My main purpose reviewing is telling you about the gotchas in video for this PC. Overall, though, it is absolutely excellent. It is utra quiet even with the fans running at high speed. It does get hot, but no performance issues. What I learned about video setup: There are three display ports in this PC: 1. Mini DisplayPort v1.4. 2. HDMI port v2.1. 3. Thunderbolt port v4 (USB-C). All display ports are capable of 4K @60Hz at least. I run my PC connected to 2 LG UltraFine 31.5in monitors at that resolution and refresh rate. However, the DisplayPort function embedded in the Thunderbolt v4 port is run by the integrated Intel HD graphics card, NOT the nVidia RTX3060 card. This is VERY IMPORTANT for gaming: The Intel integrated graphics card will NOT support DirectX 12 Ultimate. On the other hand, displays connected through ports 1 or 2 above will be un by the nVidia RTX3060 card that does support DirectX 12 Ultimate. The difference is night and day. True, I am not loading the most hardcore games ever, but still. So you get a frame of reference, my main 2 games are Age of Empires II DE and Age of Empires IV. I run both in full desktop mode, meaning the 2 monitors treated as one big monitor. AoE II DE reports consistent FPS of 60 (I have V-Sync on, which limits FPS to that of the monitor's refresh rate) with all graphics settings on. AoE IV does not seem to have a way to show the FPS, but it does run super smoothly. So there. Enjoy this super high end PC at a super low price. Oh, and you MUST use quality 8K-graded cables. FYI, the HDMI cables that shipped with my LG monitors are garbage. Get Vanky or some other reputable 8K cables.

I recently got it and has worked perfectly fine for me. I do have to make clear: I do not use it for heavy gaming, but I do play Terraria, Minecraft and The Sims 4 occasionally. The main tasks I use it for are digital painting, digital design and studying (using Office, Teams, Zoom, etc.) and it has performed very nicely. It has no touble at all managing the bigger, more complex brush settings, such as those that mimic real paint, but I do switch it to Performance mode when using them. The keyboard is nice, it feels comfortable to the touch and is easy to adapt to if you are used to a bigger laptop format. It is also very fast and easy to work with, with short waiting times for heavier apps to open (I use the Adobe Creative Suite and it does not take more than a minute to open any of the apps). With this kind of use, I have not noticed any kind of heating or fan noise. The screen brightness is perfect and adaptive for indoor use, whether the room has dim, bright or no lighting. Also, it has quite a wide range of screen viewing angles. I have noticed the cover gets fingerprint marks quite easily, but my hands do sweat a bit more than the average person's, so this could not be the case for you. Both the device and the charger are very heavy, so I would not recomment carrying it with you to work or school, unless you have no other option. But, if you can, I would totally recommend getting a tablet or some other kind of PC-like portable device in which you can do some lighter tasks, and then detail them at home. I have seen some other people complaining about it heating too much on the Turbo setting, but there are solutions to this. Also, I believe it is relatively common for this kind of PC's to heat up when they're used for heavier tasks.