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Battery

Battery life is good when not gaming. Nvidia Optimus will switch off the RTX3080 and use the onboard graphics, significantly reducing power. Acer claims this has a 12 hours battery life, I doubt it would last quite that long for normal use, but it should see you through a day in the office.

As you would expect, when gaming and not plugged in, the battery will quickly drain.

Fan Noise & Heat

Fan noise isn’t quite as bad as I was expecting. It does get loud during gaming, but I have heard worse. The turbo mode sets the fans to max, making things much louder, I’d only use this for benchmarking or if wearing headphones (ideally noise cancelling).

You can put this in quiet mode, making things a little more pleasance at the cost of heat/performance. It is quite good for office use or when doing light gaming.

This laptop has been reviewed during a rare hot spell in the UK, so the heat coming off the laptop felt more noticeable than normal. If using on my lap in the evening, I have to place something under the laptop to avoid being uncomfortable experience.

Software

As usual, Acer installs a little more software than I’d like to see. Admittedly Windows itself has become bloated, so it is a little difficult to differentiate between the bloatware from Acer and Windows.

Express VPN, Power Director and Firefox come pre-installed. They are all quite useful and not spammy, so it is not too annoying.

Some previous Acer laptops would bug me with game install notifications, which I think was via Acer Jumpstart, but this one hasn’t so far. The Jumpstart icon just links to the Acer website.

Price and Alternative Options

The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE isn’t currently available in the UK, but should be soon. I have not been able to pin down its exact price, but this model should be around £2999.

That is, for the top-spec model, there will be more affordable options which should be available from around £1750.

That price places in the same ballpark as competing options, including:

Overall

The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE sits at the top of the range for Acer this year, offering around the best performance you will find on a laptop right now.

It is therefore priced accordingly, which is quite expensive for Acer, but the price is comparable to competing brands, and some models can be £500 more than this. You can, of course, get much better value going for a lower spec model from a different Acer range, but this statement is true for every brand when looking at a flagship product.

The overall design and dimensions are both superior (in my opinion) and more subtle than the likes of the Predator Helio or Nitro. It is not quite as elegant as the ConceptD range, but this will pass off easily as a professional laptop during the day then back to gaming at night.

The display is superb, sitting nicely in the middle of 15″ & 17″ as does the resolution, better than 1080P but not as demanding as 4K.

Gaming laptops have become a lot more appealing this year due to the dire stock levels of GPUs and inflated prices. Normally I’d moan about the value aspect of a high-end gaming laptop, but for now, and the foreseeable future, they have become one of the easiest/best ways to access PC gaming.

Acer Predator Triton 500 SE Review Rating

Summary

The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE is a subtly designed high spec laptop that will work well for gamers or creators. Performance is superb, and pricing is competitive against competing brands.

Overall
85%
85%
  • Overall - 85%
    85%

Pros

  • Premium spec with high-end performance for a reasonable price
  • Unique display spec with 16:10 aspect ratio
  • 2x1TB NVMe in RAID 0 for ultra-fast storage 

Cons

  • Runs hot and loud while gaming (like most high end laptops)
  • No 2.5GbE or Wi-Fi 6E
  • So bloatware

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