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Acer Helios 300 Review - A Cheap Gaming Laptop with a GTX 1060!

2017-06-25
hey how's it going Dave 2d here and this is the cheapest gaming laptop on the market with a 6 gig GTX 1060 and it's kind of weird because it's coming from a brand name company Acer and the hardware in here is very powerful but the question that I think a lot of people may be asking is it worth it and whether or not you should purchase this laptop versus something that's slightly less powerful but a little bit cheaper and that's what this video is here to help you with so right off the bat we're kind of deep into the product cycle for both the CPU and the GPU I'm not going to go into too much detail about their performance it's a kb league 7700 HQ and a gtx 1060 this is going to crush most games and I got to be honest I was expecting the fans to be loud because of the pricing but the fans are quiet the thermals however aren't great the temperatures are a little warm nothing too bad it doesn't saddle at all in games but I would just like to see lower temperatures regardless we're seeing excellent frame rates on this thing for 1080p gaming so first the good stuff the build quality is surprisingly good it's got a metal top panel plastic everywhere else and you'd think it would have a lot of flex on the chassis but it doesn't it's really solid and even the screen and hinges are built well I think they made some great material choices here it's not particularly thin and it's also a little bit heavy but it is durable the speakers are ok they're down firing and they get pretty loud you can play game audio over the fans but they don't sound particularly clear and they lack bass if you want positional audio for gaming you're going to have to get headphones going the port selection is pretty standard for the price points there's three USB a's and a single USBC which doesn't support then about three if you're interested in upgrading the internals there's two doors on the bottom wonder lets you add a two natf inch SATA drive and then the other is for the two rams claws they include 16 gigs but opening the rest of the case isn't easy I got kind of far but I chickened out because they don't want to break the casing I'm sure it's possible but if you plan on changing the SSD you got a nut up and go on pretty deep and the SSD they include isn't super fast so you might want to do it the keyboard has a number pad the layout feels not bad the shift key is kind of weirdly positioned but I personally didn't have any issues using it the mechanism for the keys feel a little spongy but I can still type pretty fast it's strange because each individual stroke doesn't feel great but when you type on it the whole it's a very comfortable keyboard to use now I think part of that comes from just personal preferences I think the average person is going to find this keyboard decent the trackpad uses Windows precision drivers it's got great tracking clicking is a little stiff you got to press down harder than normal to register a click but it's good otherwise and if you're a tapper and not a clicker it's actually really good now there are a few things that I don't like the temperatures like I mentioned earlier it's not that they're super hot or anything it's just I wish it ran a little bit cooler but the thing is it's difficult to get into the internals of this device so if there's any kind of dust buildup in the fans it might be hard to clean them out the other thing is that the battery life isn't great it's a 48 watt hour battery and I'm getting around four hours of battery life with the screen at 250 minutes it's passable and I guess expected considering the price of the system now the last thing I don't like and this is a big one for me it's the screen it's 1080p not a touchscreen the color gamut is a super bed I mean looking at the numbers it doesn't look great but visually it's not too bad but the thing that really ruins it for me is the brightness it's really dim if you're using it in bright environment and I found it difficult to play games in the daytime in the evening or if I close all the blinds it's fine but yeah it's not a very bright screen now the screen is where a lot of companies will kind of cheap out if they have to keep their laptops at a certain price point and I feel like that's what they've done so you're still getting an amazingly powerful device for the money I mean a GTX 1060 is almost overkill for 1080p games on laptops because we're capped at the 60 frames per second on the screens I think the purchase decision boiled down to which games you actually play if you're someone that plays a lot of kind of mid tier triple-a shooters and stuff like that those aren't super demanding I would actually opt for a 1050 Ti those are going to last you a couple years with great frame rates and you'll save a little bit of money and you can spend on faster drives and stuff like that but if you're someone that plays like open-world games like GTA 5 witcher 3 then go for the gtx 1060 because you're the type of gamer that this laptop was built for
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