Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the Acer predator 15 and Predator 17 so originally I was going to do two separate videos on these but then I thought what's better than two separate videos when they have so much in common one unseparated video let's do it so design wise they're both very similar they have a soft touch rubber on all the exterior surfaces and there's a predator logo up front when the device is on the logo and these two strips here light up red now the build quality on both of these is pretty good if you have plastic finishes there's no metal on the exterior but they both have good chassis strength and limited screenflex even the 17-inch panel is sturdy one thing to keep in mind though with soft touch finishes if you treat it rough it can show scratches and stuff pretty easily but if you treat it well you're good to go reports they both have the same arrangement on the right side we have a Thunderbolt three used to be threes video outputs and then Ethernet and on the left side we have a couple more USBs audio jacks and an SD slot okay on the bottom of the laptop we have the subwoofers air intake vents and then an easy to open hatch for accessing the upgradable components so there's two empty RAM slots you can upgrade it up to 64 gigs of ram and for storage there's an empty slot that's in use and then a second slot on top that comes empty and then you also have your regular two and a half inch drive so three drives in total which is awesome for things like streaming recording games or video editing the fans exhaust out the back and it obviously has a gamer inspired design to it but I think they look pretty cool now both of them are a little heavier and larger relative to other laptops with the same screen size opening it up it has the same soft touch material on the inside big lot tops like this often have nice keyboards and these ones feel pretty good it's very spacious excellent key travel and the layout is perfect even with a keyboard shift from the number pad typing and gaming is very comfortable the backlighting is read on the keyboard area and then blue on the number pad so you can't change the backlight in color but you can turn them on and off in zones there's some profile buttons that you can program macros and you can control things like fans or graphics cards it's actually pretty useful the 17-inch predator has it on the side and then the 15-inch one has it up on the top because there's less space on the side but there is one issue on the 15 inch keyboard so the corner here can poke into your wrist now I don't have a big wrist so there's just enough space for me to use it comfortably but if you're jacked or if you have huge arms then this might actually bug you I tried it out in the store first if you can the trackpad is also really good it has excellent texture and it tracks nicely it uses physical buttons that are really nice to click there's quite a bit of travel on the buttons but they're still very responsive there's also a button here to turn off the trackpad when you're gaming with the mess the screens on both of these review units are 1080p IPS panels they're bright backlighting matte finish good contrast good color accuracy really good viewing angles there are nice screens there's no light bleed that I can see on the 15-inch panel there's a little bit in the top corners of the 17-inch but it's very slight now there's supposedly a 4k option for the 17-inch model in some countries but I haven't seen it but overall these 1080p panels are really solid and are great for gaming they don't have G sync though there's also a 720p webcam you got some pretty clean videos from it the speakers are actually on the bottom not in that front grill area like they look like they would be the 15-inch speaker sounds really good but the 17-inch speaker sounds even better both of them have plenty of volume and a good amount of bass but the middle and upper frequencies just sound cleaner and more precise on the 17-inch the fans on idle aren't too loud but when these laptops are going full tilt the fans are very audible they are cooling a gtx 980m which gets hot but yeah these fans are loud the disc drive for both of them are removable and you can replace it with this extra fan that they call a frost core it's a neat idea but doesn't seem to affect temperatures too much and it definitely adds a little bit more fan noise but whether or not you use this bonus fan temperatures stay appropriate without overheating or throttling the one terabyte hard drive speeds are pretty standard the SSD speeds heavily dependent on the configuration you get but you can easily add or upgrade self the skylake processor is a quad-core 6700 HQ and they pair them with at least 16 gigs of ram you combo that up with a 980 m and these laptops just crush games at 1080p if you play at high or Ultra settings only light to moderate ledum and in games can still maintain 60 frames per second the most graphically intense games like open-world triple-a titles are going to drop to like 30 or 40 frames per second on Ultra but in terms of laptop gaming it doesn't get too much faster right now now these 980 m chips only have 4 gigs of video RAM instead of the 8 gigs we see in some systems but it doesn't make much of a difference for most games at 1080p in terms of batteries the 15 and 17-inch both have the same 90 watt hour battery those are pretty big batteries and they take about three and a half hours to fully charge up from zero now in terms of battery life the 15-inch got around five and a half hours of use the 17-inch got a little bit less than five hours of use very respectable for the type of laptops these are and if you're playing games only about an hour and a half of gaming time ok the Acer predator laptops they have good build quality with the soft touch finish the display options don't have G sync but they're bright and have vibrant colors the keyboard is nice to type on but the backlighting is limited to red the trackpad can be toggled on and off and it's also enjoyable to use inside the i7 and 980m easily handle games the systems are really well cooled but the fans are loud it has a minimum of 16 gigs of RAM but you can upgrade it to 64 gigs they include both an SSD and a one terabyte hard drive which are easily upgraded pricing starts at $1500 for configuration with a 970m but if you want a nine ATM those configurations start at around $2,000 so the Predators are actually two of the more powerful laptops I've used there's a lot to like about them the screen is good the build quality is good powerful components and great battery life there's a lot of good stuff going on but the two things that kind of bug me are the red and black theme I know it's a very personal thing but red and black is just so common I wish they'd gone for something a little bit more neutral but the big thing for me is the weight I understand it's a gaming laptop and I understand that it's got a very wonderful battery life because of that extra battery weight in there but seven and a half pounds fifteen inch model is a very heavy device to carry like as your regular daily driver if you bring it to class or carrying it in between classes it'll bog you down but if you don't need to lug your laptop around really frequently these are really good options I take a close look at them that's a nice review hope you guys liked it thumbs have you liked it subs if you loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time