Gadgetory

this is a crazy laptop there are a lot of companies out there that make some really impressive gaming laptops but oftentimes I find them more gimmicky than not but when they first announced this I remember thinking that this legitimately looked like something that I would want to test out and it looked like something that could actually be really useful so this is the Acer Helios 700 and it has what they call the hyper drift keyboard and it really is what makes this laptop special this keyboard can shift down and the purpose of it is twofold one it sets it up into a more comfortable typing position so your hands have this built-in wrist rest for when you're playing games or typing and it also opens up the performance capabilities of this device it actually improves it to a significant degree it actually makes it both fast and furious now when you open and close this keyboard or like when you shift it up and down like when you shift it back up it doesn't make a sound but when you pull it down it puts out that techy kind of spaceship sound you can make it quieter just by lowering the system volume but it's no it's a sound effect we actually put some effort into making it kind of this cohesive experience when you open and close the hyper drift keyboard so does this work does this keyword actually do what it's supposed to do it does absolutely it does but it has some quirks so I'm gonna focus this video first on the keyboard experience itself when you use this laptop with the keyboard shifted up the keyboard positioning isn't super comfortable it's a relatively thick machine so your hand is just rested up on this device there's a pretty big drop at the edge of the laptop now the reason why it's so thick is because it's a super powerful gaming laptop this has the fastest CPU available in the market it also has the fastest mobile GPU on the market as well it's an 8 core 99 80 it's overclock well it can hit 5 gigahertz and the GPU is an art 620 80 so you do need something thick to cool it properly but when your laptop is in this position it is not the most comfortable typing experience but when you bring this thing down it's super comfortable I would actually consider this to be the most comfortable gaming laptop keyboard that I've ever used so normally when you play on any a gaming laptop the edge of the device where you rest your wrist does dig into your wrist a little bit over time it's not something that's super annoying but it does happen on basically every single laptop out there unless you have some kind of third-party wrist rest this has a built in and it just makes the whole gaming and/or typing experience really nice the trackpad however is not in a good spot when it's shifted down like this I don't know what it is exactly like physiologically but there's just a weird angle that the trackpad is now at it's not a particularly comfortable position okay the keys also have backlighting they're all individually lit so if you want to go into the software and customize it like crazy you can there's also macro keys if you're into that but the WASD Keys also have an alternative set of key caps that they include and these actually remind me of the key caps in that $9,000 curved screen gaming laptop that Acer also made like several years ago they don't only serve as an aesthetic change they obviously look different but they also have a different mechanism in terms of how they spring back up the keys that are built into the keyboard like the default ones those use a rubber dome to spring it up and down these use a metal spring and they actually feel a little bit different when they're installed it's a little bit more responsive and the keys are slightly higher than the stock key caps but the typing experience on the whole is really good I think most people will enjoy this keyboard quite readily now the other thing that this shifting keyboard does this whole hyper drift mechanism is that it opens up the air flow for the internals now when you slide this thing down you can see a cool window into the heat pipes but you also have these two fans on the left and right that are very powerful and push a ridiculous amount of air through the system it's a little weird to see this kind of air flow on a gaming laptop but remember they're cooling something that's very powerful very hot and by shifting the keyboard down like this and opening up the air flow like the air pathway it allows it to cool it very effectively these fans however when you put it on turbo are super loud I'm just going to hit it real quick it's loud now you don't have to run turbo when it's opened up like this you can run it on default mode and it's not super loud even when you're playing games on default mode but if you turbo it it's super loud it pushes a crazy amount of air but you get some crazy performance that you just cannot get on a laptop otherwise both the CPU and the GPU overclockable and software and when you do like when you crank everything up to the max and you let the fans rip this thing has very similar performance to a desktop running an RT X 2080 it's just a really really powerful system now if you want to run this device in turbo mode for the best possible performance then if you're playing games I highly recommend getting headphones to plug in because the fans are so loud like you got to crank everything to be able to hear on top of these fans and for the rest of the review I'll be doing it over these fans just we kind of get a vibe of I'm kidding okay the screen it's a 17 inch panel I do wish they had gone with a bigger panel like there's space on the bottom and sides for a larger panel the bezels are quite large on this device the panel itself is good it's a high-end gaming panel 144 Hertz bright color accurate there's nothing I really have to complain about the actual image quality it's just that the bezels are thick there's a good number of ports around this device it does not have an SD card slot but basically everything else the battery life is short I mean you expect it to be short on a device like this it's around a two hour battery and the AC adapter is pretty large now the speakers they're located on the front there's actually two on the front and two right below the screen it's a really nice sound system but keep in mind that regardless of how nice the speakers are if you have turbo mode enabled you just it's not going to happen you need headphones for that the internals are also easy to get into you get access to the two RAM slots the two nvme drives and if you go a little bit deeper you get access to the two and a half inch SATA as well as the Wi-Fi card now my overall thoughts on this machine there are like I said in the beginning the video a lot of companies that make gimmicky stuff in the gaming laptop industry this does not feel like that to me it's a big machine it's very powerful but it actually feels like legitimately useful for certain users if you're someone who values high CPU clock speed and you just want all eight cores at full bore this is one of the machines that can do it and the hyper drift keyboard like its unique right this is the only device in the world with that type of keyboard right now I do think that maybe Acer can transition this tech into smaller devices it is pretty cool I feel like because the keyboard brings something new that other people don't have it's really difficult to compare this to other devices like one to one like that the keyboard is super comfortable the performance is really good and because of that I would consider this a winner and I do remember someone really wise said it doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile winning is winning because under this video thumbs have you liked it subs have you loved it see you guys next time