Gadgetory

there now we can begin some products are an outright swinging abyss either their creators underestimate the difficulty of their task they make too many compromises in pursuit of a singular design goal or in the case of this rolling projector their idea was just terrible and something that nobody could possibly want to begin with in the case of the Helios 500 from Acer well it's actually kind of the opposite problem they actually created something awesome here but then they totally whiffed on who might want to buy it since it's dressed for a land party with a skill set that's better suited for the kind of place you'd typically wear a suit that's right you'd never know it from its appearance but you are looking at the best laptop for content creators that we've ever seen and we're gonna explain what makes it so great after the best sponsor segue you've ever seen blasts wire allows you to instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code line is to get 25% off glass wire at the link below let's cut right to the chase here the eight core rise in seven 2700 CPU that's at the heart of the Helios 500 is the fastest processor we have ever seen in a laptop without tweaking anything we were able to get a score of 1547 in Cinebench and to put that number in context the only laptop we've ever seen go faster was the Asus G 703 G at 1569 and that was with liquid metal on it and one of the most ghetto cooling solutions that even we have ever attempted I mean it wasn't usable like that by contrast with just a touch of overclocking the Helios 500 was able to do 3.9 gigahertz on all cores at one point 4 volts meting it a laptop record-shattering 1730 in Cinebench these are full blown desktop numbers like if you took the new six core razor blade and the four core razor blade stealth that I use as my daily driver and and somehow combined them there ten processing cores still wouldn't be as fast as the Helios 500 and it's equipped with a Vega 56 GPU that's the same one that ships by default in Apple's $5,000 iMac pro workstation so this means but if you wanted to roll in somewhere park your car and do some hardcore video editing or rendering or engineering work in the parking lot this is currently the fastest productivity laptop on the market and somehow it manages to do that while staying relatively cool and even quiet and it doesn't just perform well for content creators either thanks to that Vega 56 GPU I mentioned before the Helios 500 has some pretty mean gaming chops as well now it'll get handily but whopped by anything equipped with a gtx 1080 but it beat the gtx 1070 max-q in all of our tests by a comfortable margin and made excellent use of its 144 Hertz freesync display delivering smooth frame rates that were regularly well of the 60 FPS threshold making matters even better the screen is IPS has great colors an awesome response time and solid brightness too for a gaming display for content creators were given it a B+ and suggesting that a certain factory calibrate it to improve matters here though maybe the 4k 60 Hertz option is better in this regard so this is all very positive so far isn't it and you're probably waiting for the other shoe to drop well that's true around here somewhere ah yes wait no longer because for any laptop size performance or noise has to be sacrificed and here Acer clearly sacrificed size it's sturdy and it packs some great speakers but at over 11 pounds with the power brick the Helios 500 as an everyday carry makes about as much sense as an RPG launcher as it everyday carry you could but ask your buddy in the force if you should lots of space though does mean lots of upgrade potential two screws reveal two completely free sodium slots a free m2 slot and a two and a half inch drive bay with the mounting hardware included in the box if you want to go deeper 32 more screws gets you the subwoofer drives battery fans and heatsink after which you'll be greeted by the real stars of the show the Vega 56 GPU with its high bandwidth memory proudly on display and the reason that this thing is so darn thick the Rison 7 2700 in a desktop CPU socket so the performance is great but there are plenty of other ways to goof up a laptop let's start with the trackpad shall we it's not great it's small there's some really funky acceleration going on and the way that it's recessed into the chassis maybe this is to help with its mediocre palm rejection can make it pretty difficult to use now I personal generally to hand my trackpads so I didn't even notice it I on the other hand don't use my other hand so when I'm trying to click I have to kind of move my hand so that my thumb can get down between and I just can't click accurately while I'm doing that there really need to improve it for the next version moving up from there the keyboard feels very similar to the one in the Eastern I trow five and it was fine there long keystroke and some tactile feedback but mushy at the bottom and not terribly satisfying to use but the issue here is that the Helios 500 costs over twice as much so I think there's room for improvement which I guess brings us perfectly to the price starting at $2,200 the Helios 500 with the risin 7 processor is $200 more than a similarly kid at asu's efforts and about the same as a razor blade 20 18 and while in rendering the Helios does destroy both of them if you're mostly looking to game it's really hard to recommend like the blade performs close enough in games has doubled the battery life and still manages to be a perfectly competent work computer on top of being half the weight and therefore much more pleasant to carry around the Helios by contrast is most at home on your desk in your home which is why we think that a Tsar screwed up when they marketed the Helios 500 for gamers instead of trying to compete with the zephyrus blade and many other much more practical gaming laptops we think they should have doubled down on it as a mobile workstation including a calibrated screen an option for ECC Ram more subtle styling and some professional features and a much better webcam with all those changes Acer would be looking at a recommendation to buy as it stands right now they're looking at a recommendation to admire it from afar because it's not a bad machine it's just a little weird speaking of weird if we were to ever do a good segue sound Kors Liberty light earphones are so small light you'll forget that you are barring them they use graphene enhanced drivers to provide exceptional sound clarity with deep resonating bass they use an LDS antenna to keep you connected via bluetooth at up to 33 feet they offer three and a half hours of play time from a single charge and the carrying case doubles as a charger that offers an additional nine hours of battery life their IP x5 rated meaning that they are protected from water and sweat and you guys can check them out at the link in the video description not only to buy them but even for a chance to win these earphones or other sound court products go check it out so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button let's light that but you know what that would be great if YouTube replaced their look like a raspberry like a sticking out tongue if you liked it though hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description mostly if you're a workstation user or a hardcore AMD fanboy please also while you're down there you can check out our link to our merch storage house cool shirts like this one and our community forum it's a great place to hang around and talk tech well type it type it and read it rather discordant