Gadgetory

from a strictly price to performance standpoint the Acer predator Helios 300 absolutely crushes any gaming laptop that we've looked at before but in order to get the same basic gaming specs as a $1,900 razorblade into a laptop for only $1,100 what other sacrifices did they have to make lots it turns out but that doesn't mean that it's a bad product either browse privately and securely with tunnel there the simple VPN app try tunnel bear for free at the link in the video description we were pleasantly surprised by the predator Helios 300 when first opening it up we brushed aluminium on the back of the display and the palm rest of the keyboard gives the laptop an unexpectedly premium feel and the rigidity of the chassis helps here as well it certainly looks the part of a gaming laptop with red accents it's not terribly subtle but in my opinion it doesn't go over the top in its attention-seeking behavior there are areas like around the screen and the bottom where materials like plastic reigned supreme and it doesn't have the reassuringly solid feel of something by Alienware but it avoids feeling cheap so I'm willing to forgive that to type a USB 2 s and the type a and type C USB 3 + Ethernet HDMI 2.0 and even a full sized SD card slot adds up to pretty good i/o but what's more than pretty good maybe even fantastic are the internal specs of this shockingly potent little devil with a 6 gig GTX 1060 a core i7 7700 HQ and 16 gigs of DDR 4 memory at just over a thousand bucks this was legitimate the first time like I play this game I'll guess how much something costs when I go around to people's booths at trade shows this was the first time in years that I was shocked to see the price tag on a laptop now obviously there are differences here but for the pieces of hardware that actually affect gaming performance the Acer Helios on paper is the same as much more expensive competing products but how about the experience well let's put it this way you won't have to worry about having to set a game at anything lower than high since this thing has no problem pinning the framerate at the 60 Hertz refresh rate of the display so no surprises here it turns out that whether you cram 370 horsepower into a charger or a two-door Civic it's going to move pretty fast and it's a bit on the chubby side at 31 millimeters but unlike some of the sleeker and more expensive gaming machines we've seen under load the Helios is able to stay nice and cool without becoming overly loud either it even sports a pretty decent webcam but not all is hunky-dory to have an IPS screen on a budget oriented gaming laptop at all should be the icing on the cake and it does have one whoa but how do I put this delicately it's kind of like a grocery store cake where you bite into it expecting homemade cream cheese icing and you end up with some canned Betty Crocker that's a little past is best before I mean to be cleared the viewing angles in contrast ratio are great it's still icing you just regret asking for a corner piece maximum brightness could be better described as maximum glow eNOS and average Delta e values of five point six seven are only okay if you don't see huge outliers and you're covering more than 67 percent of the sRGB color space I don't want to sound ungrateful here I still wouldn't personally trade it for a TN I'm just saying that you won't be doing any serious video editing or Photoshop unless you want to invest in a secondary monitor to check your work another area that Acer skimped is the 48 watt hour battery to their credit acer was at least honest about this but with this kind of showing in our standard battery test basically if you're carting one of these around to class you should expect to be getting familiar with the power outlet locations the trackpad those are returned to things that are pretty good it's accurate and tap to click and gestures work well but I do wish that the force required to press was a little less so that dragging and dropping files is easier and the keyboard feels pretty good too again the force to press the keys is a little too high and they are touch mushy so I can't get quite as fast as I could on something like an alienware or the surface laptop which is a bummer because on a gaming laptop quick and accurate key presses are plus but overall it does the job it needs to and the inclusion of both a backlight and a full number pad are appreciated and the positives don't end there it's the 250 gig SATA SSD which can be upgraded to nvme by the way isn't quite enough to house your gaming collection adding up to 32 gigs of ram or a two and a half inch hard drive on the Helios who's really easy each of those has its own compartment on the bottom so it only takes one screw to access it should be noted though that anything beyond that requires a full disassembly so then in response to our original question what you're giving up is screen and battery so if you want a laptop for productivity and you just want a game on it a little bit I'd go for something at this price point with a gtx 1050 TI a Core i5 and potentially nearly double the battery life but if you want a machine that is laser focused on price to performance for gaming at just over $1,000 the predator Helios 300 knocks it out of the park highly recommended it's on fire it's not amazing I can't believe they're testing that right now Squarespace lets anybody build their own beautiful functional website you just pick out a template and you know with a couple of emails or quick chat messages to their 24/7 tech support you can be up and running it's just 12 bucks a month to start and you get a free domain if you buy for a year and they've got so many great cloud-based tools they've got responsive design built into every template they've got commerce built in with every website cover pages is a feature that allows you to set up a beautiful one-page online presence in minutes and the best part is that it's just super reliable there's no tooling around your websites just always up so start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today then when you decide to sign up head over to Squarespace comm /l PT and use offer code LTT to get 10% off so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit that like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is a link to our t-shirt store where you can buy t-shirts and other swag as well and our community forum which you should totally join now I'm going to go ask them to turn that off because I have one more video to film right now real fire it's not a real fire it's clearly a 10 that's not how it rings when there's a real fire done and it