Acer Predator Triton 500

amazon Acer Predator Triton 500 reviews

Gaming laptops have followed the Razer Blade on its way towards thinner designs. What once seemed rare is now commonplace. Buying a thick, bulky laptop now feels unusual. Even gamers have to go out to buy such a beast.

Few laptops highlight this change better than Acer’s Predator Triton 500. Take a look at the spec sheet, and you’d think this is a straight successor to the Acer Predator Helios 500, which is an inch and a half thick. However, the Triton 500 is only seventh one-tenth of an inch thick and weighs 4.41 pounds. It’s only a hair bigger and half a pound heavier than the Dell XPS 15 or Apple MacBook Pro 15. However, you also get Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics, the best available for gaming laptops.

It’s an incredible achievement, but it also raises the question – what has been sacrificed? Is modern hardware that efficient, or did Acer downsize the battery and throttle the GPU to cram everything into the Triton 500’s small chassis? Let’s find out together.

Hiding in a clear sign

Some predators stalk their prey quietly out of sight. Acer’s Triton 500 Predator takes a different approach. It hides on your desk and relies on its nondescript style to help it pass unnoticed.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad. No – that will attract attention. Triton 500 is just generic. Its flat, dark green exterior offers a few flourishes. A repeating pattern of geometric shapes and the speaker, repeated on the rear fan vents, is almost Laptop-like to make a statement. I can easily imagine this laptop being sold with the Asus, MSI, or Gigabyte badge.

While the Acer Predator Triton 500 lacks style, its design is functional and offers the modern conveniences gamers would expect. It’s thin and light, as mentioned, and features a slim-bezel display design that helps keep the overall footprint small. The webcam stays on top, where it should be, and the keyboard offers plenty of space.

It’s only a hair bigger and weighs half a pound more than the Dell XPS 15.

Connectivity is also a high point. You might expect a slim profile to mean fewer options, but the Acer Predator Triton 500 has three USB-A 3.1 ports, a USB-C 3.0/Thunderbolt three jack, mini-DisplayPort, HDMI, and headphone and audio jacks. There’s even a full-size Ethernet port. It’s a bunch of great options that put most laptops today to shame.

The gentle appearance and abundance of ports make me wonder if Acer is trying to please gamers who also want a workstation. The Razer Blade features popular laptops that can last all day and play all night, and this new Predator Triton 500 can fill that role too. It would look ridiculous in a meeting and have the connectivity needed to replace a desktop workstation.

An important ingredient

This quaint professional vibe continues with the keyboard. Despite the LED backlighting, it lacks the features you’d normally expect from a gaming laptop, such as per-key LED color customization or mechanical key switches. Instead, the Acer Predator Triton 500 offers simple three-zone lighting – and that’s about it. Many gamers will find that a disappointment, and we think that, given its hardware and price, the Predator Triton 500 should include a more sophisticated and impressive keyboard backlighting system.

However, if you can get past that, you’ll come to enjoy a simple and comfortable keyboard. A spacious layout and multi-travel and bottom-up trigger keys feel instantly soft and defined. I immediately felt comfortable using it. The only quirks include small function keys (didn’t bother me) and a small right Shift key (did).

Touchpad-themed so far. It’s functional and interesting but doesn’t stand out from the crowd in size or features. Competitors like the Razer Blade offer a better touchpad experience overall, mainly due to the larger touchpad surface, but I found the Triton 500 perfectly responsive. The laptop even supports Windows Precision Touchpad drivers that make full use of multi-touch gestures.

A display that’s certainly not surprising

The Acer Predator Triton 500 uses a 1080p G-Sync display with a 144Hz refresh rate instead of a higher resolution panel with a lower refresh rate. Whether that’s the right call or not will depend on the games you play. Fans of first-person shooters will love the extra versatility, but a Civilization player might prefer the crisp look and feel of a 1440p or even 4K display.

Resolution is only one part of the equation, however. Quality is at least important.

The Triton 500 didn’t blow us away. It looks good and does so while providing a dim display that’s easy to enjoy even in a brightly lit room.

Our test results show that the Predator Triton 500 is at least on par with its main competitor. The contrast ratio comes in at 910:1, better than the Razer Blade 15 we reviewed and just behind the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701. Color gamut and color accuracy also match the competition.

I’ve noticed a strange result – the gamma is 2.5. That means the image is a bit darker than it should be. That resulted in noticeable shadowing in some scenes. It can even be a problem for competitive gamers because you may not see enemies in the dark visible on other laptops. However, gamma can be adjusted in software or most games, so that’s not an unsolvable problem.

My impressions line up with the test results. Acer’s Triton 500 Predator didn’t blow me away, but its picture quality is solid. It looks best in colorful, vibrant games like Fortnite, where good contrast and color accuracy help the graphics stand out.

where can you get a Acer Predator Triton 500 online

Acer Predator Triton 500 PT515-52-73L3 Gaming Laptop, Intel i7-10750H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, 15.6″ FHD NVIDIA G-SYNC Display, 300Hz, 16GB Dual-Channel DDR4, 512GB NVMe SSD, RGB Backlit KB: Buy it now

Acer Predator Triton 500 PT515-52-73L3 Gaming Laptop, Intel i7-10750H, 15.6″ FHD 300Hz NVIDIA G-SYNC Display, 64GB DDR4 RAM, 2048GB PCIE SSD, RGB Backlit KB, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, Woov Sleeve: Buy it now

Did you hear anything?

An upward-facing speaker system is located above the keyboard of the Acer Predator Triton 500. It provides a direct, unobstructed path to your ears. The sound quality is crisp but severely lacking. The maximum volume is low, which is fine. External speakers or a good gaming headset will be your best bet.

Core i7-8750H is expected to be fast.

Acer ships the Acer Predator Triton 500 with the regular Intel Core i7-8750H, a 6-core, 12-thread chip with a maximum turbo boost frequency of 4.1 GHz. Most gaming laptops seem to use this chip, with the only exceptions appearing under $1,000 and above $2,500. Our review unit has 16GB of RAM, but Acer sells a version with 32GB (but seriously, you don’t need 32GB of RAM for gaming).

The Predator Triton 500 has processor benchmarks that don’t stand out from the crowd like other laptops. The Geekbench, with four multi-core scores of 19,263, is lower than the Lenovo Legion Y740 or Asus ROG Zephyrus S but better than the Razer Blade (2019).

Using Handbrake to test video transcoding doesn’t change the story. The Acer Predator Triton 500 needed 155 seconds to transcode a 4K trailer from h.264 to h.265, behind rivals Asus and Lenovo but ahead of the Razer Blade.

The Acer Predator Triton 500 exceeded 60 frames per second in every game except Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

All of this sounds disappointing, but it’s worth noting that the Triton 500 is a smaller laptop than the Legion Y740 (thicker) and Asus ROG Zephyrus S (which has a 17-inch screen). The Razer Blade is the most direct comparison here, and Acer won against it.

We also tested a 512 GB SSD with Crystal Disk Mark. It hit read speeds of 1,337 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speeds of 1,058 MB/s. Most competitors are a bit faster because they use Samsung 970-series NVMe drives. Meanwhile, Acer uses a Western Digital SN720 NVMe drive, and it can’t keep up. It’s fast, not quite as fast as the competition.

(Almost) 60 FPS in each game

The base Acer Predator Triton 500 sells for $1,800 and comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics chip, but our upgraded review unit came with an RTX 2080 Max-Q. That beats the price tag of up to $2,500, but that’s the norm for a laptop with Nvidia’s flagship graphics chip. Let’s see how it works in 3DMark.

The Time Spy benchmark surpassed a score of 6,930 on the Acer Predator Triton 500. That’s pretty good, easily beating other 15-inch laptops with RTX 2070 Max-Q hardware like the Razer Blade and Lenovo.

15-inch Y740 Corps. However, the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 by the Acer Predator Triton 500 achieved 7,944. That’s a bit of a hassle because it also has RTX 2080 Max-Q hardware. Acer will have to do better in real-world gaming if it hopes to hold out.

The Acer Predator Triton 500’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q delivered the powerful, albeit occasionally confused, lead to benchmarks. Its main competitor in our tests is the Asus Zephyrus S GX701, a 17-inch system with the same RTX 2080 Max-Q and a higher $3,300 price tag. The Triton 500 trades with that system, winning a small win in games like Battlefield V and Civilization VI but losing to Fortnite and fighting a virtual tie in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. That’s a positive result for Acer, which retails for a staggering $700 less than the Asus Zephyrus S GX701.

That said, the results are more confusing than you might think. In Fortnite, for example, the Acer Predator Triton 500 performs about the same as the laptop with the RTX 2070 Max-Q. A similar story is told by Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey in 1080p and high detail. There, laptops do the same, showing that processor limitations can hold everyone back.

That is the main result; The Acer Predator Triton 500 exceeded an average of 60 frames per second in every game except Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey with extreme detail, appearing a short hair at 57 frames per second. Unfortunately, this means you won’t get the most out of the 144Hz G-Sync panel, but you’ll find smooth gameplay even in the most demanding games on sale today. That’s impressive for a slim laptop that’s also (relatively) affordable.

We also tested the laptop with an external 4K display. The increase in resolution boosts frame rates, making an average of 60 FPS achievable in games like Battlefield V or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at only the lowest detail settings. Fortnite can hit 60 frames per second with high detail, but it drops to 44 FPS in Epic detail.

G-Sync reduces battery life.

The inclusion of G-Sync by the Acer Predator Triton 500 reduces battery life in normal use because G-Sync is not compatible with Optimus switchable graphics. That means the Nvidia RTX 2080 Max-Q chip is always on and consuming power. Like some of its peers, such as the Asus Zephyrus, a software switch can be used to disable G-Sync and enable Optimus. That requires a system reboot, however, so it’s not convenient.

Battery life in stock settings (Optimus off) is pretty bad. Even the video loop doesn’t take a four-hour break. Most modern laptops easily exceed eight hours in that test.

With that said, the battery life is better than the worst laptops we’ve seen. The Acer Predator Triton 500 lasted just three hours in our web browsing benchmark, but the 15-inch Lenovo Legion Y740 and Asus Zephyrus S GX701 didn’t break an hour and a half.

The Optimus switch exists, but it’s a real hassle to use. It’s nice to see Acer offering an alternative display option that lowers G-Sync but increases resolution. Even a 4K display is capable of delivering battery life results that beat what we see here.