Acer Helios 300 Vs Triton 500: Which Predator You Should Buy?

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This article is an in-depth comparison of the Acer Predator Helios 300 and the Triton 500. If you don’t know which one you should go for, this article may help you find the answer.

Helios 300	Triton 500
BUY NOW	BUY NOW
PROS	PROS
Lots of power. Affordable price. 144Hz refresh rate. Decent battery life.	Extremely powerful. Beautiful display. Surprisingly long battery life.
CONS	CONS
Gets too hot. Loud fans. Lackluster sound.	Kind of expensive. Flimsy lid. Awkward keyboard layout.

SPECIFICATIONS

DESIGN

Helios 300:

The laptop is primarily meant for gamers and it is giving the gamer vibe. The outer part of the Acer laptop has a metallic built, although the base is made of plastic which I think could have been better. There is red accent everywhere and I kind of like it. But you have to keep in mind that this is a gaming laptop and even if you’re not a gamer, I like almost everything about the design of this laptop.

Triton 500:

The thin frame of the Triton 500 measures a glass of less than 18 mm and weighs a little more than 2 kg. From the outside, the Triton 500 does not look much like a gaming laptop. It is a elegant and robust machine. The lid is quite flexible, which worried me at first, but I didn’t notice any deformation of the screen as a result. Meanwhile, the rest of the body is solid in all areas.

KEYBOARD & TOUCHPAD

Helios 300:

The keyboard on the Helios 300 has red accent to it that could be captivating to some. The aesthetics are great but in terms of usability, I didn’t quite like it because it is really mushy and just does not give you that clicky feedback that we all love. The key travel and the quality of the keyboard itself seemed fine though. Also the orientation of the keys seemed a little cluttered.

The trackpad is a Windows precision driver and it’s just ok, not good and not bad either.

Triton 500:

When I was playing games, I had no problems with this Keyboard. This three-zone RGB keyboard looks very nice when lit and, as always, you can customize the backlight to suit your tastes and your surroundings. The keyboard has the typical chiclet design. There is enough ket travel. However, there is no Numpad on this laptop. Overall, the keyboard had a very nice touch and the keys have a good responsive rate.

The touchpad is good for general use. Although, you’ll probably want the best gaming mouse, when you are  gaming. 

DISPLAY

Helios 300:

With its 144 Hertz display, you get a top quality display panel which I have no complaints about. The 144 Hertz refresh rate really helps make the laptop feel fast and the speed is noticeable, even when you keep on 120 Hertz option.

There’s a huge downside to that choice though and that is the pricing. With this 144 Hertz display, it will cost you a lot more but is it worth it? Yes, it will give you an advantage over the others because with this one you are seeking more than what you usually do. You are not going to be a great gamer for sure but you will just have a lot more fun on this laptop compared to a 60 Hertz laptop.

The 92% sRGB color coverage just seals the deal. Usually with gaming laptops, one would expect a bad display but with this one, no matter if you are gaming, editing videos or even just watching a movie, it’s just great.

Triton 500:

You get a fairly decent panel. The 15.6-inch IPS screen only supports a maximum resolution of Full HD (1920×1080). The 144Hz refresh rate means that the visuals are consistently smooth and I didn’t see any tears or other problems, as expected with full support for the Nvidia G-Sync. Such a high refresh rate is important if you want to play heavy games.

Triton 500 screen covers 96% of the sRGB, which guarantees that the colors shine naturally and vibrantly on the screen. As for the coverage of Adobe RGB and DCI-P3, the Acer Predator Triton 500 gave me 75% and 77%

The brightness of 320 nits is not that bad, although it was hard for me to see what happened in the darkest games when I played in a bright sun. This was due to anti-glare finish.

WEIGHT & DIMENSIONS

Helios 300:

Dimensions of the Helios 300 are 362mm in width, 254mm in depth, and 22.9mm in height. The laptop weights around 2.3 kilograms and with the charger, the total weight is 2.9 kilograms.

Triton 500:

The weight is listed at 2kg on Acer’s website, and I found mine to be a bit more than this, then over 2.7kg with the 180 watt power brick and cables for charging included. The dimensions of the laptop are 35.8cm in width, 25.5cm in depth, and around 1.8cm thick.

I/O

Helios 300:

It has quite a good selection of ports. On the left, you get the Kensington lock, Ethernet, HDMI, USB C, USB 3.0 port, and one SD card reader.

On the right is a USB Type A port, headphone jack, and a charging port.

Backside, there are two air exhausts near the corners with a blue finish, and like other Acer laptops a warning about it being a hot surface, though I didn’t find mine to get too hot there.

This laptop is missing a Thunderbolt C port which is a bummer but anyone who buys this laptop won’t be disappointed with it much.

Triton 500:

On the left from the back there’s an air exhaust vent, power input, gigabit ethernet port, USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port, HDMI 2.0 output, and 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks.

The right from the front there’s status LEDs, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port with both DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3 support, mini DisplayPort output, two more USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports, another air exhaust vent and Kensington lock.

Backside there are two blue air exhaust vents towards the corners, while the front is just smooth metal.

PERFORMANCE

Helios 300:

This is probably the most processing power one can buy at this price. There’s a huge bump in the performance if the seventh and eighth generation chipsets are compared. In my experience, it can handle everything you do, it’s one of the best ones around for gaming, for productivity, and even for editing or video rendering.

The 16 GB RAM inside helps all the intensive tests. You get 2 RAM slots and both are used. If you want to upgrade you obviously will have to replace both the RAM sticks and it is upgradble to 32GB.

GTX 1660 Ti on any hardware is always amazing. However, in this instance the GPU does not pair well with the 144 Hertz display and this is seen by gaming to make use of the display. I always had to lower the graphics significantly, so that I could reach 144 FPS otherwise on higher settings games barely cross 100 FPS mark. So this one is entirely up to you, you can choose crisp graphics quality or smoothness.

Triton 500:

Performance is the highlight of the Triton 500. It almost runs every title without even overclocking. This laptop got Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. You can expect glorious graphics, combined with a smooth and pleasant image speed.

The Acer Triton 500 performed quite well considering the specs that it’s got. In most cases you could of course further improve those other machines by manually making similar changes yourself, but it’s still nice to see Acer doing these performance improvements by default, which will greatly benefit those just buying a laptop and using it with out of the box settings. Believe it or not the majority of users don’t tweak their machines.

It’s worth noting that the Helios 300 with 1660 Ti was beating this config of the Triton 500, this seems to be because it has a slightly newer CPU, higher CPU undervolt at stock, higher CPU power limit made possible due to it being a thicker machine and also overclocks the GPU core in turbo mode.

BATTERY

Helios 300:

This is the area where most of the performance-oriented devices fail to shine. Almost every gaming laptop had poor battery life the same goes with the Helios 300. A 48 watt hour battery is pretty low to begin with combine that with a 144 hertz display and a 6-core processor, what you get is 2-3 hours of battery life which gets lower when I game.

Triton 500:

As I said, the battery is not the selling point of gaming laptops. However, you have to take the charger with you while traveling or going somewhere out. 

When you are doing light work like watching movies or surfing web, the battery will last about 5-6 hours. And when gaming, the battery will be dead in about 1.5 hours.

WHICH PREDATOR YOU SHOULD BUY?

There is not much difference in these 2 laptops execpt the GPU. And to summarise , the TRITON 500 has powerful and future proof GPU (RTX 2060 GPU). Triton 500 also has bigger battery when compared to Helios 300. Overall it looks like I’m leaning towards picking the Triton 500 myself as the winner.

Expert Reviews For Helios 300:

By Techau
All things considered the Acer Predator Helios 300 would sit a lot better with me if it wasn’t as big, given I take laptops with me daily, whereas this feels more like a laptop designed to take to a LAN party once a month. If I’m investing in a laptop I…

By Hothardware
Summed up, the Predator Helios 300 is a fast gaming laptop at a fair price, with some unique features to boot. It may not be the same exceptional value it was a year ago, but with the addition of a 144Hz display, it still stands out against other similarly equipped configurations.

By TechRadar
Despite two glaring flaws, namely the cooling system and the speakers, this budget gaming laptop packs a punch. If you’re serious about gaming but have a limited budget, you’re going to want to pick this one up.

By UltraBookReview
The Helios 300 is Acer’s mind-range gaming laptop built on Intel HQ processors and 1060 graphics. The excellent pricing and solid performance are its main selling points, alongside a nice keyboard, alright IO and a fairly good screen on this updated 2018 model. There are however still some aspects to improve, like the size of the battery, arguable design decisions and rather lackluster speakers.

By PCWorld
The Acer Predator Helios 300 is a comfortable, no-nonsense gaming laptop that delivers a refreshing amount of bang for your buck.

Expert Reviews For Triton 500:

By NotebookCheck
With the Predator Triton 500 Acer sells an elegant and extremely flat gaming notebook without any major flaws.In all rating categories, the 15-inch laptop earns at least 70%, which speaks for a balanced and well-thought-out system. Our criticisms, which…

By GamesRadar
The Predator Triton 500 isn’t without fault, but it’s one of the better – and more affordable – RTX-powered gaming laptops we’ve…

By Pocket-Lint
All-in-all, it’s hard to pick too many faults with the Triton 500. It’s a surprisingly good gaming machine with some really neat features, good quality speakers and some serious gaming power under the hood.Sure, we’d have liked a snazzier and more…

By HardwareZone
Good performance and stealthy designAll things considered, I’d say Acer has done a pretty good job with the Predator Triton 500. It’s by no means perfect, and it’s plagued by noisy fans, lacks per-key RGB backlighting, and isn’t the best in terms of…

By Techradar
The Acer Predator Triton 500, for being such a thin and light gaming laptop, is kind of a beast. This laptop is packed with powerful hardware and lasts surprisingly long on a charge, making it ideal for any gamer that needs to travel a lot.We do have…

Jaskaran Singh

Jaskaran, a tech enthusiast from childhood, inspired by his father, began his tech journey by rooting Android phones. He now writes on various tech topics, aiming to simplify complex ideas for a broad audience. His writing is direct, concise, and flows effortlessly, making tech topics accessible and engaging.