Acer’s new gaming laptops are good for big and small budgets

After drooling over them when they launched during the Acer Global Press Conference 2018, the company’s brand new gaming laptops have arrived in Malaysia.

Predator Helios 500

If power is what you’re looking for in a gaming laptop then the Helios 500 is the one from this new crop of gaming devices that you want to look at. You can pick up the Predator Helios 500 in two different specs in Malaysia, but neither of them are pushovers.

The base model features an 8th-gen Intel Core i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070 with 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM that you can overclock, a 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD, and a 1TB HDD. This model will be priced at RM8,999.

Need more oomph? You can instead opt for the high-spec variant that ups the ante to an Intel Core i9-8950HK overclockable processor, doubles RAM to 32GB and upgrades PCIe NVMe SSD storage to a 512GB setup (2x 256GB drives in RAID0). But, with great power comes a great price tag and this particular variant is priced at RM12,999.

That said, both laptops come with great gaming specs like Killer Wireless-AC, Killer Ethernet, and a 17.3-inch IPS panel that pushes a Full HD resolution at 144Hz. It’s also a G-SYNC display so you can expect tear-free butteriness when gaming.

Nitro 5

While the Predator Helios 500 is definitely an impressive machine, not everyone can afford to shell out that kind of dough for it. For those of you on a tighter budget, Acer’s got the updated Nitro 5.

This laptop comes in at RM3,999 and it features Intel’s new Core i7+ processor which pairs this 8th gen chip with 16GB of Intel Optane memory for speedier boot times and game loading times. Besides that, it’s got 4GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD and an NVIDIA GTX1050 Ti GPU too.

Other specs include a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS display, Acer’s Coolboost dual-fan cooling system, Dolby Audio and Acer TrueHarmony technology.

No white Predator Helios 300

Unfortunately, Acer didn’t launch the white variant of the Predator Helios 300 in Malaysia that they also revealed during the Acer GPC. But, since I got to grab some photos of the laptop during Computex, you can at least feast your eyes on it.