Some laptops strive for ultimate thinness, others the lowest weight, the Predator Helios 700 cares for none of that, it has only one interest, ultimate gaming power. In the increasingly popular and competitive gaming laptop market companies strive to slide ahead of the pack, and Acer is hoping the sliding keyboard on their flagship gaming laptop may just give them the edge.
Why a sliding keyboard you ask? The primary reason is thermal performance. With the Helios 700 featuring upto a 9th Gen Core i9 CPU, NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPU (not the MaxQ edition), 64GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB SSD and a 17.3-inch FHD display there’s a lot of heat being generated when running at full bore.
The HyperDrift keyboard as Acer calls it allows the main cooling fans to draw more air, run faster and increase the cooling profile of the laptop. In gaming the more cooling you get equate to better performance and that’s what Acer is going for here.
The other advantage of the HyperDrift keyboard is it provides a comfortable palm rest and brings the keys to the front of the laptop. At just over 4 2mm think a palm rest is almost needed to comfortably use the Helios 700 for long periods. At just over 4.4 KG this is not an ultra-portable device.
We’d class the Helios 700 as a desktop replacement laptop, intended for people who need an easily moved device that packs almost all of the power of a desktop grade gaming rig.
Acer hasn’t yet been able to confirm when the Predator Helios 700 will be coming to Australia, but we sure hope it will not be far away.
