Acer Predator 17 review

Performance and Battery Life

With such premium external hardware, it should come as no surprise that the innards of the Predator 17 are also from the top drawer. Its quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ, which runs at a base clock speed of 2.6GHz but can Turbo Boost to a maximum speed of 3.5GHz, is an extremely competent multitasker and multimedia machine, and Intel’s Hyper-Threading allows Windows to see each of its four physical cores as two virtual cores, allowing for better performance in programs with multiple threads.

16GB of DDR4 RAM is also ample for all of today’s latest games and will help with performance in high-end multimedia workloads, too. It managed an overall score of 108 in our benchmarks, including 98 in the image editing, 112 in the video rendering and 109 in the multitasking tests. This is desktop Core i5-level performance, which is pretty impressive in a portable machine.

 ^ Acer PredatorSense software lets you customise keyboard macros and check your system’s vitals

In Windows, the Predator 17 feels incredibly snappy and quick and I was never left waiting for it to load web pages, programs or respond to searches. Storage is quick, too, with a 256GB M.2 SSD backed up by a large 1TB hard disk.

3D performance comes from a 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, Nvidia’s second-from-top mobile graphics card. It’s extremely capable at Full HD resolutions, ploughing through Dirt Showdown with an average frame rate of 80.8fps and Metro: Last Light Redux with supersampling anti-aliasing switched on at an average frame rate of 31fps. The fans kick up quite a fuss when playing these titles, but it never got uncomfortably loud and the palmrest never became warm, let alone hot, which is seriously impressive.

If you find yourself without mains electricity, expect a little over three hours of usage time before the battery in the Predator 17 gives out. I found it lasted 3h 37m in our battery benchmark, although if you’re careful you might be able to eek out four hours.

Display

The Acer Predator 17 is nearly the complete package. The screen is excellent, with a Full HD resolution IPS panel that has lovely wide viewing angles. It’s capable of displaying 91% of the sRGB colour gamut, ranking it among the best non-professional laptops I’ve seen when it comes to screen quality, and I was also impressed by its very low 0.25cd/m2 black levels, which is a good deal better than the similarly-specified Asus ROG G751JT and Gigabyte P37W v4 machines we reviewed recently. Bright, 320cd/m2 white levels are also excellent.

Sound

With a name like ‘Predator SoundPound’, you’d expect a memorable performance from the laptop’s built-in speakers. Sadly, they’re rather lacking. Music was muddy and while speech was loud and clear, I couldn’t find a setting within the pre-installed Dolby software which actually improved the sound. That’s separate from the mode which switches all sound enhancement off, of course. The installed subwoofer also appears to be only for show as it barely affected the laptop’s bass levels. Once you’ve switched off the ‘enhancements’, sound is loud and clear and substantially better than most laptops, but they’re not as good as we’d have expected for the money.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator 17 is a premium laptop which manages to justify its eye-watering price with top-level performance, and its superb build quality make it a genuinely desirable machine. However, up against the Asus RoG G571JT and the Gigabyte P37W v4, it’s in competitive company. The £1,380 Gigabyte is significantly thinner and lighter than the Predator 17, making it more the practical device for mobile gamers, but the Asus is cheaper still at £1,260 (albeit for a slightly different spec from the model we reviewed in September).

In my eyes, though, the Acer trumps both of them thanks to its excellent screen and keyboard. I’d probably still pick the Gigabyte for its simplicity, portability and plainer design, but if you’re not fussed about the extra bulk and value a good quality display, the Acer Predator 17 is still a great choice. It wins a Recommended award.

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