Most consumers buy laptops these days, but many gaming laptops might as well be desktops for how impractical they are to haul around. It’s understandable when gaming laptops have to cram in so many high-end components. However, Acer’s new Predator Triton 300 takes a different approach. This gaming laptop weighs just 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms) and has enough power to satisfy the average gamer.
While this could be aptly described as an “entry-level” gaming laptop,
it’s significantly more powerful than your average mainstream notebook. The Triton 300 packs a 15.6-inch 1080p LCD with a 144Hz refresh rate. Whether or not you see all those extra frames in games will depend on what you play. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 video card isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s an able gaming GPU for a laptop.
The Acer Predator Triton 300 also has Intel’s latest-generation Core i7 processors and 16GB of RAM in the base model. On the storage side, the laptop comes with two 1TB SSDs as standard. The drives are in RAID 0, so the two drives act as one large drive. This makes them faster, but there’s no fault tolerance or redundancy. You can upgrade that to 2TB as well.
The Predator Triton 300 is thinner and lighter than most gaming laptops, and the price tag isn’t obscene. The trade-off: mid-range specs for a gaming setup.
The entire chassis is under 20mm thick, an impressive feat for a laptop with a high-end processor and dedicated video. It’s thick enough to house a full Ethernet port, but there’s also Wi-Fi 6 support. Since this is a gaming laptop, Acer took some measures to make it look the part. There’s a full keyboard (with number pad) with RGB backlighting. The WASD keys are also concave to help position your hand for gaming. For typing, it sounds like it would be rather unpleasant. The rest of the design isn’t too extreme. The lid has a beveled edge and some unnecessarily angled corners. There are also some superfluous hoods on the rear vents.
The Predator Triton 300 will launch in Europe this fall for €1,300 (about $1,434). Acer hasn’t committed to launching it in the US yet. However, the states will get the upgraded Triton 500, which now sports a 300Hz display. That laptop starts at €2,699 (almost $3,000).
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