Acer’s premium Predator Triton gaming laptops sit above its entry-level Nitro 5 and mainstream Predator Helios 300 models. The 16-inch Predator Triton 300 SE seen here (starts at $1,749; $2,199 as tested) is more than just a bigger version of the 14-inch Triton 300 SE, although it keeps the concept the same. It’s an impressive machine with a stylish metal chassis, a vibrant screen, and plenty of hardcore gaming features including Nvidia G-Sync and built-in overclocking. Its overall performance isn’t quite a match for that of the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7, but the Acer one-ups it by providing a fingerprint reader, a 1080p webcam, a higher 240Hz screen refresh rate, and longer battery life. A well-rounded gaming rig by any measure, this Predator earns our Editors’ Choice award among midrange 16-inch gaming notebooks.
The Outside: Slick, Without Screaming ‘Gamer’
The Predator Triton 300 SE won’t pass for a business laptop, but it doesn’t flaunt its gaming status like the Alienware m15 and the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7. It sticks to traditional straight-cut lines, with no garish external RGB lighting .
Even branding is minimal; you’ll find just two small Predator logos, one below the display and another on the lid. Its civilized look won’t have you second-guessing whether you should take this laptop out of your bag.
Build-wise, this Acer is rock-solid. The silver metal covering its top and bottom adds real strength. It has a sheen that can’t be confused with plastic and feels cool to the touch.
At 0.86 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches (HWD) and 5.29 pounds, the 16-inch Predator Triton 300 SE is trimmer than the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 (1.05 by 14.2 by 10.4 inches, 5.49 pounds). The Razer Blade 15 Advanced is more portable (0.67 by 14 by 9.3 inches, 4.4 pounds), but it uses a 15.6-inch screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio while the Predator embraces the latest 16-inch and 16:10 trends.
The Triton’s picture quality is nothing short of fabulous, with bright whites, deep blacks, and vivid colors that make games and movies pop. Our machine’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU is able to play fast-paced games at the panel’s native 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution without compromising on visual quality details (as our benchmarks below will show).
The screen’s gaming features include Nvidia G-Sync support, an anti-glare surface, and a 240Hz refresh rate that tops the 165Hz of the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. The full HD webcam above the display offers a sharper picture than generic 720p cameras, although it doesn’t have a privacy shutter. It’s flanked by dual microphones.
Sound quality is another one of the Predator’s strengths. The DTS-tuned speakers beneath the palm rest provide plenty of volume for personal entertainment and project nicely, although bass is in short supply. You can fine-tune sound settings in the provided DTS:X Ultra app. Acer also throws in a DTS Headphone:X spatial audio license, which would normally cost you $20.
Impressive Connectivity, Average Inputs
Physical connectivity includes one USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports (one supporting power-off charging), an HDMI 2.1 video output, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and an audio combo jack.
There’s also a microSD flash card reader on the front edge, which is handy for transferring data from your smartphone or camera.
The Ethernet jack is one of Intel’s Killer E2600 parts, while the wireless card is a Killer AX1675i supporting Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.
Sadly, the 16-inch Predator Triton 300 SE is just okay in the input department. The oversize touchpad is first-rate, with a well-defined border and satisfying, not-too-loud physical clicks. There’s a tiny fingerprint reader in its top left corner. The keyboard, however, has shallow travel without much tactile feel.
The keyboard has three-zone RGB backlighting, which isn’t all that impressive at this price. It’s sufficiently bright, but you can’t enjoy advanced animated patterns or effects as you can with the per-key RGB backlighting of the Alienware m15 and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced. A Predator Sense app lets you change backlighting settings and save profiles.
PredatorSense also lets you engage overclocking, which can also be accomplished by pressing the Turbo button above the keyboard. (See our benchmarks in the next section.)
On the Prowl: Testing the Predator Triton 300 SE
Our $2,199 configuration of the 16-inch Predator Triton 300 SE is a top-of-the-line version from the US Acer store, model PT316-51S-74RM. It has an Intel Core i7-12700H processor (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU (115 watts maximum power), 16GB of dual-channel DDR5-4800 RAM, and a 1TB PCI Express 4.0 solid-state drive. Windows 11 Home and a one-year warranty are standard, as are the aforementioned DTS Headphone:X license, two years of Norton Security Ultra, and a carrying sleeve.
At the time we published this review, holiday sales pushed a comparably equipped Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 from around $2,000 to $1,689. The all-AMD Corsair Voyager a1600 rang up at $2,299 with double the memory and storage (32GB and 2TB respectively). The Razer Blade 15 Advanced was far pricier, at $2,999.
For $1,749, the PT316-51S-7397 model of the Triton 300 SE downshifts to a 6GB GeForce RTX 3060 and a 512GB SSD. That saves you plenty of dough, but the RTX 3060 may struggle to play the latest games at 2,560-by-1,600 resolution with visual quality cranked up. The RTX 3070 Ti doesn’t have that problem. You can upgrade the Predator’s RAM or storage yourself, as nine star-bit screws secure the bottom panel, which hides two SO-DIMM slots, two M.2 Type-2280 drive slots, the M.2 Type-2230 Wi-Fi card , and the battery.
For our benchmark comparisons, we pitted the Predator against four other 15- to 16-inch gaming rigs, all mentioned above except the MSI Vector GP66. All except the AMD-powered Corsair feature Intel 12th Gen processors and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics. The Triton should fit in well; the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 should be its nemesis. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our first test is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.
Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Predator Triton 300 SE landed in the middle of the pack in PCMark 10, far surpassing the 4,000 points we consider a sign of solid everyday performance, but its paltry showing in PCMark 10’s storage exercise is well below standard. Our unit’s 1TB SSD may use the latest PCI Express 4.0 standard, but it’s a subpar performer in this test (although I repeated the test several times). To be fair, the Acer felt responsive in day-to-day use, with no noticeable delays when launching Windows or games, and this shortfall was not evidently reflected in other tests. Possibly, there’s a compatibility glitch between PCMark 10 Storage and this machine.
In our CPU tests, the Predator’s Core i7-12700H outran the Corsair’s AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS, as well as the Razer’s theoretically stronger Core i7-12800H. The Lenovo wasn’t to be caught, however, not even by the Core i9-powered MSI.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group are two off-screen-rendered tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which rates OpenGL performance.
Our real-world game testing includes the built-in benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege at two image quality settings (Medium and Ultra for Valhalla, Low and Ultra for Siege), while trying F1 with and without Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing.
The Predator usually outperformed the Razer, but narrowly trailed the Legion and Vector in 3DMark. The deficit worsened in F1 2021 and Rainbow Six Siege, although the Acer somehow turned the tables in Assassin’s Creed.
Numbers aside, the Triton 300 SE is a highly capable gaming machine. I informally tried the three games at its native 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution, as you’ll want to do for maximum sharpness, and saw 72fps in F1 2021, 77fps in Assassin’s Creed, and 122fps in Rainbow at the best quality settings . The performance hit from 1080p was substantial, but the frame rates stayed comfortably above 60fps.
As for thermal performance, the image below from our Flir One Pro shows the 16-inch Predator Triton 300 SE just finishing a 20-loop stress test in 3DMark Time Spy. The peak surface temperature was 116 degrees F at the center of the keyboard. The other surfaces were much cooler; the WASD key cluster was only 100 degrees F.
The Predator passed the stress test with a 97.2% rating, suggesting its performance over extended gaming sessions is very stable. Its cooling fans are audible but shouldn’t disturb others nearby; at their minimum, they’re no louder than those of other premium gaming laptops I’ve tested.
I also informally tested the Acer’s built-in overclocking. In 3DMark Time Spy, engaging Turbo mode boosted the score just over 7% (from 10,563 to 11,344 points), which might equate to a few more frames per second in a game. The only deterrent is that Turbo forces the fans to run at their noticeably loud top speed.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off, until the system quits. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its brightness in nits (candles per square meter) at Windows’ 50% and peak settings.
Venturing from home without the AC adapter is no problem for the Predator (as long as you’re not gaming off the plug). Its long runtime is all the more impressive considering its display at the 50% brightness we use for our video rundown is almost twice as bright as the next longest-lived system, the Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. The others are far behind, especially the MSI
The Triton also has the best screen of the group. The Legion is slightly brighter, but doesn’t cover as much of the video-friendly DCI-P3 color gamut.
Verdict: Defining Gaming Excellence in a 16-Incher
The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE melds high performance, practicality, and premium design. This 16-inch rig exceeds expectations on almost every front, especially its spiffy metal build and stunning, high-refresh G-Sync screen. The Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 has an edge in gaming performance, but the Predator is the better-balanced machine thanks to its sharper webcam, longer battery life, and convenient fingerprint reader. It richly deserves an Editors’ Choice award among midrange 16-inch gaming laptops.
.