It’s exactly the kind of gaming laptop I can get behind: a normal 14in device with a colour-accurate 1920x1080 IPS display and a gorgeous all-metal chassis that has a very agreeable 17 hours of battery life for when I want to take it on the road and get some work done. Then, thanks to its combination of an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti GPU and one of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, it can also deliver some serious power for playing games on in my downtime. No RGB nonsense. No go-faster gaming stripes. Just a regular-looking laptop that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to get out in a cafe or at the office. More of this, please, Acer. Sure, the AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU Acer have chosen isn’t one of their high-powered HX laptop chips, but with specs ranging up to a Ryzen 7 5800U, it should still offer plenty of processing power for everyday tasks and playing games alike. It will also come with up to 2TB of SSD storage and up to 16GB of RAM. The display looks lovely, too, hitting a peak brightness of 300cd/m2 and covering 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, according to Acer. There’s no mention of a high refresh rate, implying this will be capped at a standard 60Hz, but honestly, that’s plenty for the kind of GPU it has. All that lovely slimline goodness won’t cost the earth, either, as the Swift X is set to start at £899 / $899 when it launches this June in the US, and later this summer in the UK. The Swift X wasn’t the only gaming laptop Acer announced today, either. They also showed off refreshed versions of their Predator Triton 500 SE with Intel’s new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs, which was first shown off along with loads of other RTX 30 laptops earlier this year during CES, as well as two new models of their Predator Helios 500 gaming laptop. The latter will be available in both 1080p, 360Hz and 4K, 120Hz flavours, with the 4K model coming with a super fancy Mini LED display that supports full-array local dimming for a full-on HDR experience. Acer liken their Mini LED display as offering HDR that’s “comparable to VESA’s DisplayHDR 1000” screens, which is about as eye-searing as HDR gets these days, and (as far as I know) hasn’t really been done on a 17in laptop display before. Count me intrigued. The rest of the new Helios 500 sounds like a real powerhouse, too. There will be a range of models available, of course, but the top one will be packing an overclockable Intel Core i9 processor, an Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU and a whopping 64GB of RAM with a pair of RAID-ed together SSDs. The keyboard also has per-key RGB lighting, and a fancy RGB light bar across the front of the keyboard tray for extra rainbow effects. The Triton 500 SE will be arriving in July with prices starting from £1999 / $1749, while the Helios 500 will be arriving a little later in August, starting at £2999 / $2499 - and judging by those prices, it looks like the US will be getting a wider range of entry-level models compared to what we’re getting here in the UK. I’ll hopefully be able to test all three laptops very soon to see how they stack up in practice.
