The 17″ laptop is of course heavier and deeper than its 15″ sibling, but it is also nearly 5 mm thick; like the Alienware model, the cooling system protrudes from the back, making it considerably deeper and larger than other 17″ gaming laptops. Transfer speeds are decent, but still about 10% slower than the average possible with this module; the Blade 17 is also about 10% faster. Performance, on the other hand, is constant.
Despite being a 15.6″ laptop, Acer managed to squeeze an entire numeric keypad into the deck. You can use the laptop for work, or even as a macro pad for gaming. Adding these extra keys requires that everything be moved a little to the left and all the buttons be a little smaller, but it’s not hard to get used to. The keys feel good and have plenty of travel at 1.8 mm; I got used to them in less than an hour.
The extended keyboard also gives Helios room for dedicated buttons for launching the PredatorSense customization software and overclocking the GPU with a single click. and puts power modes, fan options, and lighting presets at your fingertips. Above it are dedicated keys for Play/Pause, Next Track, and Previous Track. Above the left-hand function row is a silver Turbo button that instantly overclocks the GPU and turns the fan to high RPM.
In the Geekbench 5.3 overall performance test, the Helios 300 scored 6,257, which is higher than the average for a typical gaming laptop (5,263) The Helios 300 can go back and forth between more than 30 browser tabs and eight background apps without standard performance and speed. It also took just under 9 minutes and 20 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p. While this took a little longer than the standard 9 minutes and 15 seconds, it is still faster than the competition; with Turbo Boost, we could have gotten a slightly lower number, but expect significant protests from the audience.
copying folders from an external drive, the Helios 300’s 512GB SSD consumed 87 seconds, or 544 megabytes per second. Another thing to note is that our unit comes with Acer’s massive 330W charger and weighs about 2.3 kg. Given the power settings of this lineup, the retail model will probably weigh this much as well. Incidentally, this series also supports USB-C charging up to 100W, in case you don’t want to bring a bulky mains charger. Of course, the USB-C power supply does not provide full performance.