Acer Predator Triton 500 first look
The Acer Predator Triton 500 is the latest flagship gaming laptop to be announced by Acer, acting as a less monstrous and eccentric alternative to the brawny Acer Predator Triton 900.
Despite shaving off the edges here and there, Acer’s crammed a 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD display in here, sat between bezels measuring just 6.3mm at the sides.
Along with the high-end Nvidia RTX 2080s, there will also be versions of the Acer Predator Triton 500 with RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 graphics running things as well. Whichever version your pick, you can be sure that, you’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of shiny happy ray tracing at high frame rates – as and when game devs issue RT and DLSS updates.
Another cool trick Acer has up its sleeve is the upcoming PredatorSense mobile app. While this wasn’t available to show off at CES, the idea is that you’ll be able to control things like overclocking, fan speeds, lighting, and sound modes from your phone, instead of having to pause a game, open up the desktop app and tweak away. You should, in theory, be able to do all of this on the fly from a second screen. The Android version is due to land sometime in Q1 this year, with the iOS version landing at some point in Q2.
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Acer Predator Triton 500 prices and release date
The Acer Predator Triton 500 will be going on sale in the States and EMEA countries in February, and in China later in January.
Acer hasn’t UK released prices for any of the versions of the Predator Triton 500 yet, but it’s said that U.S., EMEA and Chinese prices will start at $1799, €1999, and ¥16,999 respectively.
On average, these prices work out at roughly £1700 on average (based on current exchange rates).
Note that Acer’s not yet detailed full specs, so we don’t know, for example, what the basic RAM configuration is.
You’ll be able to get ‘up to’ 32GB of DDR4 memory with a Predator Triton 500. Presumably the baseline option will be 16GB, but it could be 8GB.
Also, we know that you’ll have the choice of ‘up to’ an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, and a NVMe PCIe SSD(s) in a RAID 0 array, but seeing as storage tends to be the one thing which sees laptop prices seriously climb, it’s hard to use these starting prices as much of a useful guide right now.
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Acer Predator Triton 500 design and features
With the Predator Triton 500, Acer seems to be in the same mind as Asus is with its new ROG Zephyrus S laptop in terms of design. In other words, it’s a gaming laptop that at a first glance appears shorn of the usual accoutrements. The usual severe angles have been softened and while the hyperactive rainbow glow of RGB keycap lights can be easily triggered, they’re just as easily muted or swapped out in favour of simple white lights.
In other words, this is laptop gaming smartened up – you could take the Predator Triton 500 into a meeting and not feel acutely embarrassed, take it home and whack Aura Sync lighting back on and game away.
The 15.6-inch display combined with the high max refresh rate of 144Hz coupled with the 20 Series cards and Nvidia G-Sync support, which will synchronise refresh rates with the frame rate when gaming, means that the battery should be fairly big.
Acer is promising battery life of up to 8 hours which, if they can pull this off, would be a real feat, as gaming laptops are usually lacking in this department.
Quite how they’ve been able to cram such a hefty cell into such a lightweight body is a mystery. In terms of weight, it’s a relatively spry 2.1kg – Acer’s own Predator Helios 500 for example weighs a hefty 4kg.
While you’ll want to be plugged into the mains when you’re actually gaming, it’d be great to know that you’ll get more than 3-4 hours of unplugged power for when you’re using the Predator Triton 500 for other things.
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Acer Predator Triton 500 specifications
Note that the full spec sheets haven’t been released by Acer just yet, but here’s what we know now:
| Acer Predator Triton 500 | |
| Dimensions | 17.9 mm (0.7 inches) thin |
| Weight | 2.1kg |
| Display | 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD |
| Processor | ‘Up to’ 8th gen Intel Core i7 |
| Memory | ‘Up to’ 32GB DDR4 RAM |
| Storage | NVMe PCIe RAID 0 SSDs (capacity TBC) |
| Graphics | Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 / 2070 / 2060 |
| Misc | Nvidia G-Sync technology |
Acer Predator Triton 500 First impressions
If Acer can cram in high performing components into such a light package and keep to that 8 hours of power promise, then the Predator Triton 500 really will be something special. The model I saw unfortunately couldn’t be turned on, as it was a very early version without final software, so I’m unable to say how decent the display looks and whether its able to render games like Battlefield V at an acceptable level with ray tracing lighting and particle effects turned on. I’m a little dubious about not knowing how much the various iterations will cost in general and the lack of UK pricing in particular, but if you were already in the market for a high-end gaming laptop, you know that you’d be having to dig deep, right?
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