Acer's built an incredible chassis, beautiful OLED screen, and a device that's gorgeous to look at, but its cooling setup leaves a lot to be desired, as it strangles the performance of both the CPU and GPU in higher frame rate titles.



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I do love a good puzzle. There's something real satisfying about looking at the benchmark results and specs of two different laptops and coming to a crisp, neat conclusion on why one, that's so similar on paper, performs so differently to another. That's great and all, but the fact that that fact is even a thing is a problem. The fact that we're talking about that fact here right now, as a thing, with Acer's latest Predator Helios Neo is a problem. And it shouldn't be.

Because you should be able to look at any laptop, see a GPU name, and know what performance you're getting, straight away. It shouldn't be ambiguous. You shouldn't have to dive into reviews, and you shouldn't need to go hunting around in the murky deep waters of spec manuals, trying to find out exactly if this new RTX 5080 is only as good as an RTX 5060, or secretly an RTX 5090 pretending to be an RTX 5070. And yet here we are. Same problem. Different day. But interestingly, it's not just the wattage caps that are entirely the bloody issue for once (like they almost always are). And I'll get to that frustrating stuff, but first, let's talk up the good stuff, shall we? Because there's a lot to like here.

This is Acer's latest Helios Neo 16S AI. It's not actually available yet, properly, so pricing is slim on the ground (and of course there are also 23 different specs per region with slightly different memory and SSD setups), but it's been revamped specifically for this year, and announced admittedly (I'm a slow reviewer) in May. And it's stunning.

Model No

PHN16S-i71-936M

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus

GPU

Nvidia RTX 5080 115W

RAM

32GB DDR5-6400

Storage

2x 1TB Kingston OM8PJP41024K3-CA0 PCIe 4.0 SSDs

Screen Size



16-inch OLED

Refresh Rate

240 Hz

Resolution

2560x1600

Battery

92 Whr

Dimensions

19.9 x 356.8 x 275.5mm | 0.78 x 14.05 x 10.85 inches

Weight

2.3 kg | 5.07 lbs

Price

$3,299 | UK pricing TBC

✅ You want the best screen on a gaming laptop, wrapped in something that's actually portable: This is a high-end, full-size desktop monitor spec, strapped to a chassis that you can shove in a backpack. A beautiful inky display that's vibrant, high refresh, and stupid quick on response.

❌ You want to pay RTX 5080 money for RTX 5080 performance: At 115 W, with a cooling solution that folds under CPU-heavy titles, this is RTX 5070-class performance dressed up in a tux, and not the cute open-source penguin kind.

You've got a beautiful, crisp glossy OLED display, surrounded by a super-thin bezel, pumping out a 240 Hz refresh rate across a 2560x1600 res, with a VESA-certified DisplayHDR True Black 500 rating. It's situated on top of a ridiculously thin chassis body (20mm deep), with clean, sharp edges, and a finish that, although not super premium on feel, looks great. With a delicate, sensitive touchpad and a simple yet efficient RGB keyboard.

There's buckets of connectivity here too, including three USB Type A, two USB Type C, HDMI, drop-jaw ethernet, Micro-SD card reader, and somehow (I do suspect I know how) Acer's also crammed in 92 Whrs of battery into this thing, in assumedly the same manner that I've managed to stuff 32,673 unread PR messages into my email archive in the last year (yes Intel I'll give you your Core i7 6700K back when I'm good and ready thankyou).



This is the bit where I crack my knuckles, put on my reviewer's cap (jokes on you, it's flat and it's always on), and tell you what the hell is going on in terms of performance, because on paper the Helios NEO looks incredible. There's 32GB of DDR5...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

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