…the 3D screen. Tearing through the high benchmark settings of Cyberpunk and Dirt 5 in 2D mode at over 50 frames per second easily put my concerns to rest regarding typical gaming performance, while Total War: Warhammer III was silky smooth even in Ultra settings. The hefty 32GB of DDR5 RAM on offer means there’s ample memory for multitasking, although the 2TB SSD is a welcome and relatively overkill inclusion – but one that I can see being a positive for some.The fans do have to spin up quite a bit to keep this level of performance running for any length of time, and they never stop being audible, even under casual web browsing. In the grand scale of gaming laptops, this is common and something that any seasoned user should be accustomed to at this price. It’s still a concern that affecting such a powerful and high-end laptop. The addition of a Turbo button above the keyboard functionality is a thoughtful inclusion, however, allowing you to bump up the power of your machine with a single button press whenever needed. Enabling it did cause quite the hurricane of fan noise however, and did seem to have minimal impact on performance in a few of our more demanding gaming tests.
Poor 3D performanceThe 3D effect is very convincingLudicrously bad battery lifeYour main takeaway for the 3D mode here is that it’s a bit disappointing. Fire up an appropriate game or benchmark program with SpatialLabs turned on and you’ll immediately feel the difference. While we haven’t included benchmarks to cover the 3D performance, it’s safe to assume that it would make almost any graph look disappointing. In even simple 3D applications like the 3D model viewer, the experience is very noticeable. Even most high-end games seem to run at a sluggish frame rate with the 3D mode turned on, and games that do not yet support 3D, run in a terribly unoptimized duplicate window on the part of the screen that is visible to the naked eye.The laptop has a battery life that is simply unforgivable for a portable gaming machine. The 4k display isn’t doing the laptop any favors here, and two hours is an unacceptable return for a gaming laptop with the specs. This could at least be somewhat justified if the hardware were delivering fantastic gaming results in 3D mode, but sadly, that’s not the case. Acer’s claims of ‘up to 10 hours’ battery life are frankly laughable, and it’s hard to imagine a scenario where you would be gaming in 3D mode without being plugged into the wall.
Acer Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition: VerdictRight now it’s impossible to recommend the Acer Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition. The hardware inside is more than enough to run the vast majority of modern games in 2D, but the 3D mode fails to convince. The 3D display may be impressive for a few minutes, but it’s not something that I would particularly want to play my favorite games on. It’s a real shame that the display takes such a special place in this system, as in every other respect this is a very competent gaming laptop. The downside is the high price and over-specification of components that are not taken advantage of in 3D mode. Zero plagiarism but to reiterate, it’s impossible to recommend the Acer Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition until Acer can figure out how to iron out the kinks.
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