Acer Predator 17 review

If you thought Alienware had the outlandish gaming laptop covered, think again. Along with the Asus RoG and HP Omen series, Acer has now joined the party with its outrageous Predator 17. Apparently inspired by 'intergalactic battlecruisers', Acer's gargantuan performance notebook matches the company's extreme desktop PCs and gaming monitors for styling.

The Predator 17 is a genuinely impressive-looking machine for those who like to show off. There's a pair of lit-up red tracers and a red-backlit Predator logo on the lid, with red highlights on the fake front-facing speaker grill, the W, A, S, D and arrow keys. The palm rest, meanwhile, is made from a quality-feeling matt black plastic. It's quite similar to the Asus RoG G571JT, which also makes heavy use of red highlights and bright LEDs.

Design

The Predator 17 is huge in every respect. Its 17.3in screen leaves a huge amount of room for the keyboard, macro keys and touchpad, and Acer's thrown portability to the wind with the laptop weighing a little over 4kg. That said, you can easily use this laptop on your lap because, despite its high-specification innards, it remains cool even when under load.

Part of the reason for these cool temperatures are the extremely loud fans which extract air from the rear of the laptop. Even with the laptop idling and processor temperatures at an impressively cool 28 degrees celsius, the fans continued to make a fair amount of noise. It was only after digging into Acer's PredatorSense software that I found a setting which keeps the fans spinning at maximum speed no matter what. Disabling this brought the noise down to a whisper without upsetting performance when serious cooling was required.

The Predator 17 is so serious about cooling that you can switch out the Blu-Ray drive for a bundled Cooler Master-badged fan module called the Acer FrostCore. However, after long term testing, recording temperatures, and running our processor and gaming benchmarks multiple times, the tiny fan in this rather large module actually made very little difference. In fact, it's only discernible effects was making the laptop a little louder and removing the obvious ability to play Blu-ray discs. 

The really perplexing thing about the fan module is that it clearly cost a lot to develop and manufacture and to have such an expensive and showy component make no difference to performance whatsoever seems like a bit of a misjudgement. Then again, when the Predator 17 already costs £1,500, an extra dozen quid probably won't faze this machine's target buyer.

There's a generous selection of ports, too. Four USB3 connectors are present along with HDMI and DisplayPort outputs for an external display, an SD card reader and a Thunderbolt port for high-performance storage drives and other high-end peripherals. There's Gigabit Ethernet, too, along with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as two 3.5mm audio jacks for a microphone and headphone setup.

Keyboard

The Acer Predator 17's keyboard deserves special credit. It's by far the best laptop keyboard I've ever used, as its large, chunky keys have loads of travel and give excellent feedback. It's fully backlit, too, meaning the keys are both edge-lit and lit through the character symbols, so typing in the dark is easy.

The macro keys are in a slightly awkward place, sitting off to the side away from the conventional keys, and they're also much shallower than the standard letter keys. However, there are five macro groups, giving you a huge 25 customisable shortcuts in total. These can be set from within the PredatorSense software and can be used to change settings such as fan speed and discrete GPU usage, as well as more advanced user-defined macros.

The touchpad, while seldom-used when stationed at a desk, is also excellent. It's responsive and its physical buttons are very pleasing to the touch. There's even a dedicated button next to the touchpad that disables both it and the Windows key to avoid unnecessary interruptions while gaming.

Performance and Battery Life

With such premium external hardware, it should come as no surprise that the innards of the Predator 17 are also from the top drawer. Its quad-core Intel Core i7-6700HQ, which runs at a base clock speed of 2.6GHz but can Turbo Boost to a maximum speed of 3.5GHz, is an extremely competent multitasker and multimedia machine, and Intel's Hyper-Threading allows Windows to see each of its four physical cores as two virtual cores, allowing for better performance in programs with multiple threads.

16GB of DDR4 RAM is also ample for all of today's latest games and will help with performance in high-end multimedia workloads, too. It managed an overall score of 108 in our benchmarks, including 98 in the image editing, 112 in the video rendering and 109 in the multitasking tests. This is desktop Core i5-level performance, which is pretty impressive in a portable machine.

 ^ Acer PredatorSense software lets you customise keyboard macros and check your system's vitals

In Windows, the Predator 17 feels incredibly snappy and quick and I was never left waiting for it to load web pages, programs or respond to searches. Storage is quick, too, with a 256GB M.2 SSD backed up by a large 1TB hard disk.

3D performance comes from a 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, Nvidia's second-from-top mobile graphics card. It's extremely capable at Full HD resolutions, ploughing through Dirt Showdown with an average frame rate of 80.8fps and Metro: Last Light Redux with supersampling anti-aliasing switched on at an average frame rate of 31fps. The fans kick up quite a fuss when playing these titles, but it never got uncomfortably loud and the palmrest never became warm, let alone hot, which is seriously impressive.

If you find yourself without mains electricity, expect a little over three hours of usage time before the battery in the Predator 17 gives out. I found it lasted 3h 37m in our battery benchmark, although if you're careful you might be able to eek out four hours.

Display

The Acer Predator 17 is nearly the complete package. The screen is excellent, with a Full HD resolution IPS panel that has lovely wide viewing angles. It's capable of displaying 91% of the sRGB colour gamut, ranking it among the best non-professional laptops I've seen when it comes to screen quality, and I was also impressed by its very low 0.25cd/m2 black levels, which is a good deal better than the similarly-specified Asus ROG G751JT and Gigabyte P37W v4 machines we reviewed recently. Bright, 320cd/m2 white levels are also excellent.

Sound

With a name like 'Predator SoundPound', you'd expect a memorable performance from the laptop's built-in speakers. Sadly, they're rather lacking. Music was muddy and while speech was loud and clear, I couldn't find a setting within the pre-installed Dolby software which actually improved the sound. That's separate from the mode which switches all sound enhancement off, of course. The installed subwoofer also appears to be only for show as it barely affected the laptop's bass levels. Once you've switched off the 'enhancements', sound is loud and clear and substantially better than most laptops, but they're not as good as we'd have expected for the money.

Conclusion

The Acer Predator 17 is a premium laptop which manages to justify its eye-watering price with top-level performance, and its superb build quality make it a genuinely desirable machine. However, up against the Asus RoG G571JT and the Gigabyte P37W v4, it's in competitive company. The £1,380 Gigabyte is significantly thinner and lighter than the Predator 17, making it more the practical device for mobile gamers, but the Asus is cheaper still at £1,260 (albeit for a slightly different spec from the model we reviewed in September).

In my eyes, though, the Acer trumps both of them thanks to its excellent screen and keyboard. I'd probably still pick the Gigabyte for its simplicity, portability and plainer design, but if you're not fussed about the extra bulk and value a good quality display, the Acer Predator 17 is still a great choice. It wins a Recommended award.