 From a strictly price to performance standpoint the Acer Predator Helios 300 absolutely crushes any gaming laptop that we've looked at before. But in order to get the same basic gaming specs as a $1,900 razor blade into a laptop for only $1,100 what other sacrifices did they have to make? Lots it turns out, but that doesn't mean that it's a bad product either. Browse privately and securely with TunnelBear the simple VPN app. Try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. We were pleasantly surprised by the Predator Helios 300 when first opening it up. The brushed aluminum on the back of the display and the palm rest of the keyboard gives the laptop an unexpectedly premium feel and the rigidity of the chassis helps here as well. It certainly looks the part of a gaming laptop with red accents. It's not terribly subtle, but in my opinion it doesn't go over the top in its attention-seeking behavior. There are areas like around the screen and the bottom where materials like Plastic reigns supreme, and it doesn't have the reassuringly solid feel of something by Alienware, but it avoids feeling cheap, so I'm willing to forgive that. Two Type-A USB 2s and a Type-A and Type-C USB 3 plus Ethernet, HDMI 2.0, and even a full-size SD card slot adds up to pretty good I.O. But what's more than pretty good, maybe even fantastic, are the internal specs of this shockingly potent little devil with a 6 gig GTX 1060, a Core i7 7700HQ, and 16 gigs of DDR4 memory at just over a thousand bucks. This was legitimately the first time, like I play this game, I'll guess how much something costs when I go around to people's booths at trade shows. This was the first time in years that I was shocked to see the price tag on a laptop. Now obviously there are differences here, but for the pieces of hardware that actually affect gaming performance, the Acer Helios on paper is the same as much more expensive competing products. But how about the experience? Well, let's put it this way. You won't have to worry about having to set a game at anything lower than high, since this thing has no problem pinning the frame rate at the 60 Hertz refresh rate of the display. So no surprises here. It turns out that whether you cram 370 horsepower into a charger or a two-door Civic, it's gonna move pretty fast. And it's a bit on the chubby side at 31 millimeters, but unlike some of the sleeker and more expensive gaming machines we've seen, Underload the Helios is able to stay nice and cool without becoming overly loud either. It even sports a pretty decent webcam, but not all is hunky-dory. To have an IPS screen on a budget-oriented gaming laptop at all should be the icing on the cake, and it does have one. Whoa! But how do I put this delicately? It's kind of like a grocery store cake, where you bite into it expecting homemade cream cheese icing and you end up with some canned Betty Crocker that's a little past his best before. I mean to be clear, the viewing angles and contrast ratio are great. It's still icing. You just regret asking for a corner piece. Maximum brightness could be better described as maximum glowiness, and average Delta E values of 5.67 are only okay if you don't see huge outliers and you're covering more than 67% of the sRGB color space. I don't want to sound ungrateful here. I still wouldn't personally trade it for a TN. I'm just saying that you won't be doing any serious video editing or Photoshop unless you want to invest in a secondary monitor to check your work. Another area that Acer skimped is the 48 watt-hour battery. To their credit Acer was at least honest about this, but with this kind of showing in our standard battery test, basically if you're carting one of these around to class, you should expect to be getting familiar with the power outlet locations. The trackpad though is a return to things that are pretty good. It's accurate and tap to click and gestures work well, but I do wish that the force required to press was a little less so that dragging and dropping files was easier and the keyboard feels pretty good too. Again the force to press the keys is a little too high and they are a touch mushy, so I can't get quite as fast as I could on something like an Alienware or the Surface laptop, which is a bummer because on a gaming laptop quick and accurate key presses are a plus, but overall it does the job it needs to and the inclusion of both a backlight and a full number pad are appreciated. And the positives don't end there. If the 250 gig SATA SSD, which can be upgraded to NVMe by the way, isn't quite enough to house your gaming collection, adding up to 32 gigs of RAM or a two and a half inch hard drive on the Helios is really easy. Each of those has its own compartment on the bottom, so it only takes one screw to access. It should be noted though that anything beyond that requires a full disassembly. So then in response to our original question, what you're giving up is screen and battery. So if you want a laptop for productivity and you just want to game on it a little bit, I'd go for something at this price point with a GTX 1050 Ti, a Core i5 and potentially nearly double the battery life. But if you want a machine that is laser focused on price to performance for gaming, at just over a thousand dollars the Predator Helios 300 knocks it out of the park. Highly recommended. It's on fire! It's that amazing! I can't believe they're testing that right now. 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So thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video hit that dislike button, but if you liked it hit that like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is a link to our t-shirt store where you can buy t-shirts and other swag as well and our community forum which you should totally join. Now I'm gonna go ask them to turn that off because I have one more video to film right now. It's not a real fire. It's clearly a test. That's not how it rings when there's a real fire down it Dennis.