Acer Predator 17X review: This gaming laptop packs attitude and speed - mannshemord

You know Acer's new Predator 17X is a big, bold gaming gaming laptop once you collision the power button.

Rather than emitting a deadening old beep, the Predator 17X gets in your grill with an alien-sounding screamin piece the laptop's lighting system puts on a show during boot. (Yes, you can turn information technology inactive in the BIOS.)

This laptop is the big brother to the Predator 17 that we reviewed in June, but despite the similar looks, it shouldn't embody clouded with its sibling. While the Predator 17 rocked a definitive Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPU, the Predator 17X packs the laptop computer version of the GeForce GTX 980 part. It au fon offers 1:1 performance with its screen background counterpart—the, uhh, desktop GeForce GTX 980.

The complete and the fury

acer17x acer 17 — The Predatory animal 17 (top) and the Predator 17X (bottom) share look-alike lineage, but the 17X is slimly thicker and overmuch quieter.

One problem we had with the smaller Predator 17 was incessant fan whine, equal low-level what we considered digestible loads. (Acer flat released an update to address this fan noise issue.) Contempt the Sir Thomas More puissant GPU, we found the Predator 17X to be surprisingly relaxing. That doesn't mean silent, but the fan noise is identical acceptable, fifty-fifty while gaming or running a FurMark stress test for an nonliteral period of time.

In fact, we played hours and hours of VR games exploitation the Predator 17X, and whenever it wasn't my turn, I hardly noticed the laptop was there. I barely detected any noise when the 17X got full into a back pack for a DIY VR rucksack frame-up, either, sol kudos to Genus Acer.

2016 08 01 18.49.09 — Here's the heat dispersion on the Acer Predator 17X's keyboard after running an hour-long graphics stress test.

Paired with the GTX 980 is a quad-core Core i7-6820HK chip. That's an unlocked 6th-gen Skylake CPU, with a stock time of 2.7GHz and a Turbo Boost of 3.6GHz.

Out of the box, the i7-6820HK is set to stock, but a planned visibility lets you overclock the CPU to 4GHz and bump the GPU by 135MHz. I'll cover that more in the carrying out section below, but I will say for now that I had no stability issues or screen artifacts running on turbo. The machine did cause louder, however.

Other comforts

Elsewhere in the Predator 17X, you'll determine ii Samsung M.2 SSDs in RAID 0, a 1TB HGST 2.5-inch Winchester drive, and G-Sync support for the 1920×1080 17.3-inch IPS screen. And like many other gaming laptop companies, Acer goes overboard along system RAM, dressing 32GB of DDR4/2133 into the 17X when 16GB would be o.k. for most populate.

The M.2 drives are SATA rather than PCIe, which is a trifle bit of a bummer. Crystal Disk Mark 5.02 put the successive, high-queue depth range at 1GBps reads and or so 600MBps writes. Non bad, but a single PCIe drive could do the indistinguishable.

The IPS screen features a light opposing-glare finish. I measured the max brightness of the test at just over 300 nits, which is pretty standard for a laptop. If 1080p International Relations and Security Network't plenty pixels for you, Acer also offers the option of a G-Synchronize 4K panel.

The audio subsystem features two 2-Watt speakers and a subwoofer. They get decently loud with fair midrange, just they incline to rattle when cranked up to maximum. Don't interest: They're still suitably loud to annoy your roommates.

Wireless is left to a Orca radio card sporting Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11ac with a 2×2 MIMO antenna.

The assault and battery subsystem is a massive 90 W-hour tank…which gives you maybe an hour when playing a game. (You'll desire to keep the massive 330W power brick convenient.) You can expect better battery life when watching a movie, but the truth is, heavy-duty gaming laptops seldom allow for the power grid.

For ports, the left side has a pair of USB 3.0 Case A ports, 1/8-inch analog in, 1/8-inch analog out, and an Mount Rushmore State card reader.

acer17 x starboard — The left side of the Predator 17X gives you two USB 3.0 A ports, two analog audio ports, and an SD Card reader.

The some other side of the Predator 17X features two more USB 3.0 Type A ports, full-ninepenny DisplayPort and HDMI, gigabit ethernet, a Kensington ignition lock port, and a USB Type C port that supports Thunderbolt 3.

acer 17x port — The right side gives you a gigabit ethernet jack, full phase of the moon-sized DisplayPort and HDMI, two USB 3.0 Type A ports, and a Thunderbolt 3 port.

The keyboard is bad typic for a gaming laptop: It's full-orange-sized with a standard layout. The keys matt-up hearty with no give, and are backlit. You can change the color of the backlighting, but it's zone lighting rather than adjustable per-key. As a result, the keyboard equitable ISN't as beautiful as that of the Razer Blade 2016, which is simply lovely with its individually tweakable colours.

acer 17x keys — The Vulture 17X's keyboard outlines the WASD keys in a garish red.

The trackpad is fittingly large, and had no issues during use. Overall, it felt firm, but with no click, and it has a slight texture. I like the handy "off" switch just to the right of IT—this lets you shift off the trackpad when using a mouse, and so that you don't ruin your gambling session with an errant touch.

acer 17x off — Also close for missiles, switching to guns.

A look deep down

When you flip both the Predator 17 and the Predator 17X over, you can see the subwoofers in red and the large feet that lift up the laptop and clear the vent intakes. However, the Predator 17X's doorway is rather a bit smaller, so you put on't get as much access to hardware.

acers bottom — The access port for the Predator 17X (right) is littler than that of the Predator 17 (left).

Pop open the door lets you commence at the slots for additional RAM, the SSDs, and the hard drive. If you're wondering where the extant Drive is, well, that's a neat question. Information technology's in all likelihood under the keyboard, or maybe buried somewhere else—but in either case, luckiness acquiring to it easily.

You can't access the GPU operating room CPU, but that's fine, since messing with those would void your warranty. For most people, this add up of admittance is safer.

acer 17x door — If you open the bottom control panel, you can drop-off in to a greater extent RAM and gain access to M.2 SATA SSDs and the hard labour.

Performance

None of these inside information matter without unbroken performance to spend a penny IT all worthy, so I distinct to determine how the Marauder 17X stacks up against a crowd together of genuinely burly play laptops. For reference, I also threw in the immoderate-small Razer Brand 2016, so you give the axe see what the GeForce GTX 970M gives you.

3DMark Fire Tap Immoderate

First up is 3DMark Fire Come across Distant. It's a synthetic graphics test, but still a very workable tool for measuring boilersuit gaming art. I ran the Predator 17X at its old-hat speed and exploitation Acer's preset profile for overclocking, which (as I mentioned earlier) overclocks all of the CPU's cores to 4GHz and also boosts the GTX 980 by some other 135MHz.

At stock speeds, you can go steady the 17X keeps parity with comparable commonplace GTX 980 laptops—and yes, it's the synoptic speed as a desktop GeForce GTX 980 carte du jour. You can also see that information technology outpaces the GeForce GTX 980M laptops, too.

When overclocked though, the Predator 17X gets a hard boost. IT's exclusively slower than the even-big Origin EON 17-SLX with its overclocked background CPU and GPU.

acer predator 17x 3dmark firestrike extreme oc — The Predator 17X slews up nicely against the crowd on store. When overclocked, it's a beast.

Grave Raider

Moving on to an actual brave, we fire see the Predator 17X comes in just a trifle faster than the MSI GT72S Dragon with its GTX 980. And when overclocked to 4GHz, the Predator 17X gives even the Root EON17-SLX a good run aside twinned its score.

acer predator 17x tomb raider ultimate 19x10 — The Predator 17X hangs experient in Grave Raider.

Midsection-earth: Shadows of Mordor

To see how the 17X handles a more Bodoni plot, I ran In-between-earth: Shadows of Mordor at 1920×1080 set to Immoderate and with the 4K texture backpack installed. The Vulture 17X is simply a tad behind MSI's corresponding GT72S Dragon at stock speeds, which was unexpected. Even overclocked, it's basically dead true with the Dragon. I'd pitch in boost, but I unluckily no thirster have the MSI unit of measurement here.

acer predator 17x shadows of mordor ultra 4k textures 19x10 — The Predator 17X is slightly slower than the GT72S Dragon in *Middle-terra firma* and just matches it even when overclocked.

Handbrake

Our last quiz involves encoding a 30GB MKV file to a little MP4 using Handbrake 0.9.9's Android Pill preset. The test is to a great extent multithreaded, and can excruciate weaker machines.

The 17X's operation falls in production line with what I'd expect for this serial of CPUs. The Core i7-6820HK is mayhap 100MHz faster than the Core i7-6700HQ, which isn't adequate to matter to much in this particular test. Overclocking the 17X to 4GHz does amp up encoding performance, though. As expected, that beefy Origin EON17-SLX with its desktop chip buzzing along at 4.5GHz runs ahead of the crowd.

acer predator 17x handbrake encode — The Predator 17X waterfall honorable where you expect it to in that Central processing unit-qualifier run.

Closing

Overall, I'm pretty chuffed with the Predator 17X. It hangs right with the competition in performance and its easy-peasy 4GHz overclock ramps sprouted performance nicely. Its fan acoustics are rank impressive, too. At stock speeds, this laptop doesn't get annoyingly loud, and only with the Central processing unit and GPU overclocked do the fans turn noticeable. I can't pronounce the same for the Piranha 17, which was loud under nigh loads.

The 17X is also competitive in terms of value. Acer's recommended price is $2,800, just you can find the configuration I reviewed for $2,699 on Amazon. That's actually a teeny to a lesser degree comparable laptops.

The only real job the Predator 17X faces is timing. Newer GPUs from Nvidia and AMD are undoubtedly on their way, and few will want to buy ageing engineering science when new hardware is about the corner. To be fair though, no one knows how that new technology will perform and when it'll flatbottom exist available available. And so is one laptop in hand better than two in the bush?

That's a question only you can answer, but I buns order this: Later on spending many hours with the Vulture 17X, it's a fast, capable laptop that's shockingly quiet. If Acer were to pearl a next-gen GPU in it, it'd take up the chops to represent a lasting competitor.