Acer Helios 300 RTX 3060 Review – BEST GAMING LAPTOP?

For fear of getting shunned and laughed at, most people are scared to admit that they might be suffering from sexual dysfunction are on the stage of becoming tested for viagra online from canada but you will find still no confirmed outcomes. Kamagra is known as second best medication free sample cialis cute-n-tiny.com among hundreds of other alternatives. However, there are certain things you should find out about blood insulin Anytime insulin shots would be quite first found as fashioned available designed for people having having diabetes, now there are came side effects levitra to be only one sort of short-acting insulin. It is a fact that as the size of the TV such as on the wall or on a stand in the room also plays tadalafil prices a vital role in boosting the performance level of person.

Acer’s Helios line of gaming laptops are one of their most popular, and now that I’ve tested one I can see why. This model is rocking an RTX 3060, an Intel i7 10750H, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD space and a 1080p 144Hz IPS panel, all for an MSRP of £1300, although slight variations in the spec can be found for more like £1200. That’s a great start, but as this product cycle has made clear more than ever before, you can’t judge laptops like this on their spec alone. So, what’s this one like?

In short, it’s a great gaming machine with a couple of drawbacks. Let me start with the graphics card, the RTX 3060 in this is a middle of the road TDP. Acer lists “up to 105W” on their site, which as best as I can work out is a 90W TDP with 15W of Dynamic Boost. That’s important to note, as a laptop even with the same CPU, RAM and storage but with say the 115W TDP version of the 3060 would perform significantly better. With that said, gaming performance on this is pretty strong.

A quick look at the results together and honestly it’s a strong showing. CS:GO offers well over 200FPS on high, and of course can be lowered if you’d rather go mad with the frame rates. Cyberpunk offers a respectable 50FPS average on ultra, personally I’d probably drop that to high or medium until that game gets a little more optimised, but it’s still good. Watchdogs is also decent for the spec, offering just shy of 50FPS average. Fortnite on epic settings is just shy of 100FPS which is somewhat surprising, but still plenty and that’s without DLSS which is obviously supported on this RTX card. Finally in Microsoft Flight it’s running at around 28FPS average on ultra settings, which is actually really good for that game. Obviously you would be turning it down if you were actually playing it, but as an outright result that’s decent.

It definitely performs well, but you might have noticed this little button, labeled “TURBO”. I wonder if that does anything… Wow, it’s loud, but wait, is that a performance increase? Yeah! It is! Enabling turbo nets you 6FPS average more in Cyberpunk, 10FPS more in Fortnite and 2FPS in Microsoft Flight, albeit with no gains in Watchdogs or CS:GO. That’s because enabling turbo changes the GPU overclock setting in the Predator app to ‘extreme’, but since CSGO is a CPU limited game and overclocking the GPU syphons power from the CPU any performance gains from the faster graphics power are outweighed by the slower CPU.

In fact, the CPU goes from using 74W while playing CSGO to just 45W with turbo enabled. I’d love to tell you what power the GPU was using, but no program I tried could read any of its sensors, including HWInfo. The good news is turbo also sets the fans to 100% meaning the relatively quiet machine gets painfully noisy, although the upside is the temps on the CPU drop from between 89°c and 95°c and thermal throttling to a much more manageable 81°c.

Anyway, back to gaming performance, when you compare those results, turbo included, against a few other models the Helios stacks up rather well. In Cyberpunk even at stock it beats Asus’ TUF Dash F15 with it’s quad core i3 dressed as an i7, and an RTX 3070. It’s even keeping up with the Zephyrus G15 with an RTX 3080 when in the turbo mode – but both of these results highlight clearly what I’m calling the “TDP Madness” that is NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series laptop GPUs.

In Watchdogs it’s more evenly matched with the Dash F15 – despite having a 3060 instead, and generally sits towards the back of the pack, only by 10FPS or so. In Fortnite it’s still tying with the F15, and sitting at the bottom of the pile.

Can I just take a second to say how crazy it is that an RTX 3060 can be as fast as an RTX 3080.. Like, if you are actually looking to buy a gaming laptop right now it is literally impossible to fully understand what you are buying with your hard earned cash. Even reading the TDP figures don’t tell the whole story as the Dash F15 shows with it’s “i7” with 2 less cores and 4 less threads than the i7 in this. I don’t envy laptop buyers right now.

Since I mentioned the CPU, lets talk about it. It’s now a last gen i7-10750H. That means it’s a hex core, 12 thread chip that in this machine runs at a whopping 98W when doing CPU intensive tasks. It has a peak PL2 of 107W but I never saw it hit that as the second you start a CPU load it spikes to 95°c and throttles boost. When most new laptops I’ve been testing are rocking AMD’s Ryzen chips, this looks positively mediocre by comparison.

In Cinebench it matches up to the two 10875H chips I’ve tested before, but compared to the new Ryzen one – hell even the last gen 4800H – it’s just not quite as good. The same goes for the multi-threaded score too, it’s fine, but not amazing.

In Blender it’s much the same story. In the BMW scene the new ryzen chips are closing on 30% faster, all while drawing half to a third the power. In Gooseberry it’s even worse, clocking it at over 1700 seconds, or 28 and a half minutes, compared to the 5800H at just 1100 seconds or 18 and a half minutes.

And in Puget Bench for the Adobe CC Suite I don’t have too many points of comparison for this one, but while it holds up fairly well in Premiere against the newer Ryzen options, it lags behind in both After Effects and Photoshop – although hardly what I’d call unusable.

But all of that is just numbers, what’s it actually like to use and game on? Well, pretty nice. The display is labeled as not only being 144Hz, but also a 3ms panel and I have to commend Acer for accurate marketing here because with the LCD overdrive setting enabled in the Predator app, it’s pretty much bang on that. With overdrive off it does have a touch of ghosting, one or two frames worth, although nothing you’d notice in games. With Overdrive on though, man the overshoot is real. Personally I think I’d leave that off as despite the panel being one or two milliseconds faster to react, it’s not fast enough to justify the overshoot you get.

The gaming experience is good, it’s not painfully loud unless you enable turbo – have a listen to both.

As for content consumption, that’s decent too. The colours are nice to the eye, you’ve got good viewing angles and reasonable brightness for indoor use. Speaking of colours, this panel covers just shy of 100% of the sRGB spectrum, meaning while it’s not perfect for content creation (neither is the CPU), it’s certainly good enough.

As for the keyboard, that’s a touch light for my taste but otherwise well laid out. I was able to get up to speed typing on it faster than usual which is always a good sign. For gaming it’s great, just the right travel and actuation force to make it an enjoyable and tactile experience.

I/O wise you’ve got 3 USB A ports, one type C, ethernet (and wifi onboard), a 4 pole headphone jack, HDMI, mini DisplayPort and DC in on the back. One nice thing is that it’s pretty easily upgradable as inside you have a full 2.5” bay free to populate, and a spare M.2 slot, alongside 2 1x8R 3200Mhz SODIMM modules running in dual channel.

As a final note, styling wise I do quite like this. It’s not insanely slim, but it’s hardly a behemoth, it’s certainly small enough to take with your to school if that’s what you need it for. The downside to this design is the instant fingerprints left at the mere sight of your hands touching it. I washed my hands with soap and water just before filming this shot, and yet there it is, a simple touch and it’s dirty again.

So, should you buy a Helios 300? If all you want to do is gaming and content consumption, I’d have no problem recommending it. Gaming on it was great, as was watching Youtube videos and films, and while the battery life isn’t amazing on low screen brightness you should get over 4 hours of web browsing to a charge. If content consumption is on the cards too, I’d consider looking for a more powerful CPU and slightly more colour accurate display. This certainly isn’t bad, but I think there is better out there. Overall, this gets a good recommendation from me. It’s a decent balance, and for the MSRP of £1,300, it’s not a bad value either.