Acer Triton Neo 16 Review – Premium Build, Budget Performance

Acer’s Triton Neo 16 is a remarkably premium laptop with frankly disappointing levels of performance. This £1,900 machine – which appears to be discounted by a whopping £500 on Acer’s store at the time of filming – sports an interesting spec sheet, super premium build quality with an all-metal shell, stylish looks with a clean, subtle design and ostentatious RGB keyboard, and yet, as tested, the performance leaves me feeling underwhelmed. Let me show you what I mean…

This version of the Triton Neo 16 I have here is I guess what you’d call the mid-range model. It sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H – great name I know – which is technically a 16 core part, but not really. This is a Meteor Lake chip – video in the cards above to explain why that’s interesting – which means it has two Low Power Island E cores, eight standard E cores, and six P cores, with the six P cores doing most of the heavy lifting for performance oriented tasks. That is paired with 16GB of soldered LPDDR5X RAM, an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU with 8 GB of VRAM, and in my case 2TB of SSD space, which if we take a peek inside you’ll see that’s actually two 1TB SK Hynix drives in RAID 0 – a bit of a dangerous game both Asus, and now Acer, are playing with your data. Oh, and that 4060 Laptop GPU is limited to just 110W of peak power consumption – down from 140W in other models. 

That Core Ultra 7 chip – the 155H “hexadeca core” – does offer some impressive compute performance. Cinebench R23 has it doing pretty damn well in multi-threaded work at around 18,000 points, which puts it up against the 13900H and 12900H, both of which are near top-end parts, compared to this ‘7’ class part. The single-threaded performance is surprisingly weak though. It’s still decent – hell it matches or beats any of the 7th gen Ryzen parts I’ve tested, but compared to the 2000+ points the higher end last-gen Intel parts can offer, well it’s a little concerning. I wonder if that’ll affect gaming performance. (That, kids, is called foreshadowing…)

Blender has the 155H in basically the same spot, although the Ryzen parts tend to do a little better in longer workloads as they are almost always more efficient, so can sustain their boost power levels for longer, hence why the 7940HS basically matches the 155H here in the Gooseberry render. The interesting part here is the power consumption, because even looking at the stable load power, rather than the peak, the 155H sucks back 63 watts, whereas that 7940HS only needed 47 watts to provide essentially the same performance. Hell the peak that Ryzen chip hit was 60W, 3W lower than the average from the Core Ultra 7. That managed to peak at 93 watts, proving despite the two sets of “efficiency cores”, these are still power hungry monsters. 

As for gaming performance, at least at native resolution – which is 2560 by 1600 – you can expect anywhere from a decent 220 FPS average in Siege and 186 FPS average in CS2, to an mediocre 86 FPS in Hitman, 84 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 77 FPS in Cyberpunk, and 70 FPS in Starfield, to an abysmal 60 FPS in Flight Simulator and 55 FPS in Fortnite. This isn’t exactly stellar performance, if I’m honest, and I think it’s definitely let down by the lower TDP of that GPU. If it had more power on tap, it might be able to push a bit harder and actually make use of the 240 hertz refresh rate this thing offers – it doesn’t even hit that in Siege or CS2, which is somewhat disappointing really.

When testing at 1080p for the sake of a fair comparison, in CS2 you’ll find the Triton Neo 16 towards the bottom of the chart, only just beating the higher powered Nitro 5 which sports an RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, and quite the delta to the next highest result, a much more power hungry XMG Core 16. In Cyberpunk you do see a distinction between the 4050 and 4060 here, but hell even the lower power 4060 in the Nitro V15 I reviewed recently beats this Triton. That might be down to the hybrid chip design in the CPU though. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the same story, although this time the Triton does edge out the V15 – but only slightly. For context, Acer’s Helios Neo 16 (which also uses a 4060) offered 159 FPS average here, compared to just 128 FPS on the Triton. Fortnite has the Triton at the back of the pack. Admittedly it’s pretty close to the V15 and even the Focus 16, but still. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the same story – at the back of the pack, behind even the 4050 Nitro 5 here, and lightyears behind the Helios Neo 16. Hitman 3’s built in benchmark lets me split out the CPU and GPU performance data, and this is the GPU data, where frankly I’m shocked to see this RTX 4060 Laptop chip be so far behind. It’s literally 10 FPS behind the 4050 – admittedly the much higher powered 4050 mind you – but that’s not great. Siege has the Neo again towards the back, at least this time reasonably higher than the V15 and Nitro 5, and closer to the Core 16. Lastly in Starfield, again, it’s towards the back of the pack with 73 FPS average, about 10 FPS behind the best result from another RTX 4060 Laptop GPU machine, the XMG Pro 16 Studio. 

Now this all seems pretty disappointing, but it turns out there is both a reason for that, and a potential, if flawed, solution. See, I test these laptops on the most realistic power mode – normally “performance”, or in this case “gaming” – although I do normally test the highest end mode too and I’ll include that data if it’s significantly different. In this case, the “gaming” mode is more like a quiet mode (although not exactly quiet). Here’s a look at the GPU power consumption through the Cyberpunk 2077 built in benchmark run. Orange is “gaming”, blue is “turbo”, and yeah you can see a pretty obvious difference. The gaming mode limits performance pretty hard, meaning the 4060 is only drawing around 50 watts here, compared to a stable 70 watts in turbo. That still isn’t quite the 110W it can draw, although in other games turbo does actually hit up to 110W. The catch is that in turbo mode this thing is incredibly loud, and the fans have that annoying high pitched whine to them that is frankly off putting. 

With that said, here’s a look at the gaming results with turbo mode included. CS2 only sees a marginal improvement, likely because it’s very much CPU limited and turbo mode doesn’t do much for the CPU – in fact it actually made it a touch slower in my testing, including single threaded. Cyberpunk sees a considerable uplift though, to much more middle of the pack, and much more reasonable performance at 114 FPS average. Shadow of the Tomb Raider too sees a significant uplift to much closer to the mid-field. It isn’t quite a match for the higher TDP versions of the 4060, but that isn’t too surprising. Fortnite sees an exceptional rise, where it now basically matches the Helios Neo 16 – admittedly that was just on the performance/gaming mode rather than turbo. In Flight Simulator there isn’t as much of an improvement – I meant 10 FPS isn’t anything to shrug at, but it isn’t quite mid-field even with 10 FPS more. Hitman equally sees a pretty minimal improvement in the standings, although again 15 FPS extra is fantastic on its own. Siege sees a more impressive rise to 324 FPS average, up from just 280 FPS on the gaming mode, and Starfield sees the best performance I’ve tested at 92 FPS average when using Turbo mode, so that’s great news. 

As for the display, that is actually really pretty nice. As the big stickers say, this is a 1600p 240Hz, 3 millisecond claimed response time panel that is Calman certified. What that means is it should look stunning, and honestly, it does. It’s bright, vibrant, the colours really pop and look vivid and sharp. I really like looking at this thing. Colours wise my SpyderX2 reckons this covers 99 percent of the DCI P3 spectrum, or 73 percent or Rec2020. You’re also looking at a little over 500 nits of peak brightness, although something I definitely noticed was the lacking contrast – with the SpyderX2 reporting a contrast ratio of just 780:1 at full brightness, and only 970:1 at 0 percent brightness. That isn’t great, and means that black looks grey, and especially the darker shades all kind of blend together, rather than nicely stand out. Still, accuracy is good with an average DeltaE of just 1.3 – with no results peaking over the target of 2, which is excellent. Honestly, to the eye, this is a very pretty panel. The contrast is a shame, but you can still enjoy content on this for sure. Hell, even games look great!

Happily Acer does include an overdrive setting in their predator sense software – along with a bunch of other customisation settings, including performance modes, fan modes, and keyboard lighting controls. It’s a good thing they do include the overdrive mode, because without it you’re looking at an average response time of 8 milliseconds – basically twice that of the refresh rate. That’s really not good. Happily if you enable the overdrive mode you bring that average down to just 4.76 millisecond, which is much closer to the refresh rate window. Taking a look at the high speed footage you can see it isn’t quite there, with the frame moving on before it really finishes drawing, and there’s still at least two copies of the frame on screen at any one time, but it’s a lot better than the without – here’s what that looks like for reference. The ghosting is definitely more prevalent, and makes for a more blurry, smeary gaming experience. If you have one of these machines I’d definitely recommend turning overdrive on!

As for input lag, that was pretty spot on at around three milliseconds, which is pretty much what I’d expect to see here. That means the gaming experience – at least on higher performing titles like Siege – is actually pretty good. It isn’t exactly a pro gamer machine, but it’s more than good enough to have an enjoyable time with it. On turbo the fan noise is definitely distracting if you aren’t using headphones, but if you are, well then you get a much better experience. You still can’t make good use of the 240 hertz refresh rate in most games, but it’s still a pretty good time. I’d also note the keyboard is pretty nice for gaming, it’s reasonably tactile and feels pretty fast actuating. It’s also pretty nice to type on.

The trackpad is massive and actually really nice to use. It has all the gestures you’d want and frankly makes the thing really easy to use. IO wise it’s a little strange. On the left you’ve got two USB C ports – one of which is Thunderbolt – a combo audio jack and DC in, and on the right you’ll find HDMI, two USB A ports and a microSD card reader. Having the USB A ports only on the right is a bit annoying for where your mouse normally sits, and only having two, I guess in favour of a USB C hub, is a bit of a shame. I suppose Acer is going for the more premium thin and sort of light category here so I suppose it makes sense.

A peek inside shows you that cooling solution – it’s mighty thin, which likely contributes to both the noise, the lower TDPs, and the fairly high heat too. As mentioned at the start you do have two M.2 slots, although those are populated with two 1TB SK Hynix drives in RAID 0, so at least in this config it isn’t exactly upgradable without a full backup first. RAM is unfortunately soldered, so even if you wanted 32GB of RAM, you can’t have it on this. Oh, and the battery is a decent but not massive 76 Wh unit, which if you’re just web browsing at moderate brightness should last a decent amount, although of course for gaming you’re talking minutes not hours.

Overall, the Triton Neo 16 is a bit of a weird one. For £1,900 I don’t think I can justify the performance you get out of this. Sure, on the turbo mode it is ok, but it’s noisy as hell and the performance still only just about matches a generation old Helios Neo 16, so unless you really care about this being a touch slimmer, and admittedly more premium thanks to that metal shell, the Helios might be a better choice. For £500 off though, well that’s a lot more interesting. That does still make it £1,400, which is a lot of money, but it becomes a much better value for money. At that price I think the performance is much more fitting, and then the benefits of 2TB of storage, and a very nice built quality actually become relevant.