Acer Predator Triton 500 (2020) – Review 2020

The Predator Triton 500 (starts at $1,699.99; $2,599.99 as tested) is Acer’s flagship 15-inch gaming laptop, now updated for 2020. We praised it highly on its debut last year, and virtually all of what we loved is back with this year’s model, but with updated components. Our test unit is a highly tricked-out configuration (headlined by a GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics chip), so your model doesn’t have to be quite so expensive (or as powerful), but it’s very appealing to those who can afford it. Given that it is a premium laptop, even its starting price is high, but regardless of the configuration this well-made, portable, and feature-packed gaming rig remains one of our favorites, even if it doesn’t unseat the Editors’ Choice Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 for value. 

Sleek Styling, and a Peak-Tech Screen

At first glance, the Triton 500 looks much like 2019’s model. Although that means there’s no major overhaul, the original version was quite good, from both build-quality and design standpoints. The chassis is all metal, giving the system the premium feel you’d expect for the price, and the appealing black and light-blue color scheme remains.

On the less positive side, the screen bezel is still a cheaper, flimsier-feeling plastic, though this isn’t an element you need to touch much, or at all. The Triton 500 is not totally identical to last year’s model: The word “Predator” no longer appears on the lid, just the logo, which for me is an improvement. 

The chassis measures the same 0.7 by 14.1 by 10 inches and weighs 4.63 pounds, also the same as its predecessor. The construction and size put the Triton 500 in the good company of some of our other favorite high-end laptops like the Razer Blade 15 and Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502. The former comes in at 0.7 by 14 by 9.25 inches and 4.6 pounds, while the latter is 0.74 by 14.2 by 9.9 inches and 4.55 pounds. These are the cream of the crop among high-end gaming laptops for design and performance, and the Triton 500 fits right in.

The design sharing between the new and old model doesn’t extend to the features and components. The full HD IPS display on this unit features Nvidia G-Sync and a 300Hz refresh rate, something we have started to see (and will continue to see more of) in high-end gaming laptops. No, most games won’t reach, or even approach, 300-frame-per-second (fps) frame rates on this laptop, but performance hounds want to go as high as they can for a select few multiplayer titles. 

The screen quality is good, with a matte finish that cuts down on reflections and high brightness at maximum level. The 1080p resolution makes sense, even if you may want a higher resolution in AAA games. The RTX 2080 Super GPU would be quite capable of respectable frame rates at 1440p, but that’s still pretty strenuous, especially on a laptop. Acer opted to maximize frame rates in all cases, and I think that’s the right call on a machine with a 300Hz screen.

Premium Parts: A Top-of-the-Line Configuration

As for those components, our higher-end SKU is packed with some of the most powerful options available. This $2,599.99 model nets you a 10th Generation “Comet Lake” Intel Core i7-10750H processor, 32GB of memory, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super (Max-Q) GPU mentioned earlier, and a 1TB solid-state drive. That’s about as fully kitted as you’ll see a 15-inch gaming rig in 2020. Some 17-inch models may boast Core i9 CPUs, and full-power rather than Max-Q versions of GPUs, but it’s difficult to fit much more power than this in a slim 15-inch chassis.

Our new model carries the 10th Generation chip I mentioned, but less-expensive configurations use the previous-generation Core i7-9750H. The starting model rings up at $1,699.99 with 16GB of memory, an RTX 2060 GPU, and a 512GB SSD. Between that and our unit, Acer offers multiple models that cover the spectrum of GPU power (RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 non-Super), as well as RAM and storage capacities between the base and top end.

Last but not least, we come to the rest of the build. The keyboard is comfortable to type and play on, and features per-key-programmable RGB backlighting. The keys have a nice bounce, and are neither too shallow nor too mushy, while the individual key lighting allows for fun color and effect customization. The touchpad is a bit small, but it’s responsive and gave me no cause for complaint.

The Triton 500 includes a useful array of ports, starting with an HDMI port, a USB 3.1 Type-A port, audio jacks, and an Ethernet jack on the left flank. The right side holds two more USB 3.1 ports, a USB-C connection with Thunderbolt 3 support, and a mini DisplayPort connection. All the bases are covered here (and then some), so kudos to Acer on this front.

A few extras round out the Triton 500 and help contribute to its high price tag. Acer prides itself on its Vortex Flow fan design, which now includes three custom internal fans, one of which is the company’s advanced all-metal AeroBlade 3D fan. I’m paying extra attention to the cooling technology because I think the Triton 500 runs a bit quieter than most gaming laptops while playing, so Acer’s extra effort seems to be having an effect.

You can set the fan speed in the included Predator software to run at automatic, or always at maximum speed. The latter is of course louder, but the auto setting kept games running smoothly and balanced the noise. The software (as well as a dedicated Turbo button above the keyboard) also lets you swap among some GPU power presets (normal, fast, and extreme) in the “overclocking” tab. I normally find these types of settings add a few frames per second in game testing, but I didn’t notice much improvement in this case. Your mileage may vary by game, but in any case, let’s check out those base numbers.

Performance Testing: Enthusiast-Grade Power

I’ve put together a list of relevant gaming laptops to give some context to the Triton 500’s performance; you can see those models in the table below.

In addition to the previous version of this laptop, I’ve included the flagship machines from several competitors. These are similarly priced and equipped 15-inch laptops—check out the chart to see what they’re packing.

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

As you’d hope, the Triton 500’s 10th-generation processor performed better in this test than its predecessors. The gulf isn’t huge, but it is noticeable, especially because we don’t often see much separation between gaming laptops. The multimedia tests below will provide deeper detail. As far as the storage test, all of these snappy SSDs provided fast boot and load times, which benefit gaming greatly.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.

The results on these tests are a bit of a mixed bag. The Triton 500’s CPU is certainly fast, especially if you look at the Photoshop results, but it wasn’t superior across the board (as you’d hope considering it’s newer than most of them). I could get into the nitty gritty with each result, but it doesn’t ultimately matter too much: If the gap between other laptops was significant, I’d recommend one over the other for multimedia work, but they each excel in different areas. More crucially, none will top a specialized professional workstation. Instead, they’ll all do in a pinch for hobbyists who need to edit photos or video. This six-core, 12-thread CPU is up to the job in that context, and it makes multitasking (even while gaming) more efficient.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.

The Triton 500 performed well if not spectacularly in these tests. The scores are objectively high, but expectations were just as high given the components. The MSI GS66 Stealth was the first laptop we reviewed with this GPU, and when I was testing that laptop, I was a bit underwhelmed as it trended a bit too close to theoretically less powerful GPUs.

At the time, I was unsure if the performance was due to MSI’s execution, but the Triton 500 falls right alongside it, or even lower. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super is the most potent mobile GPU available, so it should easily top the charts, but there wasn’t much separation in either case. It seems the tuned-down Max-Q version takes a meaningful hit compared to the unrestricted RTX 2080 Super, bringing it close to the RTX 2070. This same trend held true in the next tests.

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality settings (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).

Once again, these are very high frame rates, and many gamers would be pleased to get this performance from their laptops. But the price tag is high, and you’re paying extra for the RTX 2080 Super. There is some gain over the 2019 Triton 500 (part of which can be attributed to two generations of CPU improvements and double the RAM), but the gains are pretty small compared to the Razer Blade 15. The non-Max-Q version of the RTX 2080 Super likely has the power to impress, but here, it’s only for those who want to squeeze every possible extra frame out of their laptop.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

Acer did improve the Triton 500’s battery compared to the original model, but it’s still pretty short. Four hours will buy you some time off the charger, but even among notoriously short-lived gaming laptops, the Triton doesn’t quite endure.

Top-End Gear for the Hardcore Crowd

From a design and build standpoint, I’m a big fan of the Predator Triton 500. It gets a bit trickier once I discuss our rather expensive test configuration.

The top model goes for broke, packing in all the high-end features a gamer could want, and it’s no doubt impressive. The RTX 2080 Super Max-Q GPU stumbles somewhat compared to Nvidia’s other options, and so I wouldn’t recommend our particular model for anyone looking for a deal—lesser configurations will give you better bang for your buck. It’s a different story if price is no object.

Regardless of your budget and which configuration you choose, the laptop itself is attractive and feels high quality, giving the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502 and Razer Blade 15 a run for their money again this year. The former remains our Editors’ Choice, as a superior value, but we can definitely recommend the Triton 500 if you like its design and feature set.

Acer Predator Triton 500 (2020) Specs

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