PC makers of late have been targeting game lovers due to the fact that they are willing to pay anything for their satisfaction. And Acer is the latest to jump into this arena with the new Predator 17, one of its first portable gaming machines. It’s everything one would expect from a gaming laptop: huge, heavy, and hefty specs. A gaming laptop is also a whole lot more expensive than a desktop with similar performance, and its design seriously compromises the portability advantage. It has an aggressive black and red colour scheme, with bright LEDs illuminating the keyboard and glowing stripes on the back of the screen. However, the soft rubber finish kills the vibe as it grabs fingerprints as one plays. It has a quad-core 2.6GHz i7-6700HQ Intel Skylake processor, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M GPU, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3, a 512GB SSD backing a 1TB hard drive, and a frankly gratuitous 32GB of DDR4 RAM. The display is a 17.3-inch 1080p IPS LCD.
All of this is top of the line or near to it the i7-6700 is Intel’s best mobile gaming CPU and the GTX 980M is Nvidia’s best mobile GPU, though some competing laptops include the 8GB card rather than the 4GB version found here. The display doesn’t have the best viewing angles in the world, but it looks punchy and vibrant head-on, and 1080p is the right resolution for a gaming laptop. Costing Shs6m, any gamer would love this new gadget.
The good
• Awesome power
• Sensible design
• Wonderful keyboard
The bad
• Questionable utility
• Weak trackpad
• Not quite VR-ready
