Acer’s Helios 16S Is a Powerful Gaming Laptop That Crashes Too Dang Often

The keyboard features four-zone color backlighting, tunable through Acer’s extensive PredatorSense system, which controls everything from battery charging details to whether you want to customize the logo displayed as the laptop boots. It’s available via a dedicated key above the slim numeric keypad. The other bespoke key on the machine is the Mode key, found above the top left of the keyboard. This shifts among four different performance/fan operation modes when plugged in; two of these modes are available when running on battery power.

Thanks to the numeric keypad, the keyboard and touchpad are shifted quite far to the left. This might be a case where you can adapt to the layout over time, but I found it tough to work comfortably when pushed this far to one side, especially when using the arrow keys, which spill over into both the keyboard and keypad areas.

Ports are exceptional and can be found on both sides and the rear of the device. These include two USB-C ports (one with Thunderbolt 4 support), three USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI port, a full-size Ethernet jack, and a microSD card slot. You’ll need to use the separate power jack and 230-watt A/C adapter to power the device. (The adapter itself is heavy but not particularly large, weighing 1.1 pounds.)

The screen is one of the brightest I’ve seen in years, and while the speakers aren’t particularly nuanced, they are at least plenty loud. Unfortunately, they need to be, because when the fan kicks in, which is often, it is extremely noisy.

Computer Crash

Photograph: Chris Null

Put together the whole package, and you’ve got performance to spare on pretty much anything you can throw at this system. The Helios set records nearly across the board on my battery of benchmarks, including (by far) the best GPU-related scores I’ve seen to date, handily beating the MacBook Pro M4 Pro by 50 percent on the Geekbench 6 GPU test while nearly doubling graphics performance over systems outfitted with the last generation of GeForce laptop GPUs.