Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 AI Review

Design and Keyboard

• Compact and lighter chassis than rivals
• Solid port selection
• Decent keyboard and smaller trackpad

The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI, in perhaps no surprise to anyone, is essentially a downsized version of its bigger brother and carries similar design cues to other recent Predator Helios Neo models. This means a stylish dark blue metal chassis on top and bottom, with a plastic slab in the middle for a pleasant offset and a generally good look. It’s one of the only compact gaming laptops I’ve seen with a shelf at the back, intriguingly.

The 1.9kg weight here isn’t too off-piste for a gaming-centred choice with a more modest screen size, and at least keeps it decently portable if you want to sling it in a bag and take on a train or similar. Just beware of the bulky 230W charger that this laptop comes with, which isn’t downsized to a more travel-friendly size.

The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI sits at 21mm or so thick, which makes it reasonably slender for a gaming laptop, and means it isn’t compromising on ports, either. The left side houses a  USB-C, USB-A, a headphone jack and DC port for charging, while on the right, you get a further USB-C and USB-A, plus a full-size HDMI and a MicroSD card reader.

Opening the lid up reveals a 75 percent layout keyboard, complete with arrow keys, a slimmed-down nav cluster and a function row. The keyboard feels tactile and almost soft to the touch, and it’s a pleasant typing feel. It is also RGB-backlit with quite bright backlighting for after-dark use or an added dose of atmosphere.

The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI’s trackpad is okay in terms of size, if a little small. Tracking feels smooth and accurate, and it is a generally responsive option.

Display and Sound

• Rich, high-res OLED screen
• Exemplary black levels, contrast, and colour accuracy
• Reasonable speakers

Acer has opted for a compact. high-res OLED panel with the Predator Helios Neo 14 AI, with a 14.5-inch option with a 2880×1800 resolution for lovely detail across a smaller screen. The 120Hz refresh rate means motion isn’t as strong or responsive as with larger-screened rivals that go for a 240Hz option, for instance.

Being an OLED means we’re getting the signature inky blacks and excellent dynamic range, as demonstrated by the measured 0.01 black level and 28770:1 contrast ratio results I managed with my colorimeter. Its 6700K colour temperature is virtually bang-on.

A peak SDR brightness of 394.1 gives decently punchy images for an OLED screen, and proves that they don’t always necessarily fall foul of being dimmer than some more ‘standard’ IPS and Mini LED options found on rival machines.

Colour accuracy here is typically excellent for an OLED screen, too. The 100% sRGB result means mainstream colours are virtually perfectly represented, plus the 100% DCI-P3 and 96% Adobe RGB results mean this OLED panel is ideally-suited for more colour-sensitive or creative tasks.

The speakers here are generally fine for casual listening, with decent depth and clarity, although they are lacking in low end a smidgen. You’re better off utilising the headphone jack for more serious listening.

Performance

• Potent Arrow Lake-H CPU
• Gaming performance is good with an RTX 5070
• Decent RAM and storage configuration

In lieu of its more compact form factor and in spite of a higher price tag, the power core on offer from the Predator Helios Neo 14 AI is a little surprising. We’ve got the combo of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor and an RTX 5070 8GB laptop GPU.

The Core Ultra 9 285H is the flagship of the Arrow Lake-H lineup we’ve previously encountered in the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), complete with 16 cores and 16 threads.

The core arrangement is split between six Performance cores, eight Efficiency Cores and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. There is also a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz, making this quite the brisk chip for any laptop, let alone a gaming one.

The chip is designed as more of an efficient alternative to the beefier HX chips you’d expect to see in a top-tier gaming laptop that costs as much as this one, including the 16-inch Predator Helios Neo. It is perhaps indicative of Acer’s positioning of the Predator Helios Neo 14 AI as a laptop for both hardcore gamers and creative professionals in the marketing bumf.

Its results in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 are capable, with strong single and multi-threaded scores, given Intel’s bundling of 16 cores with this chip. Its results are strong against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip inside the Asus ProArt P16 (2025) (that also has an RTX 5070 inside). 

With this in mind, in multi-threaded tasks, though, the Core Ultra 9 275HX you’ll find in other options, such as the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate and the 16-inch model of this laptop, is better, given the eight extra cores and threads it provides.

As much as the Core Ultra 9 285H is a potent chip, the choice to opt for an RTX 5070 in a laptop at this price is a little baffling, especially considering it is possible to go for the RTX 5070 Ti and even an RTX 5080 in some discounted models in and around the £2000 price point.

Performance here is worse in games than the RTX 5070 Ti-powered Predator Helios Neo 16S AI, but results are nonetheless strong. At 1080p, we’re getting 86.28fps and 93fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal, respectively, with Rainbow Six Extraction even higher at 180ps. For 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal are still playable at 54.33fps and 67fps. Rainbow Six Extraction is virtually untroubled at 119fps, maxing out the 120Hz refresh rate of the screen.

Bringing the DLSS Transformer upscaler to the party with Cyberpunk took non-ray-traced results up to 96.24fps at 1080p and to 56.50ps at the laptop’s native 2880×1800 resolution. RT: Ultra Cyberpunk was in single figures at both 1080p and native resolution in spite of my troubleshooting. With DLSS, results seemed to go back to normal with 48.54fps at 1080p.

Being a 50-series laptop means the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI benefits from Nvidia’s clever Multi-Frame-Gen tech that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one, thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. The addition of these frames is reliant upon a base FPS figure that is high enough to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy.

With this, it’s able to mean you can take advantage of high refresh rate displays with smooth and responsive output without much of a penalty in latency. Using the maximum 4x multiplier, it was able to take Cyberpunk 2077 with RT: Ultra at 2880×1800 resolution to 132.81fps, and at 1080p, pushed it to 256.74fps. The latter result is actually ahead of the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI.

The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI also comes with 32GB of DDR5 RAM to allow for good headroom for intensive loads such as gaming and heavy multi-tasking, while the 1TB SSD is capacious and reasonably brisk with measured reads and writes of 6493.10MB/s and 4705.24MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Some useful Acer apps pre-installed
• No real other bloatware

The Predator Helios Neo 14 AI features a pleasantly clean Windows 11 install with little bloatware and some Acer-specific apps installed. These include PredatorSense, a catch-all system app that allows you to check on your system’s vitals, as well as to fiddle with settings such as power and battery modes and configure the RGB lighting of the keyboard.

As much as there is a Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 3 hours 41 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

As much as the Predator Helios Neo 14 AI is more compact than its bigger brother, Acer has still stuck with the same 76Wh battery inside, which it claims will allow this laptop to run for up to seven hours on a charge. That’s okay, but not ground-breaking.

In my testing in the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark with the screen at the requisite 150 nits, this Acer laptop lasted for just three hours and 41 minutes. That’s quite a poor result, considering its beefier 16-inch brother lasted for virtually an hour and a half longer. MSI’s Stealth A16 AI+ managed closer to five hours.

This Predator Helios Neo 14 AI comes with a beefy 230W DC power brick, making it a little less portable than its form factor has otherwise shown, and its charging speeds are about average. It took 30 minutes to put 50 percent back into this laptop’s battery, and 80 minutes to get it fully charged.

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Should you buy it?