Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 (2024) Review

Introduction

The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 (2024) is Acer’s big-screen mid-range beast of a gaming laptop, with potent specs including a powerful core and a large screen.

To be specific, this sample comes with a beefy Intel Core i7-14700HX processor and RTX 4070 laptop GPU, as well as a 16-inch 2560×1600 IPS screen with a 240Hz refresh rate, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

As much as that makes for a powerful mid to upper-tier machine, it isn’t as expensive as you may think at £1699/$1799, especially considering the similarly-specced MSI Vector 17HX (2024) with the same GPU, RAM and storage, but with Intel’s top Core i9-14900HX processor is some £700/$700 up the price ladder.

On paper then, it seems like the Predator Helios Neo 16 may well be one of the best gaming laptops out there in its price category. I’ve been testing it for the last couple of weeks to find out.

Design and Keyboard

• Smart looks for a gaming laptop
• Fantastic port selection
• Solid keyboard and trackpad

Make no bones about it – the Predator Helios Neo 16 is a big and flashy gaming laptop, with all sorts of aggressive cutouts and large cooling ducts and vents across the back and sides. It comes with a neat translucent piece on the rear with ‘Helios Neo 16’ lettering, apropos of the laptop’s name. 

As much as the chassis is mostly plastic, it feels excellent in-hand and weighs in at 2.64kg. For a 16-inch gaming laptop that’s packed to the rafters with beefier specs, I don’t think that’s bad. I wouldn’t exactly call its chunkier chassis svelte, but it’s still thinner some some other options.

The port selection here is sensible and plentiful, with lots of good connectivity housed across the rear, left and right sides. The back side of the Predator Helios Neo 16 features a pair of fast Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, as well as a full-size HDMI port and a DC jack for power. You get a USB-A on the left, as well as a microSD card slot, Ethernet jack and a headphone jack. The right side has a further pair of USB-A ports.

The keyboard here is decent too, with a snappy keypress that is marred somewhat by its membrane feel under finger. The layout here is reasonable, with a number pad, nav cluster and arrow keys, although the spacing feels a little off. You do get four-zone RGB backlighting for extra flashiness, too.

As for the trackpad, the Predator Helios Neo 16’s is roomy and provides good real estate for your fingers. The actuation is heavy and satisfying, and it’s rather responsive to inputs.

Display and Speakers

• Sublime resolution and refresh rate
• Excellent brightness, but middling contrast
• Speakers aren’t too strong

The Predator Helios Neo 16, in its base configuration, comes with a meagre 1920×1200 resolution screen, and it’s worth the upgrade to the much stronger option on my sample with a 2560×1600 IPS screen with a smooth 240Hz refresh rate that’s fantastic for games as much as it is for general productivity.

A major standout is how bright the screen gets with a measured peak brightness of 472.5 nits, although it is to the detriment of making the blacks appear more grey, with a measured black level of 0.43. With this in mind, dropping the brightness down greatly improves the depth and clarity of blacks, while a 1100:1 contrast ratio is in the ballpark for an IPS screen like this one.

In addition, the colour accuracy afforded by the Predator Helios Neo 16’s screen is excellent for both productivity and colour-sensitive workloads. This is proven with the 100% coverage of the mainstream sRGB space, and both the 98% DCI-P3 and 87% Adobe RGB results.

The speakers aren’t as strong as the rest of this package, though. They can get plenty loud to be heard over the sound of the hard-working cooling system of the Predator Helios Neo 16, although they don’t have too much depth or width to them. You’ll be much better off using the headphone jack for your own audio solution.

Performance

• Potent performance with the 14700HX and RTX 4070
• Good results at native resolution, especially with DLSS
• Solid RAM and storage combo, with a fast SSD

The Predator Helios Neo 16 packs in a respectable mid-range core of an Intel Core i7-14700HX processor and RTX 4070 laptop GPU that pair well with the 2560×1600 screen here, and provide good potency for gaming as well as more general workloads.

The 14700HX is a potent processor with its 20 cores (split between 8 Performance and 12 Efficiency cores) and 28 threads, providing some excellent results in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests with good single-core and great multi-threaded performance, in spite of it being a couple of generations old by this point.

Combine it with the power of the RTX 4070, and it leads to a fantastic score in the 3DMark Time Spy tests, as well as in games, too. Performance at 1080p is strong, with a 90.08fps average in Cyberpunk 2077 and a 93fps average in Returnal. Esports titles have no real trouble in this system with a 121fps result in Rainbow Six Extraction.

At 1440p, results do predictably take a little bit of a hit, but they’re still respectable – 51.93fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 66fps in Returnal, while the result in Rainbow Six Extraction virtually stayed the same at 117fps.

Adding in DLSS upscaling can take the result at the Predator Helios Neo 16’s native resolution up to above the magic 60fps threshold at 68.38fps, while it pushes a similar number with the RT: Ultra preset and DLSS at 1080p. In addition, DLSS can help the Predator Helios Neo 16 to get to 99.19fps at 1080p without any ray-tracing and yield a 47.97fps result at native resolution with ray-tracing, which is more than double what it’d be without it.

The 32GB of DDR5 RAM present in the system is excellent for more intensive tasks in terms of capacity, while its 1TB SSD is solid for storing games on. It’s quite a fast drive, with measured read and writes of 7084.06 MB/s and 5233.72 MB/s, respectively.

Software

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

The Predator Helios Neo 16 comes running Windows 11, and with a clean install that has some Acer-specific apps pre-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.

There is a specific app for the AI noise reduction of the laptop’s built-in microphone, although that’s about as far as the AI powers of the Predator Helios Neo 16 go. You do get the Copilot key for access to Microsoft’s assistant, although the 14700HX doesn’t have enough AI horsepower for this laptop to be considered a Copilot+ PC.

In addition to the system apps, this laptop comes with Firefox installed, but that’s it. No other bloatware or antivirus trials to be seen.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 3 hours 30 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

The Predator Helios Neo 16 packs in a large 90Whr cell, which is needed for the power-hungry components inside. As such, battery life isn’t this laptop’s strong point.

With the brightness at the requisite 150 nits, it managed a figure of 3 hours and 30 minutes in the PCMark 10 battery test. This means you’ll barely get through half a working day with this laptop, and be spending a lot of time at the mains. With this in mind, you’ll want to keep the Predator Helios Neo 16 plugged in to make the most of its power.

It comes with a hefty 330W power brick, so it will at least charge back up rather quickly. Going from zero to a half charge took just 24 minutes, while a full charge took just over an hour at 68 minutes.

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Should you buy it?

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