Acer Predator 17 (2017) review | Stuff

PERFORMANCE & BATTERY LIFE: POWER BY THE HOUR

You certainly can’t fault performance: with one of Intel’s Kaby Lake Core i7-7700HQ CPUs inside, the Predator 17 has plenty of power. There’s enough juice here to outmuscle a desktop PC from just a year or two ago.

The quad-core CPU usually runs at a heady 2.8GHz, but can Turbo boost up to a stonking 3.8GHz when there’s enough overhead. Trust me; there’s no 2D task that this laptop can’t handle.

That top-spec chip has sensibly been paired with 16GB of RAM, really the minimum you’d expect from a system putting such a considerable dent in your wallet. It makes multitasking a breeze, so you don’t have to worry about your hundreds of Chrome tabs bringing Windows to a standstill.

Acer has gone all-out with the storage options, too, fitting both a 128GB SSD and 1TB hard disk. The SSD gives you super-fast boot speeds and helps your games load lickety-split too, while the mechanical hard disk leaves plenty of storage space for your media collection.

Gaming power comes courtesy of Nvidia’s GTX 1070 GPU, which slots just underneath the top-end GTX 1080. It’s still more than capable of running some games at 4K, if you’re sensible with the detail settings. Stick to 2,560×1,440 resolution with high detail settings and you’ll be golden. For performance per pound, it’s hard to beat this chip.

Firing up the Witcher 3 and Dishonoured 2, the Predator 17 could happily run both at 1080p resolution and high details. The fan speed does kick up a gear, though, so this is one laptop that can’t be accused of being quiet. If you’ve got a headset on and you’re engrossed in a game, though, you’re unlikely to notice.

The GTX 1070 is also powerful enough to handle VR, whether that’s via an HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or one of the Microsoft-designed Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

This much power is not particularly battery friendly, though, and you’ll be lucky to squeeze three hours of light use out of it; when gaming, you can practically watch the battery meter empty itself. I managed just under 90 minutes. Still, given its size, you’re unlikely to have the Predator far from a power socket.