Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-54-760S Gaming Laptop | Intel i7-11800H | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU | 15.6 FHD 144Hz 3ms IPS Display | 16GB DDR4 | 512GB SSD | Killer WiFi 6 | RGB Keyboard

Absolute beast, can get hot to the touch during longer sessions though. There is no game it cant run well...

Make sure you get the one with the 3060 or higher graphics card. I have the 3060 card in mine and it runs just about every game I want it to on the highest settings with minimal to no lag or skipping.

You know Acer is speaking to you when you open the box, lift the heavy power brick, and see (because its bigger) that they are using a standard computer power cable instead of the usual brick cable (a plus, because you can misplace the cable!), but then you see a small package of screws. Why? So you can upgrade the SSD (this model shipped with 512GB) if you want.

This Acer Predator laptop is more expensive than other Acer brand lower level gaming laptops, but its hardly upgradable. It has weird design in the bottom case with very sticky parts on the hinge and side. Even with proper toolkit, its difficult to open the entire bottom case for RAM and SSD expansion. Most importantly, the laptop comes with Windows 10 Home 20H2 version OS. After initial set up of the laptop, it requires to do mandatory updates to keep up with the current system. After a few seconds of wait, the laptop tries to restart and said Windows updates are running. Then the nightmare loop happens again and again. The restart process has repeated over 50 times, but the laptop has not finished Windows updates for more than 10 hours. Just returned the laptop with original box and accessories to Amazon within 24 hours receiving it. Do not bother to contact the manufacturer for technical support, since they will tell you to do the same. The only way to resolve the issue is to open the bottom case and take out the SSD to wipe out the defective Windows 10 Home OS 20H2 version (its not compatible with latest 11th gen intel processor), and then reinstall Windows 10 Home 21H1 or Windows 11 on the laptop. You cannot do that on your own, since the laptops bottom case is very difficult to open.

Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-54-760S: $1299.99 at the time of review

This is a great laptop for a very good price, totally recommended, the only thing unexpected was the RAM sticks (nowhere says it has 2x8GB) so I assumed it had 1x16GB and got another 1x16 to expand

I was looking for a laptop with at least nVidia 3060 for a long time. Most of those I found were with a GPU that had reduced power. Well, not this baby! It is a venerable BEAST! I downloaded and installed all new drivers (including BIOS 1.07) and it works like a charm! Anything I threw at it worked flawlessly, full resolution and high/ultra settings.

So far this laptop beautifully runs everything Ive thrown at it, including Cyberpunk 2077 at 100+ FPS on high settings (with ray tracing off). Im using a LG 32GP850-B monitor overclocked to 180hz and couldnt be happier. The turbo mode definitely makes a difference in the FPS but the fan is loud. I use headphones anyways so the whole family doesnt have to hear me gaming, so it doesnt bother me at all - but if you dont use headphones just be aware of the fan noise while in turbo mode.

At first, I was amazed by the price–performance ratio of this laptop. However, the laptop just kept crashing and wouldnt turn on after I installed a system update. I took it to a local repair shop, and the guy told me that the motherboard was defective. Glad Ive found out this earlier, Im going to return it and get something else. Acer please get better with your quality control.

The graphics are not better. I would say they are the same. I didnt see any difference. The games I played feel the same. Now I play TF2 and old games, so I dont know how this thing handles newer games, but it really didnt look good for the old ones. It has a huge problem that I have found when Connected to a monitor if you leave the screen of the computer up for too long there will be no sound unless you restart everything. Also if you are using a Bluetooth speaker, for some reason after awhile the sound gets delay by 1 second. this means that when your character has already said something and now its mouth has stopped the sound will come out right after that. I am going to look on YouTube to see if there is a fix for this nonsense.