Review: Acer Predator Triton 500 Thin & Light Gaming Laptop with Intel Core i7-9750H and RTX 2060 (PT515-51-75BH)
Most gaming laptops tend to be thick and bulky. They are usually heavy, they make lot of noise and they tend to heat up. Acer is trying to address these challenges with Triton 500 gaming laptop. It has the horsepower of a gaming laptop but the form factor of an ultrabook. Is it any good? Let's find out
When you open this laptop, you are greeted with a large 15.6 inch display with minimal bezels. There is bit of a chin on the bottom bezel, but that cannot be avoided because it houses all of the cooling and circuit boards. The top bezel houses the webcam at its center, which in my opinion is the perfect place for a webcam. I cannot stand laptops which put webcam in obscure places creating awkward camera angles. No one wants to see your nostrils during a Skype chat, so laptop makers please stop putting webcam on the keyboard. Now let's talk about the screen quality. It's a Full HD screen clocking 1920 by 1080 resolution. This is an LED backlit IPS panel with 144Hz refresh rate. Typical laptop screens only have 60Hz refresh rate. This higher 144Hz refresh rate creates a smooth gaming experience with minimal motion blur. The screen is also bright and will not struggle in brightly lit rooms. It outputs 300 nits of brightness which is pretty good for a high refresh rate screen. The color reproduction is vivid and consistent, even when viewing at extreme angles. This is easily one of my favorite gaming laptop screens
Specifically Core-i7 9750H which belongs to the Coffee Lake family. This is a 6 core 12 thread processor with a base clock speed of 2.6 GHz. It is capable of automatically overclocking all the way up to 4.5 GHz. On Passmark CPU benchmark, this CPU scores a whopping 13565 points. Here is a chart of Top 10 Common Laptop CPUs, and as you can see Core-i7 9750H is right on the top. This is a kickass CPU and you will have no trouble playing any game on this laptop.
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Design & Built Quality
Triton 500 comes in many flavors, but configuration that I have here delivers the best bang for bucks. This is running Intel Core i7 9th Generation processor along with Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics. Check the current price here. I think this is a very enticing price point, because you are getting a sleek ultrabook with the innards of a powerful gaming laptop. Triton 500 is only 0.7 inches thick, that's comparable to typical ultrabook. It is also reasonably light, weighing around 4.6 pounds. For a 15.6 inch laptop with a discrete RTX 2060 GPU, that's pretty light. The chassis is made of aluminum giving this laptop a very classy look and feel. There is a Predator logo on the top of the lid which is illuminated in a pleasant blue color. The rest of the design is more muted and subtle. I like the fact that Triton 500 does not have an overly aggressive design, which plagues a lot competing gaming laptopsDisplay
When you open this laptop, you are greeted with a large 15.6 inch display with minimal bezels. There is bit of a chin on the bottom bezel, but that cannot be avoided because it houses all of the cooling and circuit boards. The top bezel houses the webcam at its center, which in my opinion is the perfect place for a webcam. I cannot stand laptops which put webcam in obscure places creating awkward camera angles. No one wants to see your nostrils during a Skype chat, so laptop makers please stop putting webcam on the keyboard. Now let's talk about the screen quality. It's a Full HD screen clocking 1920 by 1080 resolution. This is an LED backlit IPS panel with 144Hz refresh rate. Typical laptop screens only have 60Hz refresh rate. This higher 144Hz refresh rate creates a smooth gaming experience with minimal motion blur. The screen is also bright and will not struggle in brightly lit rooms. It outputs 300 nits of brightness which is pretty good for a high refresh rate screen. The color reproduction is vivid and consistent, even when viewing at extreme angles. This is easily one of my favorite gaming laptop screens
CPU
Now let's talk about internal hardware specs. When it comes to a gaming laptop, the most important spec is the CPU. Acer has made a great choice by going with 9th Generation Intel Core i7 processor.
GPU
OK, so what about the GPU? Acer Triton 500 comes with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. This GPU is based on the desktop RTX 2060 architecture. That means you get 1920 CUDA cores, 240 Tensor cores and 30 RT cores. But in order to conserve power and remain cool, it runs at a reduced clock frequency. RTX 2060 has a whopping 6 GIG of GDDR6 video memory. This means you will get a desktop PC class performance, somewhere between GTX 1660 and GTX 1060 Ti. Its that good, this is a kickass GPU. So the combination Core-i7 9750H and RTX 2060 means you can pretty much play any game on this laptop without stuttering or dropping frames.Upgrades
BTW, in addition to gaming, this laptop is also an excellent content creation workstation. The 6-core 12 thread core-i7 paired with this powerful GPU provides a perfect machine for running photoshop and various video editing softwares like Adobe suite or Davinci Resolve. If you are looking for a powerful laptop to edit your 4K videos, this is the one. It comes with 16 GIG of DDR4 RAM and 512 GIG of PCIe NVMe SSD which should be good enough for most folks. If you are planning to upgrade either the RAM or SSD, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that both RAM and SSD are upgradeable. The bad news is that the motherboard is mounted in an inverted orientation. This means that both DIMM slots and M.2 Slots are not easily accessible. In order to access them, you would have to remove a bunch of ribbon cables and pull the entire motherboard out of the system. Most folks won't be comfortable performing this extensive surgery on their gaming laptops.Thermals
When it comes to gaming laptops, one of the most overlooked feature is thermal management. When you have packed a Core-i7 and RTX 2060 in a thin and light design, keeping the laptop cool and comfortable will require some thermal engineering. The Triton 500 has three fans with serrated edges to maximize airflow and reduce noise. The three fans tie into five heat pipes to spread the heat. There are large intake and exhaust vents on the rear and side of the laptop. This design allow as much air as possible to be moved through the chassis. The cooling system is also tied to Acer’s PredatorSense software. The software allows you to manually adjust fan speeds or leave them on AUTO and let software decide the appropriate speedKeyboard & Trackpad
The Triton 500 comes with a compact membrane-style keyboard. It has a cool white accent which is partially see-through allowing you to showoff RGB lighting. The keyboard is not mechanical but feels great while typing. It has a satisfying 1.7 mm key travel which is perfect for long typing sessions. The keys offer about 70 grams of actuation force which results in nice clicky feedback. There is no per-key illumination, instead the keyboard is split into three zones which can be set to different colors. Overall I am very impressed with this keyboard and it's great for both gaming and long typing sessions. Moving on to the trackpad, its just the right size at 4.1 by 2.5 inches. The surface feels very smooth and supports multi-touch gestures like pinch and zoom, three-finger tap and four-finger swipe. The bottom corners of the trackpad offer springy clicky feedback.. The port situation is pretty good. You get all the ports you need including thunderbolt and mini displayport. The battery life is also pretty decent clocking about 6 hours.Conclusion: The bottom line
OK So here are my final thoughts. For a gaming laptop, Predator Triton 500 strikes a nice balance between usability, design, and functionality. This is a great laptop for both gaming and content creation like video editing and photoshop.Purchase Acer Predator Triton 500
Disclosure: Some links may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases