Summary
Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 2023.. With the new Predator Helios Neo 16 ($1,199 as reviewed), Acer focused on power and included several enhancements that you’d often expect to spend more for. These consist of a very brilliant 16-inch display, a quick solid-state drive, and a workstation-grade 13th Gen Intel Core HX CPU. Although the Helios Neo 16 is a quite large model, it falls slightly short of midrange champions such as the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. In the meanwhile, it provides consumers on a tight budget with a little faster option than the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, the winner of our Editors’ Choice award for inexpensive gaming laptops.
The Acer Predator Design: A Bulkier Build for More Serious Silicon
The Neo 16 seems like a typical gaming laptop right out of the box. Its design and components are superior to those of other low-cost gaming laptops due to a few small adjustments. But in the end, it’s just a large block of (mainly) plastic that’s prepared for gaming.
The softer feel and dazzling sheen of the keyboard top contrast with the rough underbelly. Regarding the plastics, the keyboard deck bends somewhat around the center but seems sturdy overall. On the keyboard, Acer included four zones of RGB lighting: three zones illuminated the primary keys, while the fourth zone mostly covered the number pad. At the crossing locations, there will be some light leakage, preventing the zones from being completely isolated from one another.
The keyboard itself is erratic, much like the lightning on it. With or without illumination, the keys are plainly visible and have a respectable travel. Nevertheless, Acer places full-size arrow keys between the number pad and the main keyboard, which causes the number pad’s zero key to be smaller and the right Shift key to be regretfully downsized. Additionally, Acer designates a key above the number pad for their Predator Sense software, which does nothing more than significantly alter the number pad’s standard layout. Some of the keycaps can wobble a bit, especially at the bottom edges, but other than that, they are quite steady and constant.
Beneath the keyboard, Acer has included a large, smooth touchpad that clicks silently and with a nice tactile feel.
The screen cover is made of metal, adding a little luxury touch, even if the display is surrounded by plastic bezels. One of the laptop’s best qualities is the display, even with its unconventional configuration. This 16-inch screen is G-Sync compliant and has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is less common at this price point (though it is rapidly changing). The Predator Helios Neo 16 display deviates even farther from the cheap realm with its wide color coverage and strong brightness—two aspects where cheap gaming laptop displays often fall short.
This big, heavy system is the result of the powerful gaming internals and the enormous display. At 5.7 pounds, it is more substantial than the 16-inch laptops from Lenovo that are in competition, including the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 and Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. With its 14.2-inch width and 11-inch depth, it has a substantial mass due to its 1.18-inch thickness. Acer Predator Helios Neo 16’s protruding rear end adds just enough additional depth to make it difficult to fit into certain backpacks.
At least Acer made advantage of the area to further its main function, which is gaming. In order to do this, the system has a ton of useful ports. A microSD card slot, an Ethernet port, a headphone jack, and a USB-A connector are located on the left side. There are two extra USB-A ports on the right side.
On the back side of the laptop, between the rear exhausts, Acer also included a power connector, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, and two Thunderbolt 4 connections. A couple more of these connections, especially Ethernet, which is most likely to be utilized while the laptop is at a desk, could have been moved to the rear for convenience. Nonetheless, single-cable docking configurations that leave the majority of the side ports free are possible with the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back. Additionally, using Ethernet for your internet connection is less crucial with Wi-Fi 6.
Regarding the remaining portion of the keyboard deck, Acer could have included speakers that would fire upwards in the area in front of the keyboard, but instead chose to add a grille to let even more air to enter the cooling system. This section helps guarantee that the engine won’t choke if it is placed on a soft surface that obstructs the bottom intake, since the majority of the air intake will come from the underside of the chassis. The speakers are now located toward the front corners, on the bottom of the system, due to that air intake.
Although Acer did not include any biometric login techniques, the laptop does have an improved webcam. Its 1080p model effectively displays its crispness. It serves out rather blurry photos in low light conditions and doesn’t accomplish miracles, but overall, it’s a significant improvement over the standard 720p cameras featured in many laptops at this price range.
There are simply three setups available for the Predator Helios Neo 16 sold by Acer. At $1,199, the basic model that we tested has an Intel Core i5-13500HX CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics card, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a display with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,200 pixels and a refresh rate of 165 Hz. The second option costs $1,299 and just includes an Intel Core i7-13700HX CPU upgrade. In addition to a few extra enhancements, including as twice the storage, an update to the RTX 4060 GPU, and a 2,560-by-1,600 display, the top-tier model costs $1,549.
The Display and Keyboard: Mostly, Budget Fare
The Predator Helios Neo 16’s Acer keyboard isn’t very good, but it’s still functional. It’s not horrible, but it’s also not remarkable. I was able to increase my accuracy to over 95% while typing at a pace of over 100 words per minute. I tried my hardest, but I was unable to go much quicker than that. Some of the keys seemed to me like they didn’t return to their original position fast enough when I double-pressed them. Additionally, when I press the keys there rather than in the middle of the keycaps, the soft bottom edge of the keys causes uneven typing.
On the other hand, the laptop’s touchpad is quite good. Although it’s not perfectly smooth, my fingertips go over it with ease, and the little amount of friction aids in my ability to point precisely. Compared to some touchpads that feel like they’re resting on the stiffest, cheapest button ever manufactured, the gentle, tactile clicks are a treat. The surface is roomy without being too so, and I haven’t had any problems with palm rejection when using it.
The wide screen and tall aspect ratio are great for working on the move. Despite having only 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, its display is nonetheless rather crisp. Even better, it’s simple to view in almost any situation because to the anti-glare coating and high brightness level. When you combine this with the 165Hz refresh rate, you get a passable display for online gaming and casual internet browsing. Acer chose a more colorful display that offers more brilliant graphics at every turn, in contrast to many low-cost gaming laptops that use inexpensive screens that only cover 45% of the NTSC color spectrum.
The speakers are the opposite of the display’s brightness and color. Their bass is weak, they have no punch or range, and even in calm settings, their max loudness is hardly loud enough. The built-in speakers aren’t designed for gaming, and they won’t be able to handle the noise of the fans.
Acer comes with a limited selection of pre-installed Windows programs. The laptop is equipped with DTS:X audio capabilities that improve the sound quality and get the speakers close to being useful. Although it is not as powerful or tidy as others, its Predator Sense app offers the type of hardware controls often seen on gaming laptops. It lacks a way to force a handoff between the integrated graphics and the discrete GeForce GPU, and it contains superfluous visuals (a little animated guy that I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say). The system makes mistakes from time to time, but not always. It has sometimes locked up, leaving me unable to adjust the display’s brightness. It is possible to switch between dedicated and integrated GPUs using the Nvidia Control Panel, but using the Acer app would have been more practical.
Testing the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16: All About the Muscle
The Predator Helios Neo 16 couldn’t quite start at the $999 price that defines a budget gaming laptop because of its powerful HX processor and a few higher-end components, like 16GB of RAM and an extra-bright display, but it’s not far off at a starting price of $1,199, where it offers a competitive value that a few other laptops try to match.
For a similar machine with greater storage but a smaller, duller display and an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU, the Lenovo LOQ 15 costs a little more. Next up is the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, which has an RTX 4060 graphics card and a 2,560-by-1,600 display in addition to the same Ryzen CPU. In addition to costing $1,549, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 would also benefit from 1TB of storage and an upgrade to an Intel Core i7-13700HX if it were configured accordingly.
Although there are upgrading alternatives available, less expensive laptops can pose a greater danger. Even though the MSI Cyborg 15 features a less powerful Intel Core i7-13620H, it still sports an RTX 4050 and offers a generous 16GB of RAM for the cost. More demanding is the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, our new favorite low-cost gaming laptop, which starts at $999 and sports an Intel Core i5-13500H and RTX 4050 in a premium chassis. Even though it only has 8GB of RAM, it can be readily upgraded and costs less than the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16.
Productivity Tests
UL’s PCMark 10, which replicates office and content-creation workflows with activities including word processing, spreadsheeting, web surfing, and videoconferencing, is used to assess each laptop’s capacity to manage daily workloads. We also evaluate a laptop’s storage throughput and load time using PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test.
We use all available cores and threads to conduct a series of CPU-specific benchmarks to assess how well each system’s CPU performs and to grade a PC’s readiness for processor-intensive applications. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 renders a complicated picture using the company’s Cinema 4D engine, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro mimics common applications like machine learning and PDF rendering. Lastly, we transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p quality (lower times are preferable) using the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4.
Using PugetBench for Photoshop by Puget Systems, which operates on the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s well-known image editor to score a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia, we wrap off our productivity testing with a creative workload. It’s an automatic plugin that does a wide range of standard GPU-accelerated Photoshop operations, such as applying masks, gradient fills, and filters, as well as opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images.
As a daily workhorse, the Predator Helios Neo 16 worked very well. Even though it didn’t place first in PCMark 10’s productivity test, all of these computers were quite powerful in this area, easily surpassing the 4,000-point barrier that represents excellence in daily computing.
Beyond that, the Neo 16 exhibits a PCMark 10 Storage score that even some high-end gaming laptops were unable to match, indicating that it has quicker storage than its rivals in the low- and mid-range gaming laptop market. The Intel Core i5-13500HX also performed better than the competition in most tests, including certain Ryzen 7 and Core i7 CPUs, thanks to its large chassis. This is the highest-power mobile CPU line from Intel, the HX series. This is a machine that can do strenuous tasks both during and after gameplay.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We use a combination of simulated and real-world benchmarks to assess how well gaming laptops can perform graphics tasks. The first set consists of four game simulations: 1080p and 1440p OpenGL tests in the cross-platform GFXBench 5 benchmark, and two DirectX 12 workouts from UL’s 3DMark (the more difficult Time Spy and the integrated graphics-friendly Night Raid). greater performance is achieved by rendering the latter set offscreen to support varying native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) equals greater quality.
The built-in 1080p benchmarks of three real-world games—F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege—which stand for competitive/esports shooting games, open-world action-adventure games, and simulation games, respectively, top those lists. We run Valhalla and Siege twice each on laptops, varying the image-quality settings, and F1 2021 both with and without the performance-enhancing DLSS anti-aliasing feature enabled by Nvidia.
Our simulated benchmarks revealed that the Neo 16’s RTX 4050 did not perform amazingly; instead, it performed comparably to its similarly equipped counterparts. With its powerful cooling system and 140 watts of total graphics power, the Neo 16 was able to narrowly outperform the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF and Lenovo LOQ 15. (The latter has a little performance disadvantage due to its thin construction.) These three completely destroy the MSI Cyborg 15, which is obviously unable to fully use the capability of its RTX 4050 GPU due to its 45W maximum graphics power limitation. With its RTX 4060, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 didn’t give up any ground, however.
These artificial benchmark scores performed well in actual games. When the Neo 16 is pitted against these four rivals, it performs far better than the RTX 4050 laptops in this collection, particularly MSI’s Cyborg, proving the benefit of choosing the larger, heavier device. The RTX 4050 demonstrated remarkable performance as well, easily maintaining playable performance in demanding games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and F1 2021 while easily surpassing 200 or 300 frames per second in competitive titles. Although it trailed a little in several tests, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF had impressive performance for a device that was so much more streamlined than Acer’s.
In low settings in Rainbow Six Siege, the Neo 16 turned the tables on the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and its RTX 4060, even though it lost most graphical tests. In this situation, CPU limitations are highlighted, and the Neo 16 with its potent Intel Core i5-13500HX outperformed the competition. Under such circumstances, the Neo 16 may outperform the more costly Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 for esports players who adjust their settings.
Battery and Display Tests
We test a laptop’s battery life by having it fully charged, without Wi-Fi, and without the keyboard backlight on, then playing a film. We use the publicly available Blender movie Tears of Steel, which is locally saved in 720p format. We adjust the Windows display brightness to 50% and the audio level to 100% until the machine shuts down.
Additionally, we measure the screen’s 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter) as well as the color saturation of the display—that is, what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the screen can show—using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software.
On the run, the Neo 16 won’t last too long. While modern gaming laptops sometimes exceed six hours, its battery life was barely five hours. You have a machine that you can move about but probably want to tie down when you combine that with its size and weight. However, you may be able to squeeze out a little bit extra battery life if you’re frugal with screen brightness. The laptop had to be operated at 50% brightness for our test, which in this instance resulted in an unexpectedly bright 259 nits—much higher than the rest of our test batch.
With that display, Acer at least added value. Not only is it very bright at 50%, but it is also extremely bright at 100%, reaching 490 nits for SDR material and barely missing 500 nits for HDR. Even at maximum brightness, the contrast was still deep and outperformed conventional IPS screens at 1,380:1. Additionally, the Neo 16’s color gamut coverage was enhanced over that of its less expensive rivals, resulting in noticeably more colors for a more dynamic and bright visual experience. Overall, once you’re hunkered down, the Neo 16 more than makes up for what it lacks in mobility with its visual attractiveness.
Verdict: A Credible Battlestation on a Budget
For more power, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 forgoes mobility and a really low price. This gaming laptop from Acer is reasonably priced, but it has powerful processing power, and its internal hardware is optimized to provide reasonable 1080p (or 1200p) gameplay with an RTX 4050. Its chassis and keyboard aren’t going to win any design prizes, but for the price, its display is excellent. If you’re fortunate, you may even discover this model on sale, in which case the whole package—at $100 or $200 less—would be a contender for our Editors’ Choice award.
The Neo 16 is a laptop worth taking into consideration if you mostly store it in one location. Simply said, the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF is the more reliable low-cost option.
