Acer Predator Helios 300 PH317-56 17.3 inch Gaming Laptop - (Intel Core i7-12700H, 16GB, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Ti, QHD 165Hz, Windows 11, Black)

I bought the 11th gen i9 with the 3070 (8GB) in it and this laptop is superb value for money.For the people moaning about the battery life, it is a gaming laptop so battery life will be under 2 hours. This will be the same for ANY gaming machine and they work better when plugged in, if you want good battery life then don't buy a laptop with a huge power hungry graphics card in, a massive CPU and a ton of RGB lights.The Helios wasn't too bad for bloatware but there were some things that needed removing like the AV it ships with and the trial versions of the other rubbish that came pre installed. I also turned off all the W11 telemetry and Defender so it runs far better than it normally would.It was nice to see 16GB of ram but for many modern games this needs upgrading to the maximum 32GB and you'll have to install extra storage either a 2.5" ssd/hdd or another 1TB nvme drive so budget at least another £250-300 for these upgrades.All in all though it's a lot of laptop for the money and the best value for money laptop currently on the market. I actually paid the same amount for my 6 year old GL702-VM which has a 1060 in it.

Only 2 downsides as I see it with this machine. 16gb ram is a touch stingy. And the fans on TURBO are comically loud. Like you couldn't 't be in the same room as anyone else whilst using it loud. In all honesty, unless you have headphones, YOU won't be able to be in the same room as it. Considering probably 85-90% of the Laptops performance is available with the fans at more more human friendly levels I can still recommend this. Everything else is good.*****EDIT********Despite official sources saying this laptop can take up to 32gb of ram I put 64gb inside and have had no issues.I bought this Acer to replace my outgoing Acer Aspire V3 model from 2014. My old computer had struggled for years with video editing and most types of gaming and I was in desperate need of an upgrade. After the adobe apps started loading up and telling me that my graphics drivers are not only out of date but would flat out not be supported in upcoming releases I knew the end had come for that machine.My main focus is actually productivity not gaming although there is massive overlap in requirements. The so called “creator” laptops have beautiful screens but slightly underpowered GPU’s and are costed at a massive premium. I needed something to handle Davinci Resolve, After Effects, Premier Pro, Ableton and Blender. Something mildly upgradeable with a good, colour accurate screen and a decent graphics GPU to chew through renders as fast as possible.This model ticks many boxes for me.Considering what's inside it's not as thick or heavy as what I imagined it would be. I’m used to “desktop replacement” laptops so wasn’t expecting a super thin chassis. This Helios 300 will hopefully be more durable too as the lid is metal as is some of the chassis. It does attract fingerprints easily though.The screen immediately impressed me with it's sharpness and colours. The port selection is good, 3 x usb's, 1 x thunderbolt 4, ethernet, headphone socket, mini digital display port and hdmi. The included 1 TB m.2 ssd is speedy and large enough to get all my productivity apps installed no problem.The power brick is a fair old slab of a thing ,again, to be expected as the system can draw probably 280 watts at full crack. Using Davinci 18 with 4k footage from a Pocket 4k camera is buttery smooth, a massive improvement. Scrubbing is effectively instant. I’ve done a few test exports – admittedly without tons of effects so they are not taxing the machine but it just rips through them. The screen is gorgeous and by all accounts is very colour accurate for a "gaming" pc. This makes me more confident when I'm producing video edits the colours are more likely to look right. The QHD resolution is also a noticeable upgrade from a full HD.Now you can’t buy a gaming PC and just not do some gaming on it can you? My old favourites like Starcraft 2 look fantastic on this in QHD with ultra settings.There's some included overclocking software and the machine does have a turbo button for when you want to wring every last ounce of performance out of this laptop. This mode whacks the GPU up to its full advertised power draw of 150w but comes with a heavy drawback - FAN NOISE as pointed out above. I had read a lot about this in reviews and figured it couldn't be that bad but it's *loud*. The flipside to all this is that in winter you have a viable source of heat in whatever room you're in. The airflow is so high I reckon it could rival a small fan powered heater.I haven't run it on battery other than walking between power outlets but it does show 3.5 hours runtime when the computer is basically just idling. I imagine 2.5 hours of time with general surfing and some word processing or Excel or YouTube is realistic. This will obviously tail off the more demands you place on the system. Gaming with no power connected will result in a low power mode for the GPU / CPU and subsequent drop in performance so it really needs to be plugged in to game.The keyboard has a really nice feel to it. Again in reviews I had heard the keyboard was a bit meh but I like it. Maybe compared to the absolute best out there it’s lacking but I’ve found it to be an upgrade in terms of feel from my old laptop and it has a nice muted clicky sound. The per key RGB lights put on a show but I haven’t really found a use for it as even if I was gaming I’m not sure what it’s actually useful for.All in all impressed with this. A lot of performance squeezed in. I'm looking forward to adding a second ssd at some point and upgrading the ram.