The fruits of ACER’s big CES reveal earlier this year are coming to bear, with the Predator Helios Neo 16S launching in Australia.
The all-new Predator Helios Neo 16S AI laptop offers users a slim, yet powerful option for gamers and professionals. The new slim design belies the combination of cutting-edge silicon from Intel and NVIDIA inside, with a brilliant 16” OLED display with a 240 Hz refresh rate to play your games, or work on.
The pricing starts at $3,999 with an Intel Core Ultra 7 with an NVIDIA RTX5060 GPU. The review model sent across is one of their premium models however, and jumps to $3,699 and includes an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX GeForce 5070Ti GPU driving that 16-inch 2K resolution OLED display. Want even more? There’s an even higher end option available.
I got to use – ok, let’s admit it, I got to play with the Predator Helios 16S AI for a few weeks and here’s how it went.
As gaming laptops go, the ACER Predator Helios Neo 16S AI doesn’t actually look the part. The unit simply looks like a 16” laptop, though with a funky RGB logo on the lid, and a little more booty in the hinge, with the lid inset from the rear by just shy of an inch. At just 19.9mm thin it could blend in in a business environment or hit the road with you to work during the day, and relax after hours.
While it’s fairly thin, it does weigh in at 3.96kg, so it’s more of a luggable than a portable, but it’s also not flashing RGB lights – with the exception of the 4-zone RGB keyboard and Predator logo on the lid – all of which can be fully configured, or just turned off.
That backlit keyboard expands across the entirety of the fairly large lower deck, with a keypad that actually feels fairly spacious on the left. The trackpad below is centred on the keyboard part – with it slightly off due to the keypad.
It’s always a little difficult to get used to typing on an offset keyboard, however the key travel isn’t too large, so you get a fairly instant response in games, or when typing.
The trackpad is excellent, it’s glass, smooth and responsive, with support for multi-touch gestures. It’s also massive, so you won’t have trouble finding it when you need to. I didn’t spend a large amount of time on the trackpad though as a gaming mouse is of course a far better option.
There’s a load of connectivity options to plug in that mouse with three USB Type-A and two USB-C ports, one of which is a Thunderbolt 4 port, as well as wireless options including Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 6E.
The port spread is across both the left and right, as well as the rear which also includes a HDMI 2.1 port with HDCP, an Ethernet (RJ-45) jack, and a 3.5mm headphone/speaker jack. Just a note on the port design which I like, with the barrel style connector on the charger connecting on the rear of the laptop, leaving the sides free of anything that could interfere with your gaming.
The 16” WQXGA resolution OLED panel offers great performance, with impressive viewing angles and is paired with a DTS X: Ultra tuned audio system with spatial audio support.
The OLED display is excellent. Capable of those true Blacks and stunning colours which includes HDR support. The panel also supports up to 100% DCI-P3 giving a more vibrant (and accurate) colour palette.
It’s also a 16” display with plenty of room to work on documents side-by-side, or work on editing, modelling or any project really with the colour support brilliant.
As a gaming monitor, it’s fast, with a 240Hz refresh rate with 1MS grey-to-grey response, and it supports NVIDIA G-SYNC so you can be sure your games run super smooth.
On the audio front, it sounds pretty good. There’s a little bit of peaking at higher volumes, but the sound overall has a decent all-round sound. You will find the DTS:X Ultra app installed to tune the experience with pre-set gaming audio profiles, or simply tune the EQ yourself.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 275HX with 32GB DDR5 RAM, Gen 4 M.2 SSD and of course the 12GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070TI GPU makes for a super fast system.
As a system it runs fast, however if you’re pushing the performance with the Turbo profiles you can expect some decent fan noise. There’s ACER’s 5th Gen AeroBlade 3D cooling system inside, which also includes liquid metal grease on the CPU, and precision-engineered airflow, with good ventilation underneath and raised feet to pull air in – and venting on the rear.
Of course we’re not here to look at cooling – it’s gaming we want, and the ACER Predator Helios Neo 16S AI delivers in spades.
Throwing the likes of Crysis Remastered, Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Rise of the Tomb Raider and of course a little bit of Grounded 2 you’ll be satisfied with the results. Bumping the graphics to high (or Can it run Crysis mode), the laptop consistently set 60-80fps scores, with some peaking higher even during intense battle scenes.
Suffice to say, there’s no issues with gaming on the ACER Predator Helios Neo 16S AI, and throwing a bit of video rendering at it in Premiere was no issue either.
How does it handle 3DMark? The Steel Nomad test was good, while the new Speedway score was a little under average – though it shows that benchmarks aren’t everything, because this looks great on games supporting Ray Tracing.
There’s a 4-cell 76Wh Li-ion battery inside the laptop, with a 230W charger included in the box.
In terms of battery life, the gaming options on battery aren’t great. You can get an hour running games, though you find the system automatically caps itself into Eco or Balanced mode.
Doing more sedate ‘office’ or web surfing you’ll get more life out of the battery – around 3 hours was my best – so it’s not exactly long lasting, but does the job.
Thankfully, that 230W charger works a treat, bringing the battery from flat to full in just over an hour and a half, with a 30 minute charge getting you well over half-way full.
As with most laptops these days, the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI comes with Windows 11 24H2 pre-installed, which has support through to October 2026.
The heart of the ACER gaming experience is the Predator Sense app. This app lets you monitor, as well as diagnose any issues with your hardware, as well as customise RGB lighting, performance profiles, keyboard macros and more, including adding your own logo to the boot sequence, neat!
It’s a well put together app which is simple to navigate, and easy to find what you’re looking for to manage your system.
As far as pre-installed apps go, the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI is fairly light-on. The laptop comes only with the utilities you need for your hardware, as well as some ACER apps to take advantage of the AI focused hardware.
That’s not to say there’s not a few questionable installs, with DropBox and ExpressVPN as well as Mcafee pre-installed with exclusive offers when you launch them. There is also a link to ‘Forge of Empires’ a web-based game, but you can easily remove this link from your start menu.
ACER has included all the utilities like the DTX and RealTek apps for audio, and NVIDIA Control Panel and App for your fancy GPU.
The list of ACER apps is fairly minimal, with their Purified View app adding AI-powered effects to your video calls.
For gamers, there’s also ACER’s esports platform, Planet 9 which gives access to game streams, as well as in theory
ACER has released a quite impressive laptop for the price, with the slim and tempered design language good for work or play settings.
The OLED display is fantastic, with great colours, deep blacks and fast response, while the Intel and NVIDIA hardware under the hood make for a system that runs like a dream.
The only real downsides are the battery life, which could present issues for anyone wanting to hit the road for a day, though access to a power point means you’d be back up and running fairly quickly.
All up, this is a fairly impressive laptop with an equally impressive price tag. You should definitely see what ACER is doing with the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI and you can start over on ACER’s website.
Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!
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