Acer Predator Helios 18 PH18-71 18-inch Gaming Laptop – (Intel Core i9-13900HX, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 12G, 2560 x 1600 250Hz Mini LED Display, Windows 11, Black)

1.0 out of 5 stars Don’t buy from Amazon
Product was faulty..returned next day. that was 5 weeks ago and still waiting for a refund so I can buy a replacement- shocking

5.0 out of 5 stars Bought for Starfield
I bought to play Starfield on release and it is smooth using high/ultra gfx settings. I was v happy with it. I was very worried because I have bad luck with buying laptops but this one is great. I paid same price but had to return a defective machine (from somewhere else) six months ago which had older gen hardware so I would say this is vfm.

5.0 out of 5 stars Runs hot, works beutifully when configures to run games rather than benchmarks
Okay, so lets get the elephant in the room sorted first.

AMD and Intell are in a CPU feature war, and they are producing CPUs that are close to their thermal limits to compete. Laptop suffer the most, as their power limits are often set far higher than TDP to eke out an extra 5-10% of performance – at the cost of lots more heat that a tiny laptop cooler can dump.

This means two things. Firstly, laptops like the Acer Predetor will often have one or two hot-cores; CPU cores that often thermal throttle on high temp (and on almost no load as they’ll do it on a short spike).

Intel tell us that is normal and fine, but they actually mean ‘its fine for synthetic benchmarks and applications, where the odd core thermal limiting for a short time doesn’t matter because all other cores are at 100% and they average out, plus its not real-time compute anyway… and we get to say our CPUs are better on numbers without mentioning the massive heat that subdues them in normal use’.

It is *not* fine for games, as that hot core was hot because it was handling an important game process, and because it is real-time, a throttle causes a micro glitch. Either that or the fans are configured to cool the hottest core, so the one shoots to 100C ‘just because you opened Chrome’ gets you comical looks in the office from the fan noise; ‘Nice Acer! Oh… you paid how much for this??’.

Solution? Drop the TDP from the ludicrous 130W to 5W under the package TDP (which is 45-40 = 40W).
Better still, buy one of the marketplace returns (the ones with no imperfections, so they were almost certainly returned on hot cores), fix the problem by simply configuring throttlestop, set it up to run on start (Google is your friend) and done.

Saved myself almost 40% on the cost of a new one by getting one that someone ran once, said ‘hot cores, not re-pasting at this price!’ and returned. Re-pasting probably won’t fix it anyway (hot cores happen when the power is far higher than the package TDP, noting that high power magnifies small manufacturing imperfections exponentially, and voila, sticky-hot cores on a CPU that is fine once you dial in the correct TDP limit).

Spent some of the saved money on a 32GB memory upgrade (pick the cheaper ‘4800 memory – the i7-12700 can’t use anything faster, so ‘5200 is wasted) and a fast, spacious and reliable Samsung 990 Pro 4TB PCIE 4.0 as second drive. Note that your SSD has to be single sided (memory chips on one side only) as the clearance on most laptops doesnt allow both sides (same for most laptops, not just the Acer).

Finally, worth noting the hot cores issue is not limited to the Acer, its an issue with the way AMD/Intel are creating higher spec CPUs in a very feature competitive market. Not a problem for desktops (which have massive cooling… apart from THAT Alienware review on Gamer’s Nexus…), but not so good for laptops. Upside; turning 130W TDP down to 40W does not lose you over 50% in performance – it loses you 5-10%, and actually gives you faster, less glitchy gaming!

Once that was fixed, this laptop is amazing. Everything running well. Its a laptop 3080 so you can’t mash the real time raytracing as much as you can with a desktop 3080, but its still great in Cyberpunk, Red-dead, Witcher 3 and of course less GPU intensive games such as BG3. Also great in compute (AI image generation).

Noise was a problem initially, but with the TDP set correctly, no need for turbo fans. Default is fine for normal work, extreme or default for games (depending on whether or not you are locking at 60fps or going g-sync with headphones).

Oh, and the screen is absolutely beautiful. Good sRGB coverage, nice brightness and good contrast. SpyderPro recognises it as a wide color range screen, and once you calibrate it, it is all good. Even if you don’t it is not actually far off on factory (its actually the closest to sRGB I’ve seen in a factory configured laptop screen). The 18 inch laptop screens may be larger, but they don’t tend to have the uniformity of the 15.6 and 16 inch ones. Not very portable either!

Main use case for me is development (I’m a senior ReactJS dev), Photoshop, stable diffusion (automatic1111)… so some serious work. And gaming. I’m not proud; a LOT of gaming!

Well chuffed, especially when I got it so much cheaper than RRP for the cost of 30 mins of research.