Acer Predator Triton 300 Review: The Happy Medium

This is the Acer Predator Triton 300 and to be very honest, it strikes a very happy medium in this sea of never-ending gaming laptops.

Now as you all know, the Predator series of stuff from Acer is all about gaming. I’m personally divisive about the design of the Predator logo itself, but honestly, apart from that, the laptop looks really minimalistic. It’s made entirely out of aluminium and it feels really solid. It’s also reasonably thin at just under 20mm, especially for the performance that its packing and weighs in at just about 2kg (4.4lbs).

Personally, I’m quite liking the blue accents as well which does contribute and gives the laptop a little more character. Also, it's quite the breath of fresh air from most other brands out there where red is usually the norm.

Now the Triton 300 is available in a variety of configurations ranging from an RTX 3060 all the way to an RTX 3080 and is mainly available with two main display options. For our review unit here, we basically have the top-end model.

It features a Core i7-11800H, an RTX 3080 with 110W of power, 32GB of RAM and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage. For the display, we have the 1440p 165Hz panel.

Let's talk about that display for a start. As mentioned, 1440p, which means a resolution of 2560 x 1440 and it can run up to a pretty fast and respectable 165Hz with a 3ms response time in overdrive. It covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut and can get up to about 300 nits in max brightness.

Overall, it’s a solid 1440p panel that, when coupled with the RTX 3080, delivers performance that can really dish out the frames while pushing all those pixels. Even if you’re not gaming, it’ll be as great for some creative work, such as photo or video editing as well.

My only gripe about it isn’t even about the panel itself, but rather the bezels around it. Just a tad too thick in this day and age in my opinion.

Up top, you get the webcam where it should be. It’s 720p like most other laptops and it’s below average just like other laptops. It’ll get the job done, but it’s nothing amazing.

Moving down, you do get a full-size keyboard here, complete with the numpad on a 15.6-inch device. I’ve mentioned this many times, I personally prefer a 15.6-inch laptop without a numpad but I’m sure some of you out there will appreciate it.

The keys themselves feel fine and I was able to either type or game for long hours on end without much issue. There is backlighting, but do note that it is only of the 4-zone RGB variety, no individual backlit keys here. The top of the keyboard is where you’ll also find ventilation for the cooling system and an interesting little Turbo button on the left. More about that later.

Moving further down, we get the trackpad and it’s fine for the most part. It tracks well and is reasonably sized. Moving on to the speakers, they are surprisingly decent, despite being down-firing on the sides.

As for ports, you’ll get three USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, a MiniDisplayPort, RJ45 Ethernet, Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1, your trusty headphone/mic combo jack and of course, your DC in around the back.

As for battery life, roughly six hours of use, which is just about average.

So that’s pretty much it for the exterior of the Triton 300, now let’s take a look at what’s under the hood and talk about performance.

There are a few power and fan configurations available for the Triton 300: Quiet, Default, Extreme and Turbo. For the purpose of our benchmarks, we’ll mainly focus on Extreme and we’ll explain why.

In Cinebench R23, you can expect great performance from that Core i7-11800H and the difference between Default and Extreme mainly comes down to the maximum all core boost. As for Turbo, it is basically the same as Extreme, except with the fans running at full tilt, which reduces temperatures and increases performance ever so slightly.

In Davinci Resolve, the three main modes are able to render the 10-minute 4K edit in just shy of real-time. Just like Cinebench, the difference between Default and Extreme is substantial while Extreme and Turbo is pretty negligible.

The main advantage of Turbo is lower temperatures compared to Extreme, but that’s about it. The fan noise in Turbo mode is really not worth that few extra frames or seconds. Thus, for our gaming benchmarks, we will focus on Extreme as that’s the ideal mode in our opinion.

At 1080p, the Core i7 and RTX 3080 combo basically delivers a superb gaming experience, even on new games like Halo Infinite. It really is a joy to play. Even RTX titles are fully playable with great frame rates, thanks to DLSS as well.

At 1440p, you’ll really be making full use of that display, and it delivers great performance here as well. Any games maxed out, and you’ll still enjoy high frame rates, never dropping below 60. 1440p with ray-tracing turned on definitely does drop frame rates a fair bit, but it’s still great nonetheless.

And perhaps just to mention, temperatures are well under check with the CPU mostly hovering around 90 degrees celsius and the GPU hovering around 80 degrees celsius. Additionally, the keyboard deck didn’t really get too hot to the touch either. I could play comfortably for a few hours without any issues.

All in all, I really do like the Acer Predator Triton 300 and I do think it fits a happy middle ground among the sea of gaming laptops out there. It really does perform. Now it’ll cost a fair bit, coming in at S$3,898, but given its performance and thermals in a chassis that’s reasonably thin and light. It might just be worth every dollar.