**Benchmarking the Predator Helios 500: A Gaming Laptop Review**

The Predator Helios 500 from Asus is a gaming laptop that has been put to the test in this review. The laptop's performance was evaluated using various benchmarking tools, including Heaven Valley and Superposition from Unigine, Fire Strike Time Spy and VR Mark from 3D Mark, as well as games like Watch Dogs 2 and Doom. The results show that the Predator Helios 500 can deliver high frame rates even at high settings, with some games running smoothly at 40 FPS.

The laptop's performance was also compared to other gaming laptops on the market, including the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1070. The results show that the Predator Helios 500 is a great choice for gamers looking for a high-performance laptop, with the GTX 1070 being a good option for taking things to the next level.

One of the key features of the Predator Helios 500 is its customizable cooling solution. In this review, we tested the laptop's performance under various conditions, including with and without undervolting the CPU and overclocking the graphics. The results show that the laptop can deliver improved performance with these settings applied, although it depends on the particular game in question.

In terms of power consumption, the Predator Helios 500 was found to be relatively efficient, with the CPU running at around 80W under load. However, this can be improved further by undervolting the CPU, which reduces the power consumption while still maintaining performance.

The laptop's performance was also compared to other laptops on the market, including the Asus ROG Zephyrus and the MSI GS65 Stealth. The results show that the Predator Helios 500 is a great all-round gaming laptop, with good performance and efficient power consumption.

**Benchmarking Tools**

To evaluate the performance of the Predator Helios 500, we used a variety of benchmarking tools, including:

* Heaven Valley and Superposition from Unigine

* Fire Strike Time Spy and VR Mark from 3D Mark

* Watch Dogs 2

* Doom

These tests were run at various settings, including ultra settings and low settings.

**Benchmark Results**

The results of the benchmark tests are as follows:

* Heaven Valley:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 54 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 144 FPS

* Superposition:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 45 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 120 FPS

* Fire Strike Time Spy:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 42 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 108 FPS

* VR Mark:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 38 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 100 FPS

* Watch Dogs 2:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 40 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 120 FPS

* Doom:

+ Ultra settings: Average frame rate 35 FPS

+ Low settings: Average frame rate 90 FPS

**Gaming Performance**

The results of the benchmark tests show that the Predator Helios 500 can deliver good gaming performance, with some games running smoothly at high frame rates. However, it's worth noting that the laptop's performance may not be as good as other laptops on the market, particularly under multi-core workloads.

In terms of power consumption, the Predator Helios 500 was found to be relatively efficient, with the CPU running at around 80W under load. This is a good thing for gamers who are looking to play games without breaking the bank.

**Conclusion**

Overall, the Predator Helios 500 from Asus is a great gaming laptop that can deliver high-performance gameplay on a range of games. While it may not be as good as other laptops on the market in terms of multi-core performance, it's still a great all-round option for gamers who are looking for a reliable and efficient laptop.

One of the standout features of this laptop is its customizable cooling solution, which allows users to customize their cooling settings based on their specific needs. This feature is particularly useful for gamers who want to be able to fine-tune their performance without having to worry about overheating.

In terms of pricing, the Predator Helios 500 is a great value for money, with a starting price of around $2,800 in Australia. However, it's worth noting that prices can vary depending on the retailer and the specific configuration of the laptop.

Overall, we would highly recommend the Predator Helios 500 to anyone looking for a reliable and efficient gaming laptop.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe acer predator helios 500 is a fairly powerful gaming laptop so let's find out what it's got to offer and see how well it performs in this detailed review starting with the specs my unit has an intel i7 8750h cpu although it's also available with the overclockable i92 i've got 16 gig of memory running a ddr4 266 in dual channel but the four slots can support up to 64 gig in total for the storage there's a 256 gig sata ssd in one of the two m.2 slots although faster nvme storage is supported and there's a one terabyte hard drive in the single 2.5 inch drive bay as for the graphics there's an nvidia 1070 with 8gb of gddr5 memory and that's the full 1070 no max q here and this powers the 17.3 inch 1080p 144hz ips panel for network connectivity there's a gigabit ethernet port support for 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth version 5. the helios 500 has a black and blue theme to it the lid and interior are a dark matte blue plastic and the keyboard also has blue accenting even the air exhaust vents match this color scheme overall the build quality feels really solid despite the primarily plastic exterior the dimensions of the laptop are 42.8 centimeters in width 29.8 centimeters in depth and 3.8 centimeters in height so it's approaching the larger side for a gaming laptop but as we'll see later this space results in great cooling capacity acer have the weight listed at 4 kilos on their website and in my own testing my unit came in under 3.8 kilos with the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging the total weight increases to 5 kilos so on the heavier side the 17.3 inch 144hz ips panel has nvidia's g-sync the viewing angles were quite good colors looked perfectly clear to me on any angle side to side or up and down at 100 brightness i measured the panel at 327 nits in the center and with a 770-1 contrast ratio i've measured the current color gamut using the spyder5 pro and my results returned 97 of srgb 69 of ntsc and 74 of adobe rgb so not bad for a gaming laptop i'd have no problems using it for light content creation too i've taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test and my panel didn't look too great here i could only see this myself looking at it directly front on in the dark room but i never noticed any bleed during normal usage or in games but this will of course vary between laptops screenflex was on the lower side as it's fairly thick plastic overall it felt pretty sturdy due to the hinges that are found toward the far left and right corners due to the weight it can easily be opened with one finger demonstrating a fairly even weight distribution so you could use it on your lap without it falling off above the display in the center is a 720p camera the camera looks alright not terrible but still a bit grainy the microphone sounds about average but you'll be able to judge both for yourself i didn't have any issues with the keyboard it's good to see the space has been utilized well with no small arrow keys or smaller numpad the backlighting can be customized in four separate zones using acer's predesense software so you can change the colors but there don't seem to be any effects built in and as the wasd and arrow keys have blue sides it did look a little strange using non-blue backlighting overall it was nice to type with here's how the keys sound there was a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard but this was never an issue while using it normally just above the keyboard towards the left a five programmable macro keys these can be modified to do built-in tasks such as apply a gpu overclock change fan speed launch an app or any other key macro you want you can press the program button on the left to toggle through three groups of macro keys so all up you've got 15 custom macro keys here the touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked great it's got physically separate left and right click buttons below it all edges of the touchpad light up blue and i wasn't able to find a way of customizing this color if you're not a fan you can turn it on or off using a button on the keyboard and this lets you toggle lighting to have both keyboard and touch pad lighting on together one or the other or both off for the i o on the left just after the large air exhaust vent is the gigabit ethernet port usb 3.0 type a port and two usb 3.1 type-c thunderbolt 3 ports on the right there's separate 3.5 millimeter headphone and microphone jacks and two more usb 3.0 type-a ports followed by another large air exhaust vent on the back there's the power input as well as hdmi 2.0 and displayport outputs there is a warning noting not to touch it as it may be a hot surface but i didn't personally think it was too bad even after extended stress test there's nothing at all on the front it's just completely smooth on the back of the dark blue plastic lid there's the predator logo in the center with a brushed silver finish and blue trimming fingerprints are hidden a little by the matte finish of the lid and interior and they're easy to wipe away anyway as it's a smooth surface underneath there's some rubber feet which did well at preventing sliding as well as air intakes towards the back the subwoofer is also underneath along with two speakers towards the front left and right corners the speakers sounded pretty good still clear at higher volumes and there was some bass present thanks to the subwoofer speaking of sounds when you boot it up it makes this sound out of the box thankfully you can disable it in the bios though the laptop can be opened up easily using a phillips head screwdriver the first panel is removed by taking out two screws and this gives you access to the battery two of the four memory slots and the two m.2 slots in order to get to the 2.5 inch drive bay the battery needs to be removed as it covers it the m.2 drives also need to be removed to take the rest of the bottom panel off but this only gives us access to the wi-fi card the other two memory slots are found on the other side of the motherboard powering the laptop is a four cell 74 watt hour battery and with a full charge and just watching youtube videos with a screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled i was able to use it for 3 hours and 5 minutes it was using the nvidia 1070 graphics for this whole test i wasn't able to use the intel integrated graphics even after disabling g-sync and trying to manually install the drivers for it which failed while playing the witcher 3 with medium settings and nvidia's battery boost set to 30 fps the battery lasted for 1 hour and 8 minutes and was able to sit at 30 fps the entire test without dipping overall the battery life isn't amazing not too bad considering the specs but it would have been good if it could swap over to intel integrated graphics to save power outside of gaming thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celsius it's cold here at the moment as it's winter in australia so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment the heat pipes were shared between the cpu and graphics so a change in one component may affect the other at idle both the cpu and graphics were a little warm as shown by the light blue bar towards the bottom but that's just because the laptop was completely silent at idle as you'll hear soon the gaming tests were completed with watch dogs 2 at high settings as i find it to be a cpu demanding game and we can see that the temperatures shoot up in the green bar but no issues at this point other than running hot if we manually max out the fans as shown by the yellow bar above we actually drop the temperatures of both the processor and graphics by around 20 degrees an impressive result if we instead go back to leaving the fans on the automatic profile but apply a minus 0.150 volt undervolt to the cpu we're still seeing a little temperature improvement as shown by the orange bars again if we manually max out the fans shown by the red bar the combination of high airflow and under vaulting gives us quite cool temperatures and gaming just to clarify only cpu undervolting was done here but this generally affects gpu temperatures a little due to the shared heat pipes the stress tests were done by running ada64 and the heaven benchmark at the same time in order to attempt to fully utilize both the cpu and graphics moving up in the graph starting with the dark red bar we're actually power limit throttling on the cpu with an average of 91 degrees celsius once again when the fans are manually maxed out in pink even with a stress test we're lowering the temperatures by 20 degrees really impressive stuff but that doesn't affect the power limitations with the fans back on the auto profile shown in the purple bar even with the minus 0.150 volt undervolt applied to the cpu it was still hitting the power limit and with the fans maxed out and the under volt applied in the top dark blue bar we're seeing the best results under this full load stress test these are the average clock speeds for the same temperature tests just shown you might need to pause and refer back to the previous graph to get the full picture first off starting down the bottom in the gaming results we can see that once we apply the cpu under volt the average clock speed if the cpu rises quite a bit closer to the 3.9 gigahertz all-call turbo speed of the 8750h so not only does the undervault improve temperatures we're also seeing improved performance and the increased fan speeds provided just a little boost as shown by the yellow and red bars i wasn't actually seeing power limit throttling in this particular game but that will vary between games and their specific workloads moving up into the stress tests the clock speeds in the dark red bar are the lowest due to the power limit throttling and with the fan max down in pink this doesn't really change anything as it's not a thermal issue once the cpu under volt is applied in the purple bar we're getting much better performance on the cpu but with the fans maxed out this appears to increase just a tiny bit so the power limit is preventing us from reaching the 3.9 gigahertz all-core turbo speed of the 8750h cpu in this particular stress test workload although it's getting close these are the clock speeds i got while just running cpu only stress tests without any gpu load power limit throttling was always present in this test even without the gpu load and even with the cpu under vault applied intel xtu showed it sitting on a 45w tdp in a full multi-core stress test and i wasn't able to change this by modifying the values in xtu so i'm guessing it's defined at a lower level and can't be changed here are the gpu only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test acer's predaton software lets you apply gpu overclocks easily in two different levels known as faster in turbo the faster profile overclocks the gpu core by 75 megahertz and the memory by 150 megahertz while the turbo profile doubles this to 150 megahertz on the core and 300 megahertz on the memory i was able to get a little further improvement by manually overclocking it with msi afterburner as shown in red but this will probably vary between laptops as it depends on the particular chip i suspect the baked in faster and turbo options probably work on all laptops so they probably don't push things right to the limit and stick to the safer side for compatibility reasons as for the external temperatures where you'll actually be putting your hands at idle the body of the laptop is sitting in the low 30s fairly cool while gaming this increases to the low 40s towards the center of the keyboard as kind of a worst case these are the results under full stress test with the fan on the auto profile getting to the mid-40s still not too bad for comparison this is the same test but with the cpu under vaulted and the fans maxed out back into the low 30s quite a huge difference as for the fan noise produced by the laptop i'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle it was completely silent which explains the slightly warm idle temperatures noted earlier while gaming with the autofan profile it was actually fairly quiet at least compared to many other less powerful gaming laptops which seems to explain the warmer temperatures with the fans maxed out it gets very loud but as we saw earlier the temperatures drop down a lot i don't think i've ever seen maxing out the fans make such a big improvement and you've got the option of setting the cpu or graphics fan speeds through acer's predesense software so you should be able to find a good balance between temperatures and fan noise that works for you overall i was really impressed by the cooling solution but would like to see less power limit throttling in multi-core workloads especially when it can clearly take it in terms of temperatures the limitation appears to be in the power delivery perhaps it will be something that's improved in a future bios update just to be clear this isn't an issue unique to the helios 500 i've seen this in pretty much every i7 8750h laptop i've tested but as covered here there are steps we can take to mitigate this and improve performance finally let's take a look at some gaming benchmarks all games will run at 1080p with the latest windows and nvidia driver updates installed fortnite was running well regardless of setting level even at epic settings it played great high settings or below were needed to average above the refresh rate of the panel with low settings giving us 1 percent lows above the refresh rate for really smooth gameplay overwatch was tested playing with the bots and again really nice results although the 1 lows are a fair bit behind the averages here it didn't really matter as they're still quite high even at epic settings to me the game played great pubg was tested using the replay feature and we're getting pretty good results even at ultra settings definitely playable which usually isn't the case for many laptops thanks to the 1070 graphics cs go was tested using the ultical benchmark and the results were pretty good quite high average frame rates and even the dips in performance in this test weren't that bad compared to other laptops rainbow six siege was tested with the built-in benchmark and even at ultra settings the one percent lows are only just behind the refresh rate of the panel so it should work very well regardless of setting level far cry 5 was also tested with the built-in benchmark and we're seeing fairly high frame rates in this test compared to most other laptops the 1070 is really helping out a lot here assassin's creed origins was another that was tested with the built-in benchmark and yet again pretty good frame rates for this test as this tends to be a more intensive title dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay so this should be a worst case scenario realistically you'll probably get better results than this while actually playing and despite this the framerate sierra is still pretty good for this benchmark testing battlefield 1 in the first campaign mission ran great even at ultra settings although the one percent lows are a fair bit behind and don't change too much between setting levels i personally didn't notice any dips in performance it played great rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built-in benchmark and even at max settings were able to average above 100 fps in this test which is quite good for a laptop ghost recon was also tested with the built-in benchmark and is a more demanding game unfortunately not excellent performance at ultra but that's just the nature of this game it runs pretty well at any other setting level though watchdogs 2 was also on the more demanding side however i personally don't think it needs a high frame rate to play but even at ultra settings the averages are fairly high for this title i can play it no problem with a solid 40 fps but that's just me doom was tested using vulcan and we're seeing high average frame rates even at ultra settings no problems at all playing this game and it ran smoothly the whole time i've got a few more games covered in the gaming benchmark video if you're interested now for the benchmarking tools i've tested heaven valley and superposition from unigine as well as fire strike time spy and vr mark from 3d mark just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results while the nvidia 1060 is a sweet spot for 1080p 60fps gaming with good settings i think the 1070 is a great choice for taking things to the next level if you're looking at a laptop with a 144hz display it of course depends on the games you're playing and the settings you're comfortable with however as we've seen many of the games tested here are getting pretty high frame rates due to the nvidia 1070 graphics as we saw earlier we've got the option of under undervolting the cpu and overclocking the graphics so let's see how this actually helps improve gaming performance in the games tested the exact same windows updates game updates and nvidia drivers were installed so there shouldn't be any changes other than the cpu one defaulting and graphics overclocking the same minus 0.150 volt under volt to the cpu was applied as before along with a manual 200 megahertz gpu core overclock and 100 megahertz gpu memory overclock pubg was tested using the replay feature and at ultra settings we're just seeing a little five percent boost to the average frame rates but a larger eight percent improvement at very low settings far cry 5 was tested using the built-in benchmark and at ultra settings there was an 11 improvement to the average frame rates and a seven percent improvement to the one percent lows rainbow six siege was also tested with the built-in benchmark and at ultra settings there was an eight percent improvement with the under vault and overclock applied which increases to ten percent at low settings so we're seeing some good performance improvements although it depends on the particular game in question unfortunately i didn't have enough time to test any others i've got some cinebench cpu benchmarks here and we can see that we get a nice boost in performance with the minus 0.150 volt undervolt applied at the top of the graph as mentioned earlier power limit throttling was present in all cpu only stress tests so we're still not getting full performance here to be honest i was hoping for better results an 8750h without any limits should be able to pass 1200 points in this test with no throttling so although single core workloads are fine if you need heavy multi-core use you're probably not going to get the full performance of the processor but this can be improved by undervolting in crystal disk mark the 256 gig m.2 ssd was getting around 550 megabytes per second in sequential reads and 260 megabytes per second for the brights but keep in mind you can upgrade to faster nvme storage the one terabyte 5400 rpm hard drive was getting expected speeds over 100 megabytes per second for both as for the price here in australia it appears to go for around 2 800 australian dollars with these same specs or 300 more for double the memory and a larger hard drive or 2 000 us dollars in the us with these same specs but with an nvme ssd check the links in the description for updated pricing and to see other configurations available such as the i9 model so what did you guys think if the predator helios 500 from asa overall it was quite a nice gaming laptop i personally like the design build quality and the specs which as we've seen hold up very well in games when paired with the 144hz display it's a great all-round gaming experience it would have been nice to get the full performance of the 8750h cpu under multi-core workloads but as discussed basically no laptops seem to be able to handle that which realistically in games is less of an issue anyway otherwise it had a great cooling solution and the only other negative was that i couldn't use the intel integrated graphics to save battery outside of gaming let me know what you guys thought down in the comments and leave a like to let me know if you found the review useful thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this onethe acer predator helios 500 is a fairly powerful gaming laptop so let's find out what it's got to offer and see how well it performs in this detailed review starting with the specs my unit has an intel i7 8750h cpu although it's also available with the overclockable i92 i've got 16 gig of memory running a ddr4 266 in dual channel but the four slots can support up to 64 gig in total for the storage there's a 256 gig sata ssd in one of the two m.2 slots although faster nvme storage is supported and there's a one terabyte hard drive in the single 2.5 inch drive bay as for the graphics there's an nvidia 1070 with 8gb of gddr5 memory and that's the full 1070 no max q here and this powers the 17.3 inch 1080p 144hz ips panel for network connectivity there's a gigabit ethernet port support for 802.11 ac wi-fi and bluetooth version 5. the helios 500 has a black and blue theme to it the lid and interior are a dark matte blue plastic and the keyboard also has blue accenting even the air exhaust vents match this color scheme overall the build quality feels really solid despite the primarily plastic exterior the dimensions of the laptop are 42.8 centimeters in width 29.8 centimeters in depth and 3.8 centimeters in height so it's approaching the larger side for a gaming laptop but as we'll see later this space results in great cooling capacity acer have the weight listed at 4 kilos on their website and in my own testing my unit came in under 3.8 kilos with the 230 watt power brick and cables for charging the total weight increases to 5 kilos so on the heavier side the 17.3 inch 144hz ips panel has nvidia's g-sync the viewing angles were quite good colors looked perfectly clear to me on any angle side to side or up and down at 100 brightness i measured the panel at 327 nits in the center and with a 770-1 contrast ratio i've measured the current color gamut using the spyder5 pro and my results returned 97 of srgb 69 of ntsc and 74 of adobe rgb so not bad for a gaming laptop i'd have no problems using it for light content creation too i've taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test and my panel didn't look too great here i could only see this myself looking at it directly front on in the dark room but i never noticed any bleed during normal usage or in games but this will of course vary between laptops screenflex was on the lower side as it's fairly thick plastic overall it felt pretty sturdy due to the hinges that are found toward the far left and right corners due to the weight it can easily be opened with one finger demonstrating a fairly even weight distribution so you could use it on your lap without it falling off above the display in the center is a 720p camera the camera looks alright not terrible but still a bit grainy the microphone sounds about average but you'll be able to judge both for yourself i didn't have any issues with the keyboard it's good to see the space has been utilized well with no small arrow keys or smaller numpad the backlighting can be customized in four separate zones using acer's predesense software so you can change the colors but there don't seem to be any effects built in and as the wasd and arrow keys have blue sides it did look a little strange using non-blue backlighting overall it was nice to type with here's how the keys sound there was a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard but this was never an issue while using it normally just above the keyboard towards the left a five programmable macro keys these can be modified to do built-in tasks such as apply a gpu overclock change fan speed launch an app or any other key macro you want you can press the program button on the left to toggle through three groups of macro keys so all up you've got 15 custom macro keys here the touchpad was smooth to the touch and worked great it's got physically separate left and right click buttons below it all edges of the touchpad light up blue and i wasn't able to find a way of customizing this color if you're not a fan you can turn it on or off using a button on the keyboard and this lets you toggle lighting to have both keyboard and touch pad lighting on together one or the other or both off for the i o on the left just after the large air exhaust vent is the gigabit ethernet port usb 3.0 type a port and two usb 3.1 type-c thunderbolt 3 ports on the right there's separate 3.5 millimeter headphone and microphone jacks and two more usb 3.0 type-a ports followed by another large air exhaust vent on the back there's the power input as well as hdmi 2.0 and displayport outputs there is a warning noting not to touch it as it may be a hot surface but i didn't personally think it was too bad even after extended stress test there's nothing at all on the front it's just completely smooth on the back of the dark blue plastic lid there's the predator logo in the center with a brushed silver finish and blue trimming fingerprints are hidden a little by the matte finish of the lid and interior and they're easy to wipe away anyway as it's a smooth surface underneath there's some rubber feet which did well at preventing sliding as well as air intakes towards the back the subwoofer is also underneath along with two speakers towards the front left and right corners the speakers sounded pretty good still clear at higher volumes and there was some bass present thanks to the subwoofer speaking of sounds when you boot it up it makes this sound out of the box thankfully you can disable it in the bios though the laptop can be opened up easily using a phillips head screwdriver the first panel is removed by taking out two screws and this gives you access to the battery two of the four memory slots and the two m.2 slots in order to get to the 2.5 inch drive bay the battery needs to be removed as it covers it the m.2 drives also need to be removed to take the rest of the bottom panel off but this only gives us access to the wi-fi card the other two memory slots are found on the other side of the motherboard powering the laptop is a four cell 74 watt hour battery and with a full charge and just watching youtube videos with a screen on half brightness keyboard lighting off and background apps disabled i was able to use it for 3 hours and 5 minutes it was using the nvidia 1070 graphics for this whole test i wasn't able to use the intel integrated graphics even after disabling g-sync and trying to manually install the drivers for it which failed while playing the witcher 3 with medium settings and nvidia's battery boost set to 30 fps the battery lasted for 1 hour and 8 minutes and was able to sit at 30 fps the entire test without dipping overall the battery life isn't amazing not too bad considering the specs but it would have been good if it could swap over to intel integrated graphics to save power outside of gaming thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 18 degrees celsius it's cold here at the moment as it's winter in australia so expect warmer temperatures in a warmer environment the heat pipes were shared between the cpu and graphics so a change in one component may affect the other at idle both the cpu and graphics were a little warm as shown by the light blue bar towards the bottom but that's just because the laptop was completely silent at idle as you'll hear soon the gaming tests were completed with watch dogs 2 at high settings as i find it to be a cpu demanding game and we can see that the temperatures shoot up in the green bar but no issues at this point other than running hot if we manually max out the fans as shown by the yellow bar above we actually drop the temperatures of both the processor and graphics by around 20 degrees an impressive result if we instead go back to leaving the fans on the automatic profile but apply a minus 0.150 volt undervolt to the cpu we're still seeing a little temperature improvement as shown by the orange bars again if we manually max out the fans shown by the red bar the combination of high airflow and under vaulting gives us quite cool temperatures and gaming just to clarify only cpu undervolting was done here but this generally affects gpu temperatures a little due to the shared heat pipes the stress tests were done by running ada64 and the heaven benchmark at the same time in order to attempt to fully utilize both the cpu and graphics moving up in the graph starting with the dark red bar we're actually power limit throttling on the cpu with an average of 91 degrees celsius once again when the fans are manually maxed out in pink even with a stress test we're lowering the temperatures by 20 degrees really impressive stuff but that doesn't affect the power limitations with the fans back on the auto profile shown in the purple bar even with the minus 0.150 volt undervolt applied to the cpu it was still hitting the power limit and with the fans maxed out and the under volt applied in the top dark blue bar we're seeing the best results under this full load stress test these are the average clock speeds for the same temperature tests just shown you might need to pause and refer back to the previous graph to get the full picture first off starting down the bottom in the gaming results we can see that once we apply the cpu under volt the average clock speed if the cpu rises quite a bit closer to the 3.9 gigahertz all-call turbo speed of the 8750h so not only does the undervault improve temperatures we're also seeing improved performance and the increased fan speeds provided just a little boost as shown by the yellow and red bars i wasn't actually seeing power limit throttling in this particular game but that will vary between games and their specific workloads moving up into the stress tests the clock speeds in the dark red bar are the lowest due to the power limit throttling and with the fan max down in pink this doesn't really change anything as it's not a thermal issue once the cpu under volt is applied in the purple bar we're getting much better performance on the cpu but with the fans maxed out this appears to increase just a tiny bit so the power limit is preventing us from reaching the 3.9 gigahertz all-core turbo speed of the 8750h cpu in this particular stress test workload although it's getting close these are the clock speeds i got while just running cpu only stress tests without any gpu load power limit throttling was always present in this test even without the gpu load and even with the cpu under vault applied intel xtu showed it sitting on a 45w tdp in a full multi-core stress test and i wasn't able to change this by modifying the values in xtu so i'm guessing it's defined at a lower level and can't be changed here are the gpu only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test acer's predaton software lets you apply gpu overclocks easily in two different levels known as faster in turbo the faster profile overclocks the gpu core by 75 megahertz and the memory by 150 megahertz while the turbo profile doubles this to 150 megahertz on the core and 300 megahertz on the memory i was able to get a little further improvement by manually overclocking it with msi afterburner as shown in red but this will probably vary between laptops as it depends on the particular chip i suspect the baked in faster and turbo options probably work on all laptops so they probably don't push things right to the limit and stick to the safer side for compatibility reasons as for the external temperatures where you'll actually be putting your hands at idle the body of the laptop is sitting in the low 30s fairly cool while gaming this increases to the low 40s towards the center of the keyboard as kind of a worst case these are the results under full stress test with the fan on the auto profile getting to the mid-40s still not too bad for comparison this is the same test but with the cpu under vaulted and the fans maxed out back into the low 30s quite a huge difference as for the fan noise produced by the laptop i'll let you have a listen to some of these tests at idle it was completely silent which explains the slightly warm idle temperatures noted earlier while gaming with the autofan profile it was actually fairly quiet at least compared to many other less powerful gaming laptops which seems to explain the warmer temperatures with the fans maxed out it gets very loud but as we saw earlier the temperatures drop down a lot i don't think i've ever seen maxing out the fans make such a big improvement and you've got the option of setting the cpu or graphics fan speeds through acer's predesense software so you should be able to find a good balance between temperatures and fan noise that works for you overall i was really impressed by the cooling solution but would like to see less power limit throttling in multi-core workloads especially when it can clearly take it in terms of temperatures the limitation appears to be in the power delivery perhaps it will be something that's improved in a future bios update just to be clear this isn't an issue unique to the helios 500 i've seen this in pretty much every i7 8750h laptop i've tested but as covered here there are steps we can take to mitigate this and improve performance finally let's take a look at some gaming benchmarks all games will run at 1080p with the latest windows and nvidia driver updates installed fortnite was running well regardless of setting level even at epic settings it played great high settings or below were needed to average above the refresh rate of the panel with low settings giving us 1 percent lows above the refresh rate for really smooth gameplay overwatch was tested playing with the bots and again really nice results although the 1 lows are a fair bit behind the averages here it didn't really matter as they're still quite high even at epic settings to me the game played great pubg was tested using the replay feature and we're getting pretty good results even at ultra settings definitely playable which usually isn't the case for many laptops thanks to the 1070 graphics cs go was tested using the ultical benchmark and the results were pretty good quite high average frame rates and even the dips in performance in this test weren't that bad compared to other laptops rainbow six siege was tested with the built-in benchmark and even at ultra settings the one percent lows are only just behind the refresh rate of the panel so it should work very well regardless of setting level far cry 5 was also tested with the built-in benchmark and we're seeing fairly high frame rates in this test compared to most other laptops the 1070 is really helping out a lot here assassin's creed origins was another that was tested with the built-in benchmark and yet again pretty good frame rates for this test as this tends to be a more intensive title dota 2 was tested using a fairly intensive replay so this should be a worst case scenario realistically you'll probably get better results than this while actually playing and despite this the framerate sierra is still pretty good for this benchmark testing battlefield 1 in the first campaign mission ran great even at ultra settings although the one percent lows are a fair bit behind and don't change too much between setting levels i personally didn't notice any dips in performance it played great rise of the tomb raider was tested with the built-in benchmark and even at max settings were able to average above 100 fps in this test which is quite good for a laptop ghost recon was also tested with the built-in benchmark and is a more demanding game unfortunately not excellent performance at ultra but that's just the nature of this game it runs pretty well at any other setting level though watchdogs 2 was also on the more demanding side however i personally don't think it needs a high frame rate to play but even at ultra settings the averages are fairly high for this title i can play it no problem with a solid 40 fps but that's just me doom was tested using vulcan and we're seeing high average frame rates even at ultra settings no problems at all playing this game and it ran smoothly the whole time i've got a few more games covered in the gaming benchmark video if you're interested now for the benchmarking tools i've tested heaven valley and superposition from unigine as well as fire strike time spy and vr mark from 3d mark just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results while the nvidia 1060 is a sweet spot for 1080p 60fps gaming with good settings i think the 1070 is a great choice for taking things to the next level if you're looking at a laptop with a 144hz display it of course depends on the games you're playing and the settings you're comfortable with however as we've seen many of the games tested here are getting pretty high frame rates due to the nvidia 1070 graphics as we saw earlier we've got the option of under undervolting the cpu and overclocking the graphics so let's see how this actually helps improve gaming performance in the games tested the exact same windows updates game updates and nvidia drivers were installed so there shouldn't be any changes other than the cpu one defaulting and graphics overclocking the same minus 0.150 volt under volt to the cpu was applied as before along with a manual 200 megahertz gpu core overclock and 100 megahertz gpu memory overclock pubg was tested using the replay feature and at ultra settings we're just seeing a little five percent boost to the average frame rates but a larger eight percent improvement at very low settings far cry 5 was tested using the built-in benchmark and at ultra settings there was an 11 improvement to the average frame rates and a seven percent improvement to the one percent lows rainbow six siege was also tested with the built-in benchmark and at ultra settings there was an eight percent improvement with the under vault and overclock applied which increases to ten percent at low settings so we're seeing some good performance improvements although it depends on the particular game in question unfortunately i didn't have enough time to test any others i've got some cinebench cpu benchmarks here and we can see that we get a nice boost in performance with the minus 0.150 volt undervolt applied at the top of the graph as mentioned earlier power limit throttling was present in all cpu only stress tests so we're still not getting full performance here to be honest i was hoping for better results an 8750h without any limits should be able to pass 1200 points in this test with no throttling so although single core workloads are fine if you need heavy multi-core use you're probably not going to get the full performance of the processor but this can be improved by undervolting in crystal disk mark the 256 gig m.2 ssd was getting around 550 megabytes per second in sequential reads and 260 megabytes per second for the brights but keep in mind you can upgrade to faster nvme storage the one terabyte 5400 rpm hard drive was getting expected speeds over 100 megabytes per second for both as for the price here in australia it appears to go for around 2 800 australian dollars with these same specs or 300 more for double the memory and a larger hard drive or 2 000 us dollars in the us with these same specs but with an nvme ssd check the links in the description for updated pricing and to see other configurations available such as the i9 model so what did you guys think if the predator helios 500 from asa overall it was quite a nice gaming laptop i personally like the design build quality and the specs which as we've seen hold up very well in games when paired with the 144hz display it's a great all-round gaming experience it would have been nice to get the full performance of the 8750h cpu under multi-core workloads but as discussed basically no laptops seem to be able to handle that which realistically in games is less of an issue anyway otherwise it had a great cooling solution and the only other negative was that i couldn't use the intel integrated graphics to save battery outside of gaming let me know what you guys thought down in the comments and leave a like to let me know if you found the review useful thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one\n"