The 15.6-inch screens that have defined full-size laptops for years are rapidly yielding to 16-inch displays with slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratios, and that goes for premium gaming laptops as well. The latest Acer Predator Triton 500 SE ($2,999.99 as tested) is actually the second generation of Acer's 16-inch flagship (we tested the first in September 2021), with its 11th Generation Intel CPU replaced by a 12th Gen chip and its screen refresh rate hiked to a blazing 240Hz. It's expensive, but it's a formidable choice for hardcore gaming in a not-too-heavy package.Progress Marches On The new Triton 500 SE starts at $2,299.99 with a Core i7-12700H processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, though you can go as low as $1,749.99 with a previous-gen Core i7-11800H and RTX 3060. Our $2,999.99 test unit (model PT516-52S-99EL) pulls out all the stops with a Core i9-12900H chip (six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 20 threads), 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 1TB NVMe solid-state drive, and Nvidia's 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. Its 240Hz IPS non-touch screen offers Nvidia G-Sync support and 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution. Clad in Steel Gray aluminum, the Predator measures a relatively svelte 0.78 by 14.1 by 10.3 inches (the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 is 1.05 by 14.2 by 10.4 inches) and weighs 5.29 pounds, a fifth of a pound less than the Legion. The most compact 15.6-inch gamer, the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model, is 0.67 by 14 by 9.3 inches and only 4.4 pounds. Many gaming rigs are garish, but the Triton 500 SE is as understated as any business laptop, a gunmetal slab with only a small Predator logo on the lid. It's a bit more lively when opened, with speaker grilles above the keyboard and RGB keyboard backlighting—with only three zones, disappointing compared to the four of the Legion 5i Pro and the customizable per-key illumination of other gamers in this price range. The screen bezels are stylishly thin; there's some flex if you grasp the display corners but none if you press the keyboard deck. The webcam has neither a privacy shutter nor IR face recognition, but there's a fingerprint reader in a corner of the touchpad for logins with Windows Hello. A USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port and USB 3.2 Type-A port are on the left side, along with audio and Ethernet jacks and the connector for the bulky AC adapter. Another Thunderbolt 4 port and USB-A port can be found at right, as can an HDMI 2.1 video output, an SD card reader, and an security lock slot. Killer Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth handle wireless communications. Slightly Sharper Than Usual The webcam delivers 1080p instead of the usual low-rent 720p resolution, though its images still look a little soft. However, at least they're well-lit and colorful with no noise or static. The top-firing speakers aren't particularly loud, but their sound is clear and clean; bass is minimal, but you can make out overlapping tracks. DTS:X Ultra audio software offers music, movie, voice, strategy, shooter, RPG, and automatic presets and an equalizer. The keyboard layout is a little quirky. Page Up and Page Down require pressing the Fn key plus the up and down cursor arrows, but Home and End use the Fn key plus F9 and F10. Puzzling, but at least there are dedicated media control and microphone mute keys, as well as a key to launch the PredatorSense utility (more on it in a minute). There's no numeric keypad. The typing feel is soft and shallow, but the keys bottom out firmly, so my hands ached after long typing sessions. The large, buttonless touchpad swipes and taps smoothly, with a silent, stiff click. Between its 240Hz refresh rate, Nvidia G-Sync support, and medium-sharp 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution, the Triton's screen is a highlight. Brightness and contrast are good, and white backgrounds are clean rather than grayish. Colors don't exactly pop but are rich and well-saturated. Fine details are easy to make out, with no pixelation around the edges of letters. Along with Norton Security Ultra, CyberLink's PhotoDirector and PowerDirector image and video editors, and Dropbox and ExpressVPN trials, Acer bolsters the Windows 11 Home system with PredatorSense, a control center that combines CPU and GPU monitoring; keyboard lighting control; TrueHarmony audio presets for different types of games; and Quiet, Default, Extreme, and Turbo performance and cooling modes. Extreme and Turbo (the latter also available via a button above the keyboard) are overclocking settings that bring bother-your-wife-in-the-next-room levels of fan noise. We used Extreme for benchmarks (except for Default for our battery life test) and tried a few tests in Turbo, with results discussed below. Performance Testing: The Predator Meets the Pack We've seen a swarm of speedy gaming notebooks with 12th Generation Intel processors lately, led by a rival 16-incher in the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 is an Editors' Choice award winner as a high-end 17.3-inch rig, while the MSI Vector GP66 and Razer Blade 15 Advanced Model carry the 15.6-inch banner. The Razer charges a premium for its trim design; it's the same price with a Core i7 and GeForce RTX 3070 Ti as the Acer with a Core i9 and RTX 3080 Ti.Productivity Tests The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.It's nit-picking to say the Predator finished next to last in PCMark 10; all five laptops obliterated the 4,000-point mark that indicates excellent productivity and are wild overkill for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. The Core i9 notebooks predictably aced our CPU tests, but while the Razer's Core i7 trailed, the Lenovo's did extremely well. All five machines proved superb for Photoshop image editing, but the Acer gets extra points for having an SD card slot. Switching from Extreme to Turbo mode produced only marginal benefits, boosting the Triton 500 SE's Cinebench score from 16,811 to 17,223 and its PugetBench Photoshop number from 1,132 to 1,144. Graphics and Gaming Tests We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better. Our next three tests involve real games—specifically, the built-in 1080p benchmarks from an AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.Considering the Predator's high price, it's a poor advertisement for Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti versus the 3070 Ti—it failed to win the synthetic tests and two of the three game benchmarks, and had only an imperceptible advantage in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Make no mistake, it's a sizzling fast gaming rig, but by no means dominant. Trying Turbo mode again proved not worth the extra noise, adding only 4fps in F1 2021 with DLSS and actually slowing the Rainbow Six Siege Ultra preset from 299fps to 294fps. Battery and Display Tests We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).The Acer's battery life is unimpressive (though at least it outlasted the flash-in-the-pan MSI). But its display shows high quality, offering great color reproduction and edging the Legion as the brightest panel in the parade.Impressive, But Not a Bargain The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE is a world-class 16-inch gaming laptop, with extremely fast frame rates and a handsome high-refresh screen to show them off. But it costs $600 more than the MSI Vector GP66 and roughly $1,000 more than the Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 7 without significantly outperforming them. It earns a thumbs up, but falls short of Editors' Choice consideration.

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