Acer unleashes new "beast" gaming laptop at CES 2022 – and I'm excited

(Image credit: Acer)

published 5 January 2022

We love Acer gaming laptops here at T3: the Acer Nitro 5 is the best budget gaming laptop in our best gaming laptops guide. So I was very excited to see the 2022 editions of Acer's Nitro and Predator gaming laptops unleashed at CES 2022, not least because Acer promises that one of them is "a beast".

That one's the Predator Helios 300, which features a 165Hz QHD IPS panel and graphics up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. There's a 12-gen Intel Core i7, up to 32GB of DDR5-4800 memory and storage up to 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD. Two fans, liquid metal thermal grease and Acer's CoolBoost tech stop it getting too hot no matter how hard you push it.

There's also a super-thin "special edition" gaming laptop that's also designed for work: the Predator Triton 500 SE. It can be specced with a 12-generation Intel Core i9, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 32GB of LPDDR5-5200 memory.

Acer Predator Triton 500 SE early 2022 — Acer Predator Triton 500 SE

New Nitros for gamers on a budget

Our best budget gaming laptop, the Acer Nitro 5, gets some welcome improvements too. You can now spec the Nitro 5 with up to a 12-gen Intel Core i7 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and there are twin M.2 SSD slots (PCie Gen 4) and up to 32GB of DDR4-3200RAM. The QHD 165 panel has a 3ms response time.

Acer Nitro 5 early 2022 — Acer Nitro 5 (early 2022)

The Nitro 5 is also available with up to an AMD Ryzen 6000 Series processor and up to a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU, 32GB of DDR-4800 RAM and either an FHD 144Hz panel or a 165Hz QHD. Both options have AMD FreeSync.

The Acer Nitro 5 goes on sale in February/March from £799 to £1,499, and the Predator Helios 300 starts at £1,399 for the 15.6 inch model and £1,499 for the 17.3-inch.

The Predator Triton 500 SE will ship in Q2 2022 and prices will range from £1,999 to £2,999 for the fully loaded specification.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).