Acer Launches Predator Helios 500 Gaming Laptop With Bespoke Cooling Tech

Last Updated on December 6, 2021 by Nachiket Mhatre

Acer is known for delivering top-drawer performance and features without breaking the bank. This time around, it isn’t pulling any punches with the Predator Helios 500 gaming laptop. It’s essentially a gaming rig masquerading as a laptop. It ships with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU paired with a 4K Mini LED display for a price that starts at ₹3.8 lakhs.

The Taiwanese PC hardware manufacturer claims that the gaming laptop delivers “desktop calibre gameplay”, which might sound implausible, but the PH517-52 model boasts of an overclockable 11th Gen Intel Core i9 processor under the hood. Prima facie, that indicates the laptop isn’t too overzealous with power limits and seems to allow the demanding 11th-gen Intel silicon to stretch its legs.

However, the secret sauce backing Acer’s claim is the custom-engineered PowerGem cooling technology reserved for its top-end Predator laptops.

Acer’s PowerGem Cooling Tech Explained

The new thermal interface material sits between the vapour chamber cooling heatsink and the processor IHS (integrated heat spreader) as well as the GPU die. Acer’s PowerGem is a newly-developed thermal pad that uses a unique metal-polymer blend.

A thermal pad might not sound sexy, but there has been a considerable amount of scientific research around such composite thermal interfaces. Traditional thermal compounds and pads are solely comprised of polymer based materials to eliminate the risk of electrical short circuits brought upon by conductive materials. Acer’s PowerGem seems to get around this hazard by encapsulating conductive metal particles within an elastomer interface.

The company’s marketing material claims its bespoke cooling system to have four times the cooling performance of traditional copper interfaces. It is also touted to deliver a cool 12-percent performance improvement with another 77.7 percent increase in the overall permissible wattage limit.

It will be interesting to find out how the laptop handles the CPU package power levels and exactly what sort of optimisations Acer has made to the otherwise conservative PL1, PL2, and Tau limits (for laptops), which determine the power limits for current-gen Intel processors.

Hit us up in the comments section if you would like for us to put the laptop through its paces.

MagForce Mechanical Switches Allow Analogue Control

The top-end Predator Helios 500 laptop also ships with a massive 64GB of DDR4 3200Mhz RAM. But the real icing on the cake is the MagForce optical mechanical switches. These switches can be tuned to deliver analogue-like linear modulation of input—much like the analogue sticks and index triggers found in console gamepads.

To cite a relevant example, this allows more precise proportional steering control in racing games. The same feature can also be used in shooters to transition from walking to running by merely modulating the pressure exerted on the WASD keys—all without using the modifier (Shift) key.

Meanwhile, all this gaming muscle is complemented by an AUO-made 4K Mini LED display. The 17.3-inch screen is good up to 120Hz and delivers DisplayHDR 1000-grade HDR output backed by 512 backlight dimming zones.

You can find the other (relatively) banal specifications on the official Acer store page, which is also where the laptop can be purchased right away.