Acer’s new Predator gaming laptop trades power for portability

What’s the point of getting a powerful laptop if you can’t drag it to a gaming party? Acer’s latest back-to-school update for its Predator series of laptops, the Triton 700, may actually be portable enough for those trips. It packs the latest NVIDIA graphics chips and an advanced dual-fan cooling system into a chassis that’s just 18.9mm (or 0.75 inches) tall. Acer hasn’t shared many other details about the notebook yet, except to say that it will be ready for the back-to-school season this summer. In addition to size, the overall weight impacts portability, so we’ll have to withhold any final assessment until we have that info.

Even with all that oomph, the latest Razer Blade is still a smidge thinner and more powerful that the Triton 700 Acer is showing off. A closer comparison spec-wise to the machine we’re seeing today is Origin’s EON15-S that runs NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti graphics and an Intel i7-7700HQ CPU, but there are a number of PC makers cramming capable components into slimmer form factors for gamers these days.

Gamers who don’t need all that power can consider the new Nitro 5 laptop, which offers NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti graphics and the company’s CoolBoost cooling system. Again, at its New York presentation, the company didn’t dwell very long on each product, so other details about the laptop are scant, and we’ll update this post as we get more later from our hands-on.

For those who prefer to invest in their at-home battle stations, Acer also unveiled a 27-inch 4K gaming monitor called the Predator X27. It boasts a 144Hz refresh rate, 4ms response time and uses Quantom Dot technology for better image quality while saving energy. The X27, like many of its rivals, supports NVIDIA’s G-Sync HDR technology for smoother streams with higher definition and contrast.

We’ll be taking a closer look at Acer’s gaming lineup for 2017 later, so check back here for more information.

Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.