Acer Predator 15: the very good surprise

Presentation

With its new Predator range, Acer jumps with both feet into the gaming laptop market, currently dominated by Asus, MSI and Alienware. The Taiwanese brand therefore intends to make a small place in this niche and here offers us a 15-inch laptop that has all the characteristics of a gaming machine: GeForce GTX 980M graphics card, latest generation Core i7 processor, 16 GB of memory vivid. .. without forgetting a look all in red and black.

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Construction

You don't have to look far to find the source of design inspiration for Acer. The brand draws so cheerfully from the competition and we find ourselves in front of a mixture of ROG from Asus and machines from Alienware. The set is heavy and thick as it should be (3.4 kg for 3.9 cm high) and ticks the main characteristics of a gaming laptop: black softouch type coating which provides a very soft touch - in return for traces fingers -, multi-color keyboard , underlined Z, Q, S and D keys, aggressive logo and red lines on the hood. The construction is solid and the chassis benefits from a good level of finish.

The keyboard is chiclet type and offers a pleasant typing. The keys are well spaced, sink enough and are perfect for long typing sessions. We also benefit from a dynamic backlight adjustable by a homemade tool. Just above the keyboard, 5 keys dedicated to macros can be distributed on 3 different profiles (for a total of 15 configurable shortcuts). Here again, the configuration is done very simply via the Predator Sense tool.

The touchpad is wide enough and slides correctly, even if the user of this type of laptop will of course prefer a mouse dedicated to the game. Note also the welcome presence of a button - very accessible - to deactivate this tactile surface.

The Predator 15 is upgradeable. An easy-to-remove hatch (only 2 screws) provides access to two free slots for DDR4 RAM, the preinstalled HDD and an additional slot that can accommodate a second SSD in M.2 PCIe format.

Connectivity side, everything is there, what's more very accessible: oven USB 3 ports, a USB Type C port, an HDMI port, an RJ45, a DisplayPort, a headphone jack output and a microphone input.

Small originality to optimize cooling, Acer offers an additional fan as standard which can be easily installed to replace the optical drive. It allows the temperature to drop by a few small additional degrees.

Without this fan, there is thus a hot spot at 42.6 ° C at the front, and 55.6 ° C at the rear. As with the ROG G752, the heat is mainly removed from the rear. By adding the additional fan, the temperature rises to 38.9 ° C at the front and remains almost the same at the rear. The noise goes from 39 dB to 40 dB. The machine is therefore a bit noisier than the ROG G752, which oscillates between 37.5 dB and 41 dB. We thus hear a permanent but acceptable breath during a resource-intensive game.

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Screen

The Acer Predator 15 benefits from a 15.6-inch IPS mat screen displaying a Full HD definition (1920 x 1080 px). It is an interesting format for playing and which offers a good compromise between visual comfort and compactness. The panel displays a satisfactory maximum brightness (320 cd / m²), but a somewhat disappointing contrast ratio which does not exceed 680: 1. Still, the matt slab still offers good readability.

The colorimetry is quite good, with a delta E measured at 4.3 and a color temperature at 6630 K. Very correct figures which translate into fairly faithful colors and a balanced rendering. The gamma curve is relatively regular but highlights fairly blocked blacks.

In the gaming laptop category, the Predator 15 screen is therefore located at the top of the basket, mainly thanks to its good colorimetry and its matte screen.

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Performances

You can't imagine anything other than a sixth generation Intel Core i7 processor in a machine like this. So we take advantage of a 6700HQ, 4-core CPU offering frequencies ranging from 2.6 GHz to 3.5 GHz in Turbo mode. The 16 GB of RAM in DDR4 and the 128 GB SSD coupled with this configuration allow us to hope for a very good performance index ... and it is there.

Whether for advanced office automation, heavy video editing or high-level photo editing, the Predator 15 does not flinch. Windows 10 turns like a charm, starts in 12 seconds and shuts down in 11 seconds.

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Games

The Acer Predator 15 is available in two versions: one with a GeForce GTX 970M graphics card, the other with a 980M (4 GB of GDDR5). It is this latest version that we are testing here. The GTX 980M is Nvidia's most high-end card for a laptop, except of course the 980 - which is found in particular on MSI GT72S Dragon Edition. Not surprisingly, the results of our benchmarks are excellent.

In practice, it is possible to play all the games on the market in the native definition of the tile and with a level of detail set between "high" and "very high". We were able to rotate Crysis 3 (max details) at 33 frames / second, Metro Last Light (max details) at 41 fps, or The Witcher 3 (max details) at 59 fps. For slightly older titles, like Tomb Raider or Battlelfield, the 60 fps are happily exceeded (118 fps on Tomb Raider, 85 fps on Battlefield 4).

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Mobility / Autonomy

3 kg on the scale, almost 4 cm thick ... the Predator 15 is a machine that is difficult to transport, and even more so with its bulky charger. There remains a relatively compact 15 inch format which even allows it to be placed on the knees to type text.

Good surprise on the autonomy side, since our reading test under Netflix (under Chrome, headphones plugged in, brightness at 200 cd / m²) ran for 5:20. An excellent score compared to other gaming laptops (the MSI GS60 runs for less than 2 hours, the ROG G752 from Asus for 2 hours 20 minutes).

In games, however, this duration melts like snow in the sun: by activating Nvidia Battery Boost (which limits the number of images per second to 30), a title like Metro Last Light empties the battery in 1 hour.

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Audio

The Predator 15's headphone output is good. The distortion is quite low (0.03%), the whole sound spectrum is well restored and the power is in a good average.

On the speaker side, Acer had the good idea to integrate a subwoofer under the chassis. Listening, we see indeed that the bass is quite present, but saturate quite quickly. Switching to the audio lab allows you to display a curve, however, very average and only the voice really stands out clearly (graphic above).

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Conclusion

For a first try on the gaming laptop market, we can say that Acer has applied. The Predator 15 is probably not the most original machine of the year, but ticks all the boxes that make it a good product of this type: solid construction, power to play in excellent conditions, quality screen, good noise and heat management. By the way, he even allows himself to put a little slap on his competitors side autonomy. A nice success and a nice surprise.

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