Acer Predator Triton 900
Incredible performance, but do gamers need the Acer Predator Triton 900’s spinning hinged display?
Gaming laptops aren’t renowned for their subtlety. Typically oversized, noisy and coated in RGB lighting, they’re the most garish form of laptop. Yet the Acer Predator Triton 900 may be the most outlandish of them all: its unique rotating hinged display is a serious head-turner.
It’s also huge. Weighing 4.5kg without the power supply, it measures 428 x 303.3 x 23.8mm. To call the Triton 900 “portable” would be to stretch the definition of the word to breaking point. With its massive rear and side vents and jutting hinges, it’s an imposing sight and becomes even more so once you raise the lid.
The bulky hinges allow the display to tilt on its X-axis, flipping back as far as 18o˚. This means you can adjust the angle of the display to suit your needs, and you can imagine designers and artists taking advantage.
The screen image flips when the display is rotated into a backwardsfacing position, and in Acer’s marketing this is depicted as a good way to play games: it puts the main body of the laptop behind the display so that you can be closer to the action. Personally, I found it a handy way to show colleagues sitting opposite me what was on my screen; simply flip, wait for auto-rotate to kick in, then flip back to continue working.
Style over substance
Acer has followed the Asus ROG lead with its keyboard and touchpad arrangement, shunting the keyboard in front to make way for the fan intake above. You can actually see one of the fans glowing from within through a semi-transparent window – a silly feature that doesn’t look anywhere near as cool as it sounds. Meanwhile, the touchpad has been pushed into the bottom-right corner and flipped at a right angle. It doubles as a digital numeric keypad.
Nor am I a fan of the mechanical keyboard. The keys are tacky and cheap, in contrast to the premium chassis, and each key press elicits a tinny clack. With a meaty design such as this, I expected something more substantial. Plus, the touchpad is comically small for a laptop of this size, making a mouse essential. It’s best to think of it as a digital number pad; at least it’s highly responsive.
One of my main gripes with gaming laptops is their reliance on hyper-glossy display finishes, which reflect light and distract from the onscreen action. I’m sorry to report that the 17.3in IPS touchscreen display on the Triton 900 is a particularly glossy offender, but at least you can adjust the angle so it’s not pointing at any light sources.
“To call the Acer Predator Triton 900 ‘portable’ would be to stretch the definition of the word to its breaking point”
Sadly, the display quality still isn’t that great considering how much Acer is charging. While it has a 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution, it lacks colour accuracy. Using a colorimeter and DisplayCAL software, I measured sRGB gamut coverage of 98.6% and an sRGB gamut volume of 149.4%, which means that the Predator Triton 900 is capable of reproducing much of the sRGB gamut but overshoots massively. Blues, reds, greens and whites are all way off target.
The oversaturation of colours is evident at a glance, and the numbers back this up: an average Delta E of 5.65 makes this one of the least accurate displays I’ve tested in months, and it’s unsuitable for professional photo or video work. There goes the appeal for designers and artists who might be interested in the rotating touchscreen.
A measured maximum brightness of 326cd/m2 means the display is perfectly visible indoors, as long as it’s not reflecting any lights. And a contrast ratio of 1,075:1 is neither impressive nor unimpressive. Yes, it could be better, but it provides an adequate amount of contrast between dark and light, so you can still see what’s going on in shadow-heavy games such as Metro: Last Light and
Hitman. Ultimately, though, it’s this screen’s 60Hz refresh rate that will put off gamers.
Need for speed
Which brings me to performance. Acer packs this top-end version of the Triton 900 with a 9th Gen octacore Intel Core i9-9980HK processor with a 2.4GHz base frequency and Turbo Boost of 5GHz. This is helped along by 32GB of RAM – the maximum that the Triton 900 can hold. Graphics responsibilities are shouldered by the all-new Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 mobile GPU, while two 512GB PCIe SSD drives give you 1TB of storage.
Our benchmarks are designed to put laptops through the wringer, straining the CPU, GPU and thermal management systems to their limit. Unsurprisingly, given the impressive spec, the Triton 900 performed admirably, smashing out an overall speed of 291. It’s our second-fastest laptop ever, with only the Alienware Area-51m’s supersonic 310 beating it.
That puts the Triton 900 on par with many high-end desktop PCs, and it chews through such tasks while staying cool: at no point during my testing did any individual core exceed a temperature of 94°C, and most went no further than the mid-80s.
What the Triton 900 won’t do, however, is keep quiet. When the internals are running at full tilt, the fans go into overdrive, and they are obnoxiously loud – 78dB loud, according to the sound level meter I placed on the table next to the laptop.
But it’s the RTX 2080-powered gaming that matters here. In the GFXBench Car Chase test, the Triton 900 pushed off-screen frame rates to an unprecedented average of 430fps, besting even the Area-51m’s 416fps.
When it comes to more “realworld” gaming tests, the Triton 900 begins to fall behind the Area-51m. Take the Metro: Last Light 1080p benchmark, which the Predator Triton 900 ran at an average of 155fps – barely any better than rivals that cost around £2,000. Under the same conditions, the mighty Area-51m pushed the Metro benchmark to an average frame rate of 213fps.
IO Interactive’s Hitman 2 has one of the most demanding benchmarks of any game. Running the Hitman 2 1080p Mumbai benchmark on high settings, the Triton 900 cranked out an average of 57.9fps, only slightly below its refresh rate. Few laptops out there could manage such a feat, and even the Area-51m was a tad behind at 54.7fps.
If you buy a Triton 900, you’ll be no doubt eager to save your games library as quickly as possible and boot up a session right away. In which case, you’ll be grateful for the impressive storage speeds of its dual 512GB PCIe SSDs. The Triton 900 is in a league of its own, with its drives managing sequential read speeds of 3,027MB/sec and sequential write speeds of 2,781MB/sec. It’s unusual for a laptop to have such incredible read rates, and even rarer that the write rates match them so closely.
No matter what you’re using the Triton 900 for, be it gaming or editing or just watching a film, you won’t want to separate it from its power source. In our standardised battery rundown test, it went from a full charge to dead after only 1hr 57mins of video playback. The same goes for any laptop of this magnitude, though.
Final twist?
Acer packs the Triton 900 with ports spread across the back, right and left, despite the amount of space along the edges consumed by the air vents. The right edge holds an RJ-45 jack, USB 3.1 port and two USB-C ports: one USB 3.1 with DisplayPort, the other supporting Thunderbolt 3. Annoyingly, a power button sits next to the latter, which I kept pressing accidentally when inserting or removing cables.
Over on the left are two 3.5mm jacks, one for a headset and one for a mic, plus two USB 2 ports. Oddly, one of these USB ports is concealed within a hatch set into the base. This hatch swivels outwards, allowing you to remove the dummy connector and slot in a USB dongle (for a wireless mouse, perhaps), then swivel the hatch closed, thus keeping your USB-attachment out of view. Lastly, on the back edge, you’ll find an HDMI 2.0 output, a full-sized DisplayPort and the proprietary power port.
So is there a final twist? A great reason to buy the Triton 900? Sorry, no. You can save up to £1,480 by opting for the Razer Blade 15 ( see p52) or the Asus ROG Strix Scar III ( pcpro. link/301strix), which both offer great gaming performance and 240Hz refresh rates.
And if money is no object, I’d still choose the Alienware Area-51m because of its superior benchmark results, higher refresh rate and better display quality (even given the lower screen resolution). While the Triton 900’s spinning screen is fun to play with for a few minutes, the hallmark of a great gaming laptop is that it’s fun to use for hundreds of hours.
SPECIFICATIONS
Octa-core 2.4GHz Intel Core i9-9980HK processor 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics 32GB DDR4 RAM 17.3in 60Hz IPS display, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution 2 x 512GB M.2 PCIe SSDs 2MP webcam 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 2 x USB-C 3.1 (USB-C 3.1 with DisplayPort, Thunderbolt) 2 x USB-A 3.1
USB-A 2 HDMI 2 DisplayPort 1.4 72Wh battery Windows 10 Home 428 x 303 x 23.8mm (WDH) 4.5kg 1yr warranty
“In the GFXBench Car Chase test, the Triton 900 pushed off-screen frame rates to an unprecedented average of 430fps”