Acer Predator Triton 500 15.6" Laptop: i7-8750H, 512GB SSD, RTX 2080 Max-Q EXPIRED

Uhh... GTX 1080 or RTX 2080?? Title and description on this post is off a bit..

Edit: its been fixed

Sorry!!! Corrected the post. It should be RTX 2080 Max Q.

I have the 9750h version and I love it! Light, powerful, everything one could really need. Battery life is amazing and zero thermal throttling. I paid 2k for mine and it was well worth it. I play BF5 at max settings at around 70fps hooked up to my 2560x1440 monitor. 90+ on the laptops 1080p screen. Not bad at all.

The only thing i dont care for is RTX. Makes the games grainy and costs a fair bit of performance. BF5 is maybe 40fps on the 2k monitor... :/ whatever. I just wont use it.

Everything else about it is solid.

edit: Battery life for me is 3-4 hours of web surfing, coding, youtube, and other general tasks on a balanced setting. 4-5hrs on battery saver mode.

I had a HP omen laptop that wouldn't even last for 2 hrs...

That's a helluva machine for the money. Love that it's under 5 pounds. The issue with the 2080MQ is that it's just a hair (~8%) faster than the 2070MQ which is just a hair (~7%) faster than a 2060 mobile which is nearly on par with a 1660ti mobile. If you don't care about RTX (which you will care about once trying on something like Control), then you can save a ton with a 1660ti machine while only sacrificing a few frames even vs a 2080MQ.

RTX Super cards are rumored to be released soon for laptops. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2070MQ Super is faster than the 2080MQ.

Not a bad deal. But with GFN, even as a heavy laptop gamer myself, I've personally been looking at laptops with better battery life, lighter, and an overall nicer screen. Everyone's different of course but just my 2 cents.

Too rich for my blood. I like the Nitro 5 for cheap (but bulky) laptop gaming.

Quote from trombot : That's a helluva machine for the money. Love that it's under 5 pounds. The issue with the 2080MQ is that it's just a hair (~8%) faster than the 2070MQ which is just a hair (~7%) faster than a 2060 mobile which is nearly on par with a 1660ti mobile. If you don't care about RTX (which you will care about once trying on something like Control), then you can save a ton with a 1660ti machine while only sacrificing a few frames even vs a 2080MQ. RTX Super cards are rumored to be released soon for laptops. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2070MQ Super is faster than the 2080MQ.

The main problem is the 9750h, which is very anemic for gaming.

It's got a 50-60watt limit, so for esports titles, you don't get very high framerate as the CPU locks to only 4ghz.

So, depending on the game, you simply can't get your money's worth out of these machines.

For example, my old desktop 2500K @ 5ghz, a 7yr old qiadcore CPU can push 50% higher framerates on CSGO/ LOL/ DOTA, vs a 9750h 6-core

It just doesn't make sense to spend $1800 on a gaming laptop, you don't get what you paid for.

8750 not 9750, 15.6 not 17 and 3000Nvidia and new AMD cpu GPU offerings in a couple months for $1800 dollars....hard pass imo

Quote from xtp : The main problem is the 9750h, which is very anemic for gaming. It's got a 50-60watt limit, so for esports titles, you don't get very high framerate as the CPU locks to only 4ghz. So, depending on the game, you simply can't get your money's worth out of these machines. For example, my old desktop 2500K @ 5ghz, a 7yr old qiadcore CPU can push 50% higher framerates on CSGO/ LOL/ DOTA, vs a 9750h 6-core It just doesn't make sense to spend $1800 on a gaming laptop, you don't get what you paid for.

I don't think this is accurate based on my experience with my 9750h.

I push a 1440p 144mhz monitor at max frame rates on my MSI GS65 9750h w/ 1660ti, on a mix of high/ultra settings on Overwatch. Dota and LOL are no problem whatsoever maxing out 144hz on max settings.

I should also mention this is actually USING Throttlestop to lower voltage. In fact, my laptop is faster than my 8550 i7 desktop CPU with a RX 580 8gb across the board.

Also, esports titles are generally old games. It's just the nature of esports (i.e. you can't create an esports franchise by changing the games constantly), so if anything... esports games are old and very easy to run.

Even COD MW (latest release) runs 135-144hz on high settings on my 9750h + 1660ti.

FWIW, I had an RTX 2060 Razer Blade (same 9750h), and in some titles (i.e Overwatch) the 1660ti is noticably faster by 10+ avg. fps.

It depends on the game. Some games lean on CPU, some lean on GPU. In either event, 9750h is fully capable of running anything. You're more likely to get bottlenecked by the GPU, even a RTX 2080 MQ.

That being said, I don't think this deal is actually that great. Same CPU w/ 1660ti or RTX 2060 (non MQ) were on sale the entire holiday season for as low as 1100, with avg pricing around 1200-1300. At 1800, you're paying a 500-700 premium for a 2080 MQ, which will most likely net maybe 10-15 fps (if at all) depending on title. Not worth it IMO.

Quote from wuss : I don't think this is accurate based on my experience with my 9750h. I push a 1440p 144mhz monitor at max frame rates on my MSI GS65 9750h w/ 1660ti, on a mix of high/ultra settings on Overwatch. Dota and LOL are no problem whatsoever maxing out 144hz on max settings. I should also mention this is actually USING Throttlestop to lower voltage. In fact, my laptop is faster than my 8550 i7 desktop CPU with a RX 580 8gb across the board. Also, esports titles are generally old games. It's just the nature of esports (i.e. you can't create an esports franchise by changing the games constantly), so if anything... esports games are old and very easy to run. Even COD MW (latest release) runs 135-144hz on high settings on my 9750h + 1660ti. FWIW, I had an RTX 2060 Razer Blade (same 9750h), and in some titles (i.e Overwatch) the 1660ti is noticably faster by 10+ avg. fps. It depends on the game. Some games lean on CPU, some lean on GPU. In either event, 9750h is fully capable of running anything. You're more likely to get bottlenecked by the GPU, even a RTX 2080 MQ. That being said, I don't think this deal is actually that great. Same CPU w/ 1660ti or RTX 2060 (non MQ) were on sale the entire holiday season for as low as 1100, with avg pricing around 1200-1300. At 1800, you're paying a 500-700 premium for a 2080 MQ, which will most likely net maybe 10-15 fps (if at all) depending on title. Not worth it IMO.

I also just got an MSI laptop, same processor but with a 2080. Runs PUBG on ultra and rarely drops below 100fps.

Quote from xtp : The main problem is the 9750h, which is very anemic for gaming. It's got a 50-60watt limit, so for esports titles, you don't get very high framerate as the CPU locks to only 4ghz. So, depending on the game, you simply can't get your money's worth out of these machines. For example, my old desktop 2500K @ 5ghz, a 7yr old qiadcore CPU can push 50% higher framerates on CSGO/ LOL/ DOTA, vs a 9750h 6-core It just doesn't make sense to spend $1800 on a gaming laptop, you don't get what you paid for.

I don't know where you're getting that information honestly.
-- https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Com...70418vs619
The 8750H is much faster with almost half the wattage of a stock 2500K in a laptop that weighs only 4.41 pounds and is 0.7" inches thick, pretty impressive honestly. Like, I have zero clue how you don't think an 8750H can handle competitive games at 1080p with a RTX 2080 Max-Q. Where are you pulling your information from?

Quote from xtp : The main problem is the 9750h, which is very anemic for gaming. It's got a 50-60watt limit, so for esports titles, you don't get very high framerate as the CPU locks to only 4ghz. So, depending on the game, you simply can't get your money's worth out of these machines. For example, my old desktop 2500K @ 5ghz, a 7yr old qiadcore CPU can push 50% higher framerates on CSGO/ LOL/ DOTA, vs a 9750h 6-core It just doesn't make sense to spend $1800 on a gaming laptop, you don't get what you paid for.

I looked up CSGO - people with properly configured laptops seem to get around 240-260fps on a 9750h. 2500k seemed to get 180 stock, 250 overclocked. Appears equal to me.


The 8750h/9750h is a 45W CPU, with short bursts of up to the 60W range (couple minutes before throttle down). I haven't seen a laptop without BIOS overclocking options that can sustain higher output, even if the temperature is under 70C. Throttlestop doesn't help.

"Only" 4GHz though? A Sandy bridge CPU needs a good 25% higher clock speed to perform the same as Coffee Lake in nearly any task (I won't discount raw instructions per second). That comes out to exactly a 5GHz Sandy Bridge core being on par with a 4GHz Coffee Lake core, with the newer CPU being 14nm instead of 32nm. They claimed 10% here, 15% there on generational IPC improvements, but plenty of numbers are out there comparing stock to stock. Some tasks may be 100% faster with the slower-clocked newer CPU (and hundreds more for specialized tasks). Some tasks may be less. Raw numbers seem to point to around 25% in my experience over the 7 "generations". It was mostly a stock-frequency update with small IPC bumps from 2nd gen to 6th gen.

This assumes all being equal though. I will give you that my 8750h laptop is far less responsive in productivity apps than my 8600k workstation when ran under-Volted and frequency-locked. NVMe and 2.5in drives in both, 32GB RAM in both, 1070 max-q in laptop, 1080Ti in desktop. It may come down to turbo events in laptops being lazier, timings, or the laptop itself, even though monitoring shows the CPU frequency as being pegged solid. My 7th gen Alienware 8lb laptop did many things better than my 8th gen 4.5lb machine, including responsiveness and simple things like hdmi audio output not sending pops to the left speaker when seeking forward/back in any video app...


The CPU in this machine is solid, but with the Ryzen 7nm mobile parts being released within the next couple months, I wouldn't spend $1800 on this at this time. This feels like buying a 7th gen Intel laptop right before the 8th gen came out with frequency boosts and an extra 2 cores - where an 8th gen i3 performed better than the 7th gen i5, at a lower price.

This is not a slick deal. You can get an HP regularly priced at $1800 with the 9th gen i7 9750h and a full RTX 2080 not maxq.