Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI review: perfect price to power balance?

When you survey the latest and greatest gaming laptops, there's now a big divide between those that wear their power on their sleeve, with huge vents and chunky designs, compared with others that slim things down as much as possible and masquerade as Ultrabooks.

In the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI, though, Acer looks like it's trying to thread a challenging needle. It doesn't aim for one extreme or the other; instead, it slims things down while maintaining a lot of ventilation and, frankly, chunkiness.

The price seems fair, though, and the specs don't lie – delivering high-end gaming as a guarantee, without the cost of many key competitors. Here's how I've found living with Acer's latest gaming laptop.

Price & Availability

You can order the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI now from a range of retailers, in a few different configurations. The loan unit I tested came with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, along with an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, and you can pick up this unit for £2,199 in the UK or from around $2,049 in the US.

Based on the competition I've been testing in recent weeks, that's a very reasonable price that doesn't push into the more design-focused territory of options like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 or Razer Blade 16 (with the same GPU).

Design

As I mentioned in the intro to this review, many of the best gaming laptops on the market right now are ultra-slim and make open compromises to achieve that slimness. The Predator Helios Neo 16S AI is something of a welcome compromise in that department, though.

Don't get me wrong – it earns the "S" in its name, and is impressively thin compared to the chunkier laptops I've tried. Still, it's not in the same bracket as an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and that's obvious the moment you pick it up. When it's closed, it's about 2cm thick in most places, aside from the far rear of the laptop, which protrudes behind the hinge a little.

This is a shortcut that has become common in gaming laptops, giving more space for internal components and airflow, but there's no getting around the fact that I don't love the look. It makes the footprint of this 16-inch laptop feel bigger, making for a laptop that's thin, but not small.

Image 1 of 2

Still, it will slip into many a backpack's laptop sleeve nicely, and the rest of Acer's design choices are largely successful.

The laptop is finished all over in black metal; on the top of the case, there's a single Acer Predator logo that lights up when the machine is on, but it's really not too shouty.

The bottom of the Helios Neo 16S AI hides four rubberised feet for grip on a surface when it's placed down, along with a whole heap of vents for airflow and cooling.

The protruding rear section holds some useful ports, meanwhile: AC for power, an HDMI, and two for USB-C – one of which is rated for power, the other for display output.

The left of the laptop has more ports – Ethernet, a USB-A, and a microSD card reader, plus a combined headphone and microphone jack. The right, finally, offers up two more for USB-A, plus two indicator lights to keep you abreast of charging and lighting.

Image 1 of 3

The Helios Neo 16S AI weighs in at 2.7kg, which isn't nothing, but I found that carrying it around wasn't too onerous compared to even something like my MacBook Pro, even if that's a kilogram lighter. Really, once you have a laptop in your bag, it's going to be heavy regardless.

Open it up and you'll find a full-sized keyboard with a numpad (something I'd do without, but which plenty of people do value). These keys are fully backlit, and can be customised easily. There's one other button above the keyboard, which toggles you through power modes at a touch; that's actually an elegant solution for when you want broad tweaks on the fly.

The trackpad isn't something that most gamers aim to use unless they need to, but this is not a particularly great example of one anyway. It's a little cheap feeling compared to other glass options, but it will still do a job.

Specs & Features

The most headline-grabbing part of any gaming laptop is the discrete GPU that its designers have managed to squeeze in. In the case of this Predator Helios Neo 16S AI, Acer has gone with an RTX 5070 Ti. That's a card that's proving both powerful and popular, for a bit more VRAM than the base 5070 and a decent boost in performance.

It's a card that I've found excellent in other machines, and it's paired here with an Intel Core Ultra 9 Series 2 CPU that should ensure this laptop can power through modern games for years to come.

To go with that power, you get 32GB of DDR5 RAM, ensuring that multitasking ought to be buttery smooth. You do only get a single Terabyte of SSD space by default, though, which is a slight shame – games are only getting larger, and you might find that additional storage becomes desirable soon.

The 16-inch OLED display clocks in at 165Hz and with a 2560 x 1600 resolution. That means you get sharpness but also real smoothness – if you tweak your settings to make the most of what you have.

The 500 nits of peak brightness is pretty standard, but bright enough to work in well-lit rooms (although you might struggle in the sun, as always). The benefits of OLED tech are there to see when you game, though, as I'll cover later.

For control of various settings, you'll find Acer's in-house app PredatorSense, which has a silly name but works very well. It has extensive options, across lighting, power and more, and they're all clearly labelled and explained. That's rarer than it should be in this space, and this makes real-time monitoring really easy here.

Performance

Like every major gaming laptop you could care to find right now, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI throttles itself hard when you're running off battery power. In fact, it limits you to its Eco or Balanced modes, as well as ramping down its performance massively in other ways.

Plug it in, though, and you'll get full access to its 5070 Ti, with all the bells and whistles that come with it. Doom: The Dark Ages has been my go-to benchmark in recent weeks across a range of laptops, and it proved no issue at all for this machine.

Running at the monitor's native 2560 x 1600 resolution, with no frame generation at all, the game's maximum settings (Ultra Nightmare) across the board saw frame rates hover around the 70fps mark. That's already extremely playable for a brand-new release, and better than you'd fare on console.

Turn on the first level of frame-generation, though (2X), and you get an immediate boost to around 110 fps, which is a huge leap. That was available on 40-series cards, but the next-level multipliers aren't. The 3X frame-generation saw another leap to around 150fps, while the 4X setting topped out at 180fps.

Those are massive gains, and they turn the game from being nice and smooth to super-responsive, with very few downsides visually. There are plenty of people out there who are adamant that they can see blurriness in motion using frame-gen, but the more the tech develops, the better it gets.

My experience with 50-series cards is that it feels like the magic trick Nvidia markets it as, and it's a perfect fit on laptop displays like this one, where a smaller screen makes it all the harder to see any hiccups.

When stressing the card like this, the laptop obviously revs itself up pretty significantly, and there's no escaping that old bête noire – fan noise. Acer's fans go up in steps according to your power mode, but to get the best performance, you'll have to endure them at their most powerful.

We're in the realms of needing one of the best gaming headsets to get any immersion at all, as always, but these really are some of the louder fans I've tested recently. Not that it's unusual, you only need to look at Alienware's 16 Area-51 to know that.

The display itself, meanwhile, is a doozy. It's great to get an OLED display on a laptop with this spec and price, and I've tested more expensive rivals that didn't opt for OLED.

It delivers really inky blacks and vivid colours, and while 165Hz might not satisfy the most ultra-competitive FPS gamers, it should be more than enough for most of us. The only small duff note is that it has a very reflective surface coating, which undermines its qualities in some lighting.

Battery life is predictably mediocre once you unplug your power cord. You'll get a couple of hours of regular use out of the Helios Neo 16S AI if you want it, but you'd be better advised not to think of it as remotely capable for productivity. If you try to game on battery, meanwhile, expect it to barely last.

Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI review: Verdict

Acer's 16-inch Predator Helios Neo 16S AI gaming laptop is a really solid effort that makes some compromises many people will be happy to accept – especially for its balanced asking price.

Yes, its fan noise is significant, and I think its design isn't wildly inspiring. However, it has great specs, a lovely OLED display, and the power to run the most recent games at their max.

So if you want a gaming machine that you can pack away and carry around without breaking your back – or, indeed, breaking the bank – but aren't tempted or able to justify a truly ultralight option, then Acer's machine is a great choice for high-end gaming guaranteed.

Also consider

I was blown away by the 2025 refresh of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 when I tested it recently, and its bigger sibling, the G16, should be equally impressive. Either of them would put the Predator Helios Neo 16S AI to shame on the design side, and make more premium options.

For a 16-inch laptop that surprised me and pumps things up even further on the specs side of things, the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate has a 5090 up its sleeve and isn't afraid to use it. It's thicker than Acer's laptop, but I might just prefer that to the weird rear-end that Acer went with.