We love Acer gaming laptops here at T3: the Acer Nitro 5 is the best budget gaming laptop in our best gaming laptops guide. So I was very excited to see the 2022 editions of Acer's Nitro and Predator gaming laptops unleashed at CES 2022, not least because Acer promises that one of them is "a beast".
That one's the Predator Helios 300, which features a 165Hz QHD IPS panel and graphics up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. There's a 12-gen Intel Core i7, up to 32GB of DDR5-4800 memory and storage up to 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 SSD. Two fans, liquid metal thermal grease and Acer's CoolBoost tech stop it getting too hot no matter how hard you push it.
There's also a super-thin "special edition" gaming laptop that's also designed for work: the Predator Triton 500 SE. It can be specced with a 12-generation Intel Core i9, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and 32GB of LPDDR5-5200 memory.
New Nitros for gamers on a budget
Our best budget gaming laptop, the Acer Nitro 5, gets some welcome improvements too. You can now spec the Nitro 5 with up to a 12-gen Intel Core i7 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and there are twin M.2 SSD slots (PCie Gen 4) and up to 32GB of DDR4-3200RAM. The QHD 165 panel has a 3ms response time.
The Nitro 5 is also available with up to an AMD Ryzen 6000 Series processor and up to a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU, 32GB of DDR-4800 RAM and either an FHD 144Hz panel or a 165Hz QHD. Both options have AMD FreeSync.
The Acer Nitro 5 goes on sale in February/March from £799 to £1,499, and the Predator Helios 300 starts at £1,399 for the 15.6 inch model and £1,499 for the 17.3-inch.
The Predator Triton 500 SE will ship in Q2 2022 and prices will range from £1,999 to £2,999 for the fully loaded specification.