At CES 2022, Acer revealed a slew of updates to their slate of PCs and laptops, including the Acer Predator line. The Acer Predator Helios 300, the jack-of-all-trades gaming laptop in the Predator line, gets a brand new refreshed look for 2022, alongside the expected specs update.
The 2022 Predator Helios 300 (PH315-55) will come equipped with 12th-gen Intel Core CPUs, and the newly revealed Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 GPUs (which already existed in desktop form, but the Max-Q laptop version is new for this year).
The most striking change is how it looks. The updated chassis is cleaner now with an actual rectangle shape, only the Predator logo on the back (the blue accent lines are gone outside of the outer trims seen on the Predator logo), a new hinge assembly that brings back the pronounced back-end from past years but now with a sliver-ish finish, an underglow RGB light strip that runs at the bottom-front of the laptop, under the palm rest.
The underglow RGB, alongside the per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard (which uses mini-LED) can be configurable in the PredatorSense app.
Other than that, the 2022 Predator Helios 300 comes in both 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch screens, sporting 1440p (2560 x1440, QHD) resolution up to 165Hz refresh rate. For cooling, it uses a dual-fan layout, one of which is of Acer’s proprietary 5th-gen Aeroblade 3D fan and uses liquid metal thermal grease. Plus it will come included with Windows 11.
The spec upgrade is the usual annual bump in performance, so it’s good to see Acer is subtly changing up how the laptop looks for this year.
The 2022 Acer Predator Helios 300 will be coming to North America in May, and in China and the EMEA region this February. Though expect it to arrive in Malaysia a little later than that just like the 2021 models did. Price-wise, the 15.6-inch version will start at $1,649.99 USD (approximately RM6,915).