Ben Madilynn
Even though they have some pretty funny names, Acer’s range of monitors, laptops, and more, are often rather wonderful. If you’ve found yourself with the desire to run, well, pretty much any game out there, and want it to be portable, this is a mighty 16-inch laptop available right now at a very good discount.
The Acer Predator Helios 16 is $1,840 at Best Buy at the moment, which is $460 cheaper than its full price, and about as cheap as we’ve seen an RTX 4080 laptop outside of Black Friday. This is, admittedly, still a pretty high price point, but the mobile RTX 4080 is the most powerful card I’d wholeheartedly recommend putting in a laptop under 17-inches. For the price and heat, an RTX 4090 might be a little too much for most smaller cooling arrays and this 16-inch laptop balances the second-tier Nvidia GPU’s power demands well.
The Intel Core i9 13900HX processor sitting alongside it makes for a solid gaming and productivity device, which means you can play and record games, then edit them with near-peak performance. The 16 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD storage, and IPS screen are the only real downsides to consider. Even then, these are only really compromises in the face of other stellar OLED and mini-LED panels in premium machines, and the fact that Chrome will eat your RAM and Steam will quickly eat up your storage space.
The 240 Hz 2560 x 1600 screen is super smooth for any game and should be more than bright enough to handle what you throw at it with a peak of 500 nits. Luckily, that RAM is expandable up to 32 GB, with two on-board memory slots, so you should even be able to upgrade it a little if you want even better RAM.
It also has everything you might want from a modern gaming laptop, like a 1080p camera, RGB backlit keyboard, and it even has two Thunderbolt ports, making for a capable IO. This is a super solid choice, even at full price, so it’s made even better by this clearance sale.
