Acer put an emphasis on power with the new Predator Helios Neo 16 ($1,199 as tested), including some parts you’d normally expect to pay more for as upgrades. These include a workstation-grade 13th Gen Intel Core HX processor, a fast solid-state drive, and a super-bright 16-inch display. It ends up being a fairly bulky model, but the Helios Neo 16 finds its place just beneath midrange champs like the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. Meanwhile, it gives budget-minded shoppers a somewhat speedier alternative to the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, our Editors' Choice award holder for cheap gaming laptops.
The Design: A Bulkier Build for More Serious Silicon
Out of the box, the Neo 16 comes across as standard gaming laptop fare. A few minor touches raise it above other budget gaming laptops, as far as design and components are concerned. Ultimately, though, it’s a big block of (mostly) plastic that’s ready to game.
The keyboard surface has a sparkling finish and a smoother feel than the rough underside. As far as the plastics go, the keyboard deck feels solid, but it flexes slightly near the middle. Acer implemented four-zone RGB lighting on the keyboard, with three zones covering the main keys and the fourth mostly covering the number pad. You'll see a little light bleed out at the crossover points, keeping each zone from standing fully apart.
Just like the keyboard’s lightning, the keyboard itself is inconsistent. The keys have decent travel and are easily visible with backlighting on or off. However, Acer sticks full-size arrow keys between the main keyboard and the number pad, which results in a regrettably shrunken right Shift key and a smaller zero key on the number pad. Acer also dedicates a key above the number pad to its Predator Sense software, which only serves to further morph the number pad from its usual arrangement. You'll feel a little wiggle to some of the keycaps, particularly along their bottom edges, but they’re otherwise fairly stable and consistent.
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Acer squeezes in a sizable and smooth touchpad below the keyboard that produces a satisfyingly tactile and silent click when depressed.
In a small premium touch, the screen lid is metal, though the panel itself is flanked by plastic bezels. Despite that mixed arrangement, the display is one of the laptop's standout features. It’s a 16-inch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio that’s less common at this price (though that is changing fast), and it’s G-Sync compatible. Further stepping away from the budget world, the Predator Helios Neo 16 display features broad color coverage and high brightness, two areas in which budget gaming laptop displays consistently falter.
That large display and all the high-power gaming internals add up to a sizable, weighty machine. It comes in at 5.7 pounds, heavier than Lenovo’s competing 16-inch laptops, notably the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 8 and Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. It’s fairly thick at 1.18 inch, which means big bulk paired with its 14.2-inch width and 11-inch depth. That jutting rear end creates just enough extra depth to make the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 tricky to slip into some backpacks.
At least Acer used the space to benefit its primary purpose: gaming. To that end, the system comes loaded with handy ports. The left side includes a USB-A port, a microSD card slot, a headset jack, and an Ethernet port. The right side adds two more USB-A ports.
Acer also fitted a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, and a power port on the back edge of the laptop between the rear exhausts. It would have been convenient to have a few more of these ports shifted around back, particularly Ethernet since it’s most likely to be used when the laptop is at a desk. However, the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the rear allow for single-cable docking setups that would keep most of the side ports clear. And, with Wi-Fi 6, using Ethernet for your internet connection isn’t as critical.
As for the rest of the keyboard deck, Acer could have included top-firing speakers in the space forward of the keyboard but rather opted for a grille to enable even more airflow into the cooling system. Most of the air intake will come from the underside of the chassis, so this area on top helps ensure it won’t choke if it’s set on a soft surface that obstructs the bottom intake. That air intake relegates the speakers to the underside of the system, near the front corners.
Acer didn't build in any biometric login methods, but the laptop does feature a better-than-expected webcam. It’s a 1080p model that shows its sharpness well. While it doesn’t perform miracles in darker settings, serving up fairly noisy images, it’s still a substantial upgrade from the run-of-the-mill 720p webcams found in many laptops at this price.
Acer sells the Predator Helios Neo 16 in just three configurations. Our test model is the base version, at $1,199, and it packs an Intel Core i5-13500HX CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics chip, 16GB of DDR5 memory, a 512GB SSD, and a display with a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution and 165Hz refresh rate. The second configuration jumps to $1,299, which simply upgrades the CPU to an Intel Core i7-13700HX. The top-tier model costs $1,549 and adds a few more upgrades, including double the storage, a GPU bump to the RTX 4060, and a display swap for a 2,560-by-1,600 unit.
The Display and Keyboard: Mostly, Budget Fare
While far from unusable, Acer’s keyboard isn’t a strong point for the Predator Helios Neo 16. It’s not bad, but definitely not exceptional. I was able to get my typing speed to just about 100 words per minute with more than 95% accuracy. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t really go faster than that. I struggled with some of the keys feeling like they don’t kick back quickly enough through double presses. Also, the soft bottom edge of the keys makes typing inconsistent when I hit them there instead of in the center of the keycaps.
In contrast, the laptop's touchpad is excellent. It's not icy smooth, but my fingers glide across it with ease, and the little bit of friction helps me with precision pointing. The soft, tactile clicks are a delight and a big upgrade from some touchpads that feel like they’re sitting on the cheapest, stiffest button ever made. The surface is spacious, but not overly large, and I haven’t run into any issues with palm rejection while using it.
The tall aspect ratio and large screen are lovely for getting work done on the go. Though this display is only 1,920 by 1,200 in pixels, it’s still reasonably sharp. Better still, the combination of a high brightness level and an anti-glare finish makes it easy to see in just about any condition. Tack on the 165Hz refresh rate, and you have a decent display for casually scrolling around websites and gaming. While many budget gaming laptops opt for cheap displays that cover only 45% of the NTSC color space, Acer went for a more colorful display that provides more vibrant visuals at every turn.
As bright and colorful as the display is, the speakers are the opposite. They lack much punch or range, their bass is insufficient, and the peak volume is barely enough even for quiet environments. Don’t try gaming with the built-in speakers, as they’ll fail to keep up with the fan noise.
Acer doesn’t include too much beyond the usual Windows pre-installed apps. The laptop has some DTS:X audio tools for upgrading the sound, bringing the speakers to just the right side of usable. Its Predator Sense app delivers the kind of hardware controls commonly found on gaming laptops, though it is not as capable or clean as some. It has unnecessary graphics (in the form of a little animated fellow who symbolizes nothing I could make out), and it lacks a means of forcing a handoff between the integrated graphics and the discrete GeForce GPU. Sometimes the system gets it right, but sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve seen it run into a lockup that left no control over the display brightness. The Nvidia Control Panel provides a means of switching between the dedicated and integrated GPUs, but this would have been more convenient inside Acer’s app.
Testing the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16: All About the Muscle
With its robust HX processor and a few higher-end parts—like 16GB of RAM and an extra-bright display—the Predator Helios Neo 16 couldn’t quite start at that $999 price that defines a budget gaming laptop, but it’s not far off at a $1,199 starting price, where it provides a competitive value that a few other laptops try to match.
The Lenovo LOQ 15 costs a bit more for a comparable system that will include more storage but a smaller, dimmer display and an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor. Then you have the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8, which carries that same Ryzen CPU but upgrades to an RTX 4060 and a 2,560-by-1,600 display. For the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 to come configured similarly, it would also cost $1,549, though it would also benefit from 1TB of storage and an upgrade to an Intel Core i7-13700HX.
While upgrade options are one threat, cheaper laptops may be an even bigger threat. The MSI Cyborg 15 may opt for a weaker Intel Core i7-13620H, but it has the same RTX 4050 and also delivers 16GB of RAM for the price. Even more challenging is the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF, our new favorite in the budget gaming laptop segment, which employs an Intel Core i5-13500H and RTX 4050 in a high-quality chassis for a $999 starting price. While it might have only 8GB of RAM, that's easily upgraded while remaining below the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 in price.
Productivity Tests
We test each laptop’s ability to handle everyday workloads using UL's PCMark 10, which simulates office and content-creation workflows with tasks like word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.
To see how well each system’s CPU performs we run a series of CPU-specific benchmarks, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
We finish our productivity testing with a creative workload using PugetBench for Photoshop by Puget Systems, which runs in the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Predator Helios Neo 16 performed exceptionally well as an everyday workhorse. It may not have led the pack in PCMark 10’s productivity test, but all of these machines were beyond capable in this regard, easily past the 4,000-point threshold that’s a mark of excellence in everyday computing.
Beyond that, the Neo 16 clearly has faster storage than its budget and midrange gaming laptop competitors, with a PCMark 10 Storage result that even some high-end gaming laptops failed to meet. Also, its sizable chassis helped the Intel Core i5-13500HX flex and outperform the competition here in many tests, including some Ryzen 7 and Core i7 CPUs. The HX series is Intel’s highest-power mobile CPU line, and it shows here. This is a machine that's ready for some heavy lifting both in and out of the game.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We see how well gaming laptops can handle graphical work with a mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. The first group includes four gaming simulations—two DirectX 12 exercises from UL's 3DMark (the integrated-graphics-friendly Night Raid and the more demanding Time Spy), and 1080p and 1440p OpenGL tests in the cross-platform GFXBench 5 benchmark. The latter set is rendered offscreen to accommodate different native display resolutions; more frames per second (fps) means higher performance.
We top those off with the built-in 1080p benchmarks of three real-world games: F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter titles, respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice each, at different image-quality presets, and F1 2021 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.
The Neo 16 didn't pull off any magic tricks with its RTX 4050 in our synthetic benchmarks, performing in line with its similarly equipped competitors. The beefy cooling and 140 watts of total graphics power on the Neo 16 allowed it a slight edge over the Lenovo LOQ 15 and Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF. (The latter’s thin design comes with a small performance penalty.) Those three decimate the MSI Cyborg 15, plainly unable to maximize the potential of its RTX 4050 GPU, held back by its 45W maximum graphics power. Meanwhile, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 didn't cede an inch of ground with its RTX 4060.
Those synthetic benchmark results translated well to real-world gaming. The Neo 16 largely produced faster performance than the RTX 4050 laptops in this competitive set, especially MSI's Cyborg, illustrating the value to going for the bigger and heavier machine—which the Neo 16 is compared with these four competitors. This was an impressive showing for the RTX 4050, as well, with playable performance in the demanding Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and F1 2021 while cruising well past 200 or 300 frames per second in esports games. The Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF lagged slightly behind in some tests, but it showed compelling performance for a machine so much sleeker than Acer's.
While the Neo 16 couldn't keep up with the Legion Slim 5 Gen 8 and its RTX 4060 in most graphics tests, it flipped the script in Rainbow Six Siege at low settings. This scenario sees CPU limits come to the fore, and the Neo 16 pulled ahead with its powerful Intel Core i5-13500HX. In situations like that, esports gamers playing with settings dialed back could see better performance from the Neo 16 than the more expensive Lenovo Legion Slim 5 Gen 8.
Battery and Display Tests
We evaluate how long a laptop can run away from wall power by running a video playback test with the system fully charged and Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting disabled. We play a locally stored 720p video (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with Windows' display brightness set to 50% and audio volume to 100% until the system quits.
Also, we analyze the screen using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure the display's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the screen can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Neo 16 won't last long on the go. Its battery life fell just shy of the five-hour mark, whereas current gaming laptops now often pass six hours. Combine that with its size and weight, and you’ve got a machine that you can move about, but likely want to anchor down. You might be able to eke out more battery life if you’re economical about screen brightness, though. Our test mandates running the laptop at 50% brightness, which in this case meant a surprisingly bright 259 nits, much brighter than the rest of our test lot.
At least Acer delivered extra value with that display. It’s not just extra-bright at 50% but also at 100%, which saw it hit 490 nits for SDR content and narrowly exceed 500 nits for HDR. Contrast remained deep at max brightness, as well, beating standard IPS panels at 1,380:1. Color gamut coverage was also improved over the Neo 16’s budget competitors, producing significantly more colors for more vibrant and lively viewing. Altogether, for what it misses in portability, the Neo 16 makes up for in visual appeal once you’re hunkered down.
Verdict: A Credible Battlestation on a Budget
The Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 sacrifices portability and a truly budget price in the name of additional power. While remaining relatively budget-friendly, this gaming laptop packs serious processing chops, and Acer optimizes its internals to deliver respectable 1080p (or 1200p) gameplay from an RTX 4050. Its keyboard and chassis design won't win it any awards, but its display is a cut above for the price. And you might find this model on sale, if you're lucky; that would make the whole package a borderline Editors' Choice pick for us, at $100 or $200 less.
If you largely keep your laptop in one place, the Neo 16 is well worth considering. It's just that the Gigabyte Aorus 15 BMF is the surer budget bet.
Acer's Predator Helios Neo 16 is a hefty budget gaming laptop that maximizes GPU performance for the money, which should appeal to power-hungry gamers less fixated on portability.
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