Acer Predator Helios 18 AI Review

Design and Keyboard

• Hefty, premium build quality
• Excellent port selection
• Snappy keyboard and smooth trackpad

The Predator Helios 18 AI is a big laptop, although that’s not surprising given the 18-inch screen size and the associated heft that brings on its own. It leans into the more aggressive gamer aesthetic in a similar vein to Medion’s rival, especially with a large shelf on the rear and a shedload of RGB all across the chassis that lights it up like a Christmas tree.

At 3.5kg, it’s a bit of a hefty monster, although the build quality is solid with an aluminium lid for a smooth finish. Where this laptop wins out against its rivals, weirdly, is by being quite thin for a powerful choice at just under 30mm, giving it some semblance of portability – as long as you’re happy to lug around a 400W power brick alongside the unit itself.

As expected, the port selection here is strong, with a trifecta of USB-A ports, plus a pair of USB-Cs, a full-size Ethernet jack, SD card reader, HDMI and a headphone jack. The two USB-Cs, HDMI and power jack ports are kept on the rear of the laptop, with the rest on the left and right for convenient access.

Owing to the larger size of the Predator Helios 18 AI, the keyboard here is a full-size one, complete with arrow keys, number pad, and nav cluster. It’s laden with RGB and features a snappy and tactile keypress. The keycaps for the WASD and arrow keys are swappable with others included in the box for added customisation. 

The trackpad here is large, providing plenty of real estate for your fingers, and it’s both smooth for slick inputs and accurate in tracking.

Display and Sound

• Very bright, detailed Mini LED screen
• Impeccable colours, black level and contrast
• Decent speakers with plenty of volume

Acer has thrown the kitchen sink at the Predator Helios 18 AI’s display, featuring a huge 18-inch 4K (3840×2400) Mini LED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. That makes it one of the largest, most detailed, and potentially brightest screens on a laptop at its high price. For reference, both the Medion and Alienware choices opt for a 2560×1600 resolution that’s easier to drive than a 4K panel.

The real benefit of a Mini LED panel is its searing peak brightness for vivid highlights and dynamic range, which became apparent with my colorimeter in testing. The screen on this Acer laptop reached a peak SDR brightness of 903 nits, which is easily the brightest laptop screen I’ve ever tested.

This screen also benefits from surprisingly deep blacks and wonderful contrast, with measured levels of 0.01 and 32730:1, respectively. In addition, the 6500K colour temperature is perfect.

The Predator Helios 18 AI’s colour accuracy is rather excellent for a non-OLED panel, with 100% sRGB coverage proving it perfectly displays mainstream colours for productivity tasks, while the 100% DCI-P3 and 92% Adobe RGB results are well above the requisite level where I can recommend this screen for more colour-sensitive tasks.

Plus, it’s a dual-mode screen, which is quite rare for a laptop, meaning you can lower the resolution and increase the refresh rate. In this case, by switching to a 1080p resolution, the refresh rate can more than double to 320Hz, helping for even more responsive on-screen action in competitive, fast-paced shooters such as Counter-Strike 2 or Overwatch.

The Predator Helios 18 AI’s speaker system can get rather loud for a set of laptop units, although it is mostly mid-range that comes through, as is typical with other laptop speakers. They’re generally pretty good, though.

Performance

• Very powerful processor
• Potent gaming performance with an RTX 5090
• Immensely fast SSD

With the biggest and boldest laptop in its current range, it’s perhaps no surprise that Acer has thrown the kitchen sink at the Predator Helios 18 AI. This top-spec model I have features the 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, plus the beefiest GPU in Nvidia’s new Blackwell lineup with an RTX 5090 running at 175W TGP.

In the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 tests, the Core Ultra 9 275HX proved itself again to be an especially powerful chip with fast single-core performance and sublime multi-core scores. Results here are within the margin of error against key rivals from Alienware and Medion, and this Acer laptop isn’t lacking in power, to say the least.

The addition of the RTX 5090 at its full 175W TGP makes this a behemoth for gaming in a general sense, although this laptop isn’t quite as fast in the 3DMark Time Spy test, with a result that’s 20 percent lower than the Alienware 18 Area-51.

Gaming performance is strong, as you’d expect from such a beefy laptop, although it isn’t quite as brisk as Alienware’s choice. At 1080p, we saw 131.67fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 148fps in Returnal, while the 302fps in Rainbow Six Extraction is enough to nigh-on max out the 320Hz refresh rate of the dual-mode display at this resolution.

In going up to 1440p, we’re seeing 102.49fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 118fps in Returnal, which are simply incredible. We might have seen Rainbow Six Extraction’s frame rate drop by a third to 209fps, but still. Even with such a beefy laptop, the 42.30fps result in Cyberpunk 2077 at native resolution still proves such a high resolution to be a little bit of a problem without upscaling.

Adding ray-tracing into the equation did hamstring results a little, dropping Cyberpunk 2077 down to just 19.97fps at its native 3840×2400 resolution, while at 1080p, it sat at 63.58fps.

The new DLSS Transformer model pushed these results up to 50.53fps and 90.29fps, respectively, with a much stronger performance thanks to the powers of DLSS4 and the new Transformer model that does a better job of preserving detail and removing unwanted artefacts against the older CNN version.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this 18 Area-51 can benefit from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5090 that’s present. With this, it adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every ‘real’ frame rendered to increase your FPS to play well with high-refresh-rate screens. The results are reliant upon there being a high enough base frame rate to prevent displayed images from being choppy or there being horrible latency.

For ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 at this laptop’s native 3840×2400 resolution and with DLSS Transformer applied with the maximum 4x multiplier, it was able to get up to 146.25fps, while at 1080p, it went as high as 280.11fps, again virtually topping out the 320Hz refresh rate of the display with its dual-mode capabilities. That’s mightily impressive.

The Predator Helios 18 AI can be specced with a ludicrous amount of RAM and storage if you’re willing to pay up, with my sample coming with 192GB of DDR5 RAM and a 2TB SSD. That’s more for the benefit of folks using this laptop for AI models and creative tasks that can be a hog for RAM, as opposed to gaming. The 2TB SSD here is generous in both capacity and speed as a Gen 5 drive, with reads and writes of 12949.04 MB/s and 7924.11 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Some useful Acer apps pre-installed
• No real other bloatware

The Predator Helios 18 AI features a pleasantly clean Windows 11 install with little bloatware and some Acer-specific apps installed. These include PredatorSense, a catch-all system app that allows you to check on your system’s vitals, as well as to fiddle with settings such as power and battery modes and configure the RGB lighting of the keyboard.

As much as there is a Copilot key on this laptop for waking Microsoft’s AI assistant, this laptop isn’t powerful enough on the AI front to become one of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs with its extra AI gubbins. It does have some Acer-specific AI features, though, such as its PurifiedView webcam and microphone optimisations if you want those.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours 19 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for less than half a working day

The Predator Helios 18 AI comes with a hefty 99Whr battery, which is on par with this laptop’s key rivals in capacity. The brand says it should be able to last for five and a half hours on a charge with this cell in mind, which would give you nearly a working day out of it before needing to plug it back in.

Running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark at the requisite 150 nits revealed a runtime of just two hours and 19 minutes. This is a disappointing result in a general sense, and is some half an hour shorter than Alienware’s large flagship Area 51 model. The Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate has both of these beat by several hours.

This Acer option also comes with a very hefty 400W power brick that, surprisingly, wasn’t that brisk in getting charge back into the laptop. It took 37 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 90 minutes.

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Should you buy it?