Acer Predator Triton 14 AI Review

Design and Keyboard

• Ultrabook-style look and feel
• Competent port selection
• Tactile keyboard and large, slick trackpad

In keeping with its contemporaries, Acer has opted for a sleek blend of style and substance for the Predator Triton 14 AI with a compact, aluminium chassis that helps justify this laptop’s dearer price tag.

It gives it more of an ultrabook-style look, rather than a beefy gaming laptop. This is pleasant to see, especially as lots of other choices are still playing catch-up to achieve a similar result. A 1.6kg weight does shatter the ultralight illusion somewhat when you pick the laptop up, although it’s no heavier than a larger-screened ultrabook that doesn’t have as much grunt inside, so it’s still portable to carry around with you.

Likewise, the 18mm thickness of the Predator Triton 14 AI puts this more into ultrabook territory, aiding its portability. This Acer laptop doesn’t skimp on ports either, with the left side housing a Thunderbolt 4-capable USB-C port, a USB-A and a headphone jack. The right side has another, albeit slower, USB-C port, a further USB-A, HDMI and microSD reader.

Due to the smaller chassis, the 65 percent keyboard inside this Acer laptop isn’t a surprise, but it nonetheless impresses with a tactile and snappy keypress over a decent travel. The keycaps are well-spaced across the deck, too, plus the RGB backlighting is pleasantly sharp and is more of a giveaway that this is a gaming laptop at heart.

I’m very impressed with the Predator Triton 14 AI’s trackpad, given its large surface to provide your fingers with a lot of real estate for navigation and gestures. Given it’s a glass option, it’s also especially smooth and slick surface to use.

Display and Sound

• High-res OLED screen
• Lovely blacks and contrast
• Middling speakers

Acer has bundled the Predator Triton 14 AI with a compact, high-res OLED screen that’s sharp and detailed, with a 2880×1800, or 3K, resolution across a 14-inch panel, plus a snappy 120Hz refresh rate to make games and everyday work feel a little slicker.

Being OLED, this panel comes with the usual benefits that you’d expect from the type, with deep blacks and lovely dynamic range. My colorimeter measured 0.01 for black level and 25830:1 for contrast, providing a generally lovely experience. The 6500K colour temperature is also perfect.

Colour accuracy is also a strong point, with 100% sRGB and 99% DCI-P3 coverage, plus 92% Adobe RGB, proving the impeccable suitability of the Predator Triton 14 AI’s screen for both productivity and more creative, colour-sensitive workloads.

371.4 nits of peak brightness make this screen okay for both indoor and outdoor work, and provides decent overall punch. It’s in line with a lot of other OLED laptop screens in this regard. The Asus ProArt P16 (2025), in both its original RTX 5070-powered form and with its new 4K Lumina Pro tandem OLED screen, can go a fair bit brighter.

The speakers on the Predator Triton 14 AI are okay and offer reasonable mid-range, although they lack some depth and bass compared to other creative laptops. You’re much better off with a separate headset or desktop speakers.

Performance

• Core Ultra 9 288V isn’t as beefy as you may expect
• RTX 5070 GPU offers good gaming and graphically intensive performance
• Solid RAM and SSD headroom

The Predator Triton 14 AI features a processor that I haven’t technically covered yet, with the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V inside. This is Intel’s top-of-the-line Lunar Lake processor that sits ahead of the 256V and 258V models I’ve encountered before, hence its model designation with the number 9.

The Core Ultra 9 288V surpasses the 256V and 258V in clock speed, with a boost of up to 5.1GHz over 4.8GHz, and has a higher power draw, although it retains the same eight cores and eight threads as the Core Ultra 7 chips. 

Intriguingly, in spite of it being a faster chip in terms of specs, the differences over the other models are negligible, at least in some synthetic benchmark tests.

The likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 put this processor in and around laptops with the Core Ultra 7 256V and 258V, although it slightly pulls ahead in the Cinebench R23 tests. It remains behind the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in multi-threaded scores, though, owing to Intel’s lack of hyper-threading for this generation, as well as the fact that it has fewer cores.

The presence of a discrete GPU in the RTX 5070 here is designed more as a helpful aid for providing more graphical horsepower for 3D workloads and such, rather than for gaming tasks. This is demonstrated by the fact that this laptop comes with Nvidia’s creative-oriented Studio drivers, rather than the more typical Game Ready ones, although the latter is easily installable, but makes a negligible difference to performance in the real world.

Owing to the slender frame of the Predator Triton 14 AI and the more constrained performance of the Lunar Lake processor inside, this laptop’s gaming grunt isn’t as much as with other RTX 5070-powered laptops I’ve tested. The results here are fine, if a little unremarkable, with 1080p providing results of Cyberpunk 2077at 75fps and Returnal at 80fps. The lighter Rainbow Six Extraction pushed up to 143fps.

In bumping up the resolution to 1440p, the results are still playable with a 46.49fps average in Cyberpunk 2077, a 59fps average in Returnal, plus 95fps in Rainbow Six Extraction. Adding in ray-tracing to the mix at this laptop’s native 3K resolution in Cyberpunk 2077 pushed the figure down to 5.59fps (essentially a slideshow), while at 1080p, it posted a 33.25fps average.

The RTX 5070 does have some tricks up its sleeve to get more frames, though. For instance, the clever new DLSS Transformer model is a marked improvement over its predecessor, boosting the RT: Ultra result to 48.95fps at 1080p and taking native rasterised Cyberpunk 2077 to 48.33fps.

Nvidia has added a clever feature known as Multi-Frame-Gen that adds up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one, thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. The addition of these frames is reliant upon there being a high enough base FPS figure to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy. The output was generally smooth and responsive, with the tech taking the average all the way up to 226.1fps with the maximum 4x setting applied alongside the clever DLSS Transformer Model upscaler at 1080p.

My sample of the Predator Triton 14 AI came with solid RAM and SSD headroom with 32GB of RAM providing plentiful headroom for multitasking and more intensive workloads, plus a 1TB SSD provides decent storage room for apps, games, project files and more. It’s a decently brisk SSD too, with measured read and write speeds of 6647.72 MB/s and 4569.46 MB/s, although it is possible to get faster Gen 5 drives at this higher price tag.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Some useful Acer apps pre-installed
• Enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

The Predator Triton 14 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.

With its Lunar Lake chip inside, this Acer laptop has enough AI horsepower (or TOPS) to be considered a Copilot+ PC. This gives you access to features such as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and background blur, as well as generative AI capabilities in Photos and Microsoft Paint.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 3 hours 55 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

I had decently high hopes for the Predator Triton 14 AI’s endurance, given the capacious 76Whr battery inside its slim chassis, plus the general efficiency we’ve seen from other laptops powered by Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, although the presence of a discrete GPU may sap some of those gains away. Acer doesn’t provide a specific claim for endurance for this laptop.

With the brightness of the screen set to the requisite 150 nits, this Acer laptop lasted for just three hours and 55 minutes in the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test. This is quite disappointing against this laptop’s key rivals, with the Asus ProArt P16 lasting for just over ten hours on a charge, and the Razer Blade 14 (2025) managing just shy of eight hours. It means you’ll barely get through half a working day before needing to plug it back in.

The 140W charging brick that this Acer choice comes with is okay with regards to charging speeds, taking 38 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 87 minutes.

Should you buy it?