Review of 2025 Acer Predator Helios 18: A Flawed Powerhouse
So here it is, the 2025-model Acer Predator Helios 18, which comes with a spec-sheet to die for: 18-inch Mini-LED screen, four RAM slots, three storage slots, and the latest silicon from Intel and NVIDIA. A desktop replacement seemingly without compromise, which can (theoretically) be carried around. But bigger does not always imply better, and herein lies a classic example of a product that had tremendous potential stymied by some truly serious and hard-to-ignore drawbacks. Let us now get on to the nitty-gritty.
Design and Build Quality
The Helios 18 pleasantly resembles the more business-like black finish, metal lid, plastic-weave interior, and bottom panel. The build quality seems alright, but there is noticeable chassis and hinge flex when pushed too hard. The weigh-in at 3.5kg (7.7lb) and over 4.6kg(10lb) with the charger, that is an even bigger 400-watt one-off, makes this laptop something which can hardly be called portable. Truly a desktop replacement in every sense-weight and size.
RGB lights all around: an RGB keyboard with per-key lighting; light bars at the front and rear of the laptop and glowing logos. It is a "gamer" look that can be toned down or killed altogether with the use of PredatorSense software. This laptop loves to catch fingerprints, which can be cleaned off pretty well. The glass touchpad is enormous, smooth, works beautifully, and feels premium.
The Stunning Mini-LED Display
Without a doubt, the screen is the highlight. The 3840x2400 (WQXGA+) Mini-LED panel is an 18-inch beauty running at 120Hz. It has excellent color gamut coverage (100% sRGB, 99% DCI-P3) and a high brightness range, approximately 700 nits in SDR, and almost 1000 nits in HDR, thus making it a very good display for gaming and color-critical creative work.
Acer has thrown in an excellent feature that allows the users to reboot and switch to 1920x1200 at 240Hz for competitive gaming. While the response time can be said to be decent for a Mini-LED panel, some haloing or "bloom" effect is visible around bright objects on dark backgrounds just as is typical for this kind of technology.
Keyboard, Ports, and Upgradability
The keyboard should be classified as either good or bad, as neither option would apply to the reviewer's opinion. It does include Acer's Magkey 4.0 feature, allowing for optional swappable mechanical keycaps for the WASD and arrow keys, for a tactile, clicky feel suitable for gaming. The rest of the keys, however, use standard membrane keys. While they feel decent enough for typing, the inconsistency becomes all the more glaring, especially at this price.
Regarding port selection, we have two Thunderbolt 4 ports along with HDMI 2.1 and Ethernet, plus several USB-A ports and a MicroSD card slot. A major problem that came up during testing, however, was that neither Thunderbolt 4 port supported USB-C charging, even though the official spec sheet claims that it does.
The inner layouts of the Helios 18 are made for easy upgrades. It provides
- Four DDR5 slots for RAM, capable of an astounding 192GB of memory.
- Three M.2 slots of SSDs for storage.
- Maintenance and upgrades will be easy since the access is simplified.
Performance and Benchmark
Now here is where the dream begins falling apart. Despite packing the best-in-class Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX & an NVIDIA RTX 5090 or 5080 laptop GPU, the Helios 18 kept more or less consistently underperforming when compared to its peers sporting the same hardware. The memory configuration seems to be the biggest offender, as it appears to be throttled by slower speeds to accommodate a four-slot design, alongside a thermal solution that just couldn't keep up.
The performance bottleneck: Enormous 192GB capacity RAM seems to hold the back of performance. The memory had to work slowly at DDR5-4000 speed, and thus impeded performance considerably in CPU-bound scenarios and at lower gaming resolutions.
Gaming Performance
High frame rates are delivered in-games through Helios 18, but performance trails consistently with other laptops using the same GPU. Mainly reflected at 1080p and 1440p, the gap is due to limitations of slower RAM and CPU performance. At 4k, the GPU becomes the primary performance hit, allowing for closer Helios 18 performance to that of its peers.
- Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra Settings): The RTX 5090 model performed, in our tests, at a level comparable to last generation's RTX 4090 laptop, reaching nearly 100 FPS (1440p Ultra), yet a disappointingly low value for the tier.
- Alan Wake 2: Here again, one of the lower metrics for a 5090-equipped laptop, especially at 1080p, fails to improve at 4K, where the machine is increasingly GPU-bound.
- Black Myth: Wukong (High Settings): The trend is unchanged, with the Helios 18 rated as one of the worst-performing 5090s currently tested, underperforming 12% against other 18-inch competitions models at 1440p average frames.
- Doom: The Dark Ages: Did so nicely at both 1440p and 1080p, providing a very seamless experience.
Switching to Turbo mode from Performance offers a substantial increase in FPS in most situations, especially with heavy graphics activity like 4K or ray tracing—often up to a 17.5% increase—and rarely accompanied by more than excruciating fan noise.
Productivity and Synthetic Benchmarks
It is apparent that productivity workloads and even synthetic tests show similar types of limitations of the Helios 18 in terms of performance. The Helios 18 has some of the lowest scores recorded for the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor.
- Cinebench 2024: The lowest recorded single-core result scored by the 275HX CPU, most probably due to the slow DDR5-4000 memory, while also multi-core performance was weaker than competitions.
- 3DMark: Overall, test scores were not so high for an RTX 5080/5090 machine, simply reflecting the broader system bottleneck.
- PugetBench (Premiere Pro & Photoshop): Since these activities are generally single-core dependent, switching to Turbo mode raised performance by a meager ~3%.
- PugetBench (DaVinci Resolve): There was a significantly improved 6.5% performance in Turbo mode, since Resolve leverages GPU's power much more.
Thermal Performance and Acoustics
This is probably one of the major letdowns of the laptop. Under the combined load of the CPU and GPU, the internal components get dangerously hot. The CPU normally runs above 100°C while thermal throttling is observed with the GPU.
This is extremely unusual and unacceptable for such a large chassis like an 18-inch that should give plenty of room to cool down. To this, fans have to keep spinning up into extreme levels. In Turbo mode, it got measured as the loudest laptop all year, dishing out piercingly painful 60 decibels. Interspersed with this jet-engine noise, internal components still get overheated, leaving the one silver lining of heat well managed on the surface to keep WASD keys and palm rests cool to the touch.
Battery Life and Audio
As expected from an 18-incher, battery life is pretty bad; anticipate 4 to 5 hours of light use from 99Wh, but plan on having the massive 400W power brick close. The six-speaker system is loud and has some bass, but the sound can get muddy as voices are lost in the mix.
Pros
- Amazing 18-inch Mini-LED display with superbright color quality
- Outstanding upgradability with 4 RAM slots and 3 M.2 slots
- Unique swappable mechanical keys for WASD/arrows
- Port selection offers good options for connectivity
- Premium glass touchpad
cons
- Thermal throttling both CPU and GPU.
- Loudest fans under full load.
- Sluggish RAM speeds made it underperform compared to the competitors.
- Charging via USB-C doesn't work like it should.
- Really mediocre battery life and a very heavy power adapter.
- Keyboard uses a hybrid of mechanical and membrane keys.
An extremely ambitious laptop equipped with a phenomenal screen, excellent upgrade capabilities, and yet severely letting down by poor thermals, raised noise levels, and hampered performance.
Verdict
The Acer Predator Helios 18 is a machine with frustrating contradictions. It has one of the best displays on the market and unparalleled upgradability, but these strengths are undermined by blatant thermal-design flaws and performance-tuning basics. The combination of thermal throttling, deafening fans, and performance bottlenecks cannot be recommended to any substantial portion of the gaming or creation audience.
Unless your requirements are specific, in the end, laptops that have better balanced designs and are often cheaper and offer portable designs would totally trump this laptop regarding the 192GB of DRAM this machine-type has. High-end large-format gaming machines like the Lenovo Legion 9 will get people inspired, boasting a better offer for those looking for good gaming.
