Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 review

Acer has been making laptops for an age, and the pedigree shows in this affordable 14-inch machine. For a price of just $1,249.99, the Acer Predator Helios Neo not only gives you a well-built system with a decent screen, but it also contains one of Intel’s latest Core Ultra 7 CPUs.

From the price and specs list to the build quality, I’ve looked at this machine from every angle, and it’s a strong contender. It’s not flawless, don’t get me wrong. There are a few infuriating cut corners, which are somewhat expected at this price, but I’m nonetheless impressed by what Acer has managed to achieve with the Neo 14. It might not be the best gaming laptop out there to date, but it’s well-rounded nonetheless.

So who’s this for then? Well, the core spec alone gives us a great deal of insight on that front. Acer’s picked up one of Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H chips. These latest Meteor Lake laptop chips have some of the best AI tech Intel has available, paired alongside a high-performing and efficient processor architecture.

Acer’s Predator line has always been a well-equipped and stylish product stack, and the Helios Neo 14 is no different. It’s sleek yet potent. Gaming yet professional. What I’m looking for here, though, is a laptop that blurs the lines between gaming and professionalism. It needs to be flexible, solid enough for gaming, yet capable enough to render, work in Photoshop, or edit video on the fly.

An additional plus is the Nvidia GPU. The Neo can be specced up to an RTX 4070, but my review sample has a 120W 8GB RTX 4060 instead. It’s honestly an okay GPU for the price. The internal spec is identical to the RTX 4060 desktop variant, although the TDP is far lower. Still, it’s more than capable of handling gaming at 1080p with decent settings, with the added bonus of Nvidia’s Frame Generation tech and Nvidia DLSS 3 really spicing up your frame rate.

You also get a decent-sized SSD, with 1TB giving you enough storage space to install a few of the latest games, and it’s a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive as well, so it’s reasonably quick.

Then there’s the memory, the Achilles heel of this Helios. You only get 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM which runs at a speed of 6,400MHz, and just about gives you enough memory for gaming. But the biggest faux pas? It’s soldered, so what you get is what you get, there’s no chance of upgrading in the future – and that dents this machine’s lifespan.

Ghosting was pretty much non-existent (there was a touch of it on lighter blue tests, but you really do have to be looking for it), and overall it’s a pleasure to use. It’s not anywhere near the caliber of the OLED screens we’re starting to see on a number of mid-range gaming laptops now (the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 has one as standard), but it’s great for an IPS display.

It has Nvidia G-Sync built in as well, which synchronizes the screen’s refresh rate with the GPU’s frame rate output, reducing tearing and stuttering. While the resolution is a little odd for such a small screen, it’s a top display that’s really well-calibrated. Despite being an IPS screen, the image never looks washed out – if anything it’s a little too bright at top settings – it did give me a touch of eye-strain at full brightness in the late evenings.

Other than the screen itself, there’s not a huge amount else to write home about. Wi-Fi is handled by Killer, and you do get Wi-Fi 6E as standard. There’s no wired Ethernet port, though, so if you fancy a wired hook-up, you’re going to have to reach for the dongles. There’s a webcam, but it’s positively average, and there’s no fingerprint reader either. Likewise, the speakers are okay, but they’re not outstanding. You’ll want to use a headset if possible.

One last note and it’s on that warranty. Acer is covering all parts and labor on that front – you just need to ship it or carry it into one of Acer’s repair shops and the company will get the rest sorted for you. If you do ship it to Acer, the company will ship it back free of charge, but carry-in requires collection. That’s not too shabby, although it’s a shame there’s only a single year of coverage.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, for example, gives you a 14-inch OLED screen and is regularly available for $1,599. At this price, the Acer’s black plastic chassis isn’t quite enough compared to the Asus’ CNC-machined aluminum alloy chassis either. Yes, the Acer has sharp edges, tight lines, and thin bezels, but that’s not enough when you’re looking at a price that high.

Costs aside, the Acer’s ports are managed relatively well. It is a shame it lacks an Ethernet port, but the fact the connections are all positioned on either the right or left side has allowed Acer to focus on building out the cooling ventilation at the rear of the unit, and that really does translate well to performance.

Not only are there vents at the rear, but they also run along the rear half of each side, which gives the Helios plenty of breathing room. It does feature a full-fat DC connector as well, which is technically reversible, but it’s also quite blocky and very easy to knock, or accidentally catch on the side of a desk.

As a result of all that epic cooling, the Acer Helios Neo 14 is impressively quiet, even under load. The fan curves are dialed in well, and although it’s still preferable to use a headset if you’re buried deep in some late-night gaming sessions to drown out the fan noise, it’s a smooth experience under light load.

One of the biggest downsides by far is the memory situation. On the one hand, utilizing LPDDR5X is a smart move. It’s efficient, quick, and has plenty of capacity. On the other hand, it requires soldering to the motherboard itself, which effectively eliminates any possibility of upgrading it later down the line.

Now that’s fine for the vast majority of people, but it’s a big blow if you’re a tinkerer looking to stretch out the life of this machine, particularly when you only get 16GB as standard in this configuration. That’s enough for gaming, but we recommend 32GB for future-proofing and for a smooth experience if you like to have lots of applications and browser tabs open at the same time.

As for performance, the Acer Helios Neo 14’s cooling system is doing the gaming gods’ work here. This is actually the highest-performing Core Ultra chip I’ve seen so far in a gaming laptop with this form factor, even beating out two 16-inch gaming laptops in the process – the Alienware M16 R2 and MSI Stealth 16 AI Studio A1V.

That alone is impressive, particularly given that this laptop has a far smaller footprint than both those 16-inch juggernauts. In Cinebench 2024, it scored 988 points in the multi-core test, near enough on par with the Alienware’s 981. It even (just) pipped it on single-core performance as well, managing a svelte 105 points to 104.

Interestingly, however, this doesn’t always translate to top-tier gaming performance. With its RTX 4060 GPU, the Acer delivered some some comfortable frame rates at 1080p. For example, it averaged 58fps in Total War: Warhammer 3 at Ultra settings, and it even averaged 63fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at the Ultra ray tracing preset, thanks to some help from DLSS 3 upscaling and frame generation.

However, the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 is a faster machine here, despite also having an RTX 4060 and 16GB of 6,400MHz DDR5 memory. For example, the Lenovo averaged 75fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at the same settings, and 72fps in Total War: Warhammer 3.  The only major difference between these two machines is the processors, with the Slim 5 running an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. The Acer is still capable at 1080p, of course, but the Lenovo is quicker.

Both of those laptops also massively struggle at their native resolutions, and the situation is far more pronounced for the Predator Helios Neo, given that its resolution is so high. In fact, games are practically unplayable on high presets at this resolution. Cyberpunk for instance, with DLSS 3 upscaling and AI frame gen on, only averaged 12fps. Total War did a bit better, sailing in at 29fps, but that’s still far from playable, and it did have some serious dips along the way to that point.

If you are looking to game on this system, realistically you’re limited to 1080p, and we recommend dialing some of the more modern features back a touch, or leaning into DLSS by adjusting the preset to be more performance-oriented than quality.

It’s a shame, because that screen is just awesome. Still, even if it was equipped with an RTX 4070, plus 32GB of DDR5 memory, this laptop would still struggle at its native resolution, in a similar manner to the Alienware M16 R2, and that machine only has a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution.

I used the Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 for around one week as my daily driver, taking advantage of it for a bit of light gaming in Dave the Diver, and Gwent (don’t judge me), along with a touch of Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify, it could almost always last a whole day in the office.

However, sometimes this laptop’s price creeps up to the £1,500 level, and at that point we recommend either going with a faster machine without soldered RAM, such as the Alienware M16 R2, or an OLED laptop such as the Lenovo Legion Slim 5.