Our go-to game of the moment is The Witcher 3 which the Neo 16 ate up on the highest settings while holding onto a decent framerate. When it came time to boot up something other than Minecraft or Sid Meier’s Pirates, we were quite happy with what we got. Or not, if you want your laptop to double as a white-noise machine. We’d suggest pairing that up with a decent pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Turbo? It’ll knock performance up to 100 and set the fans into overdrive. Performance is when you’re looking for a few extra frames and a fan or two to kick in. Balanced and below saw us through everything else with ease, and quietly too. You’ll only ever need Performance and Turbo for anything gaming related. It’s also where you’ll fiddle with the laptop’s four preset profiles Quiet, Balanced, Performance and Turbo. Here, you’ll find a 3D-animated visual of the laptop’s ‘health’ represented by some Master Chief lookalike. It’s worth making friends with Acer’s Predator Sense toolbox, accessed by that Predator button we pressed a little too often. Even so, this gives you the choice, but don’t expect it to last very long. How often are you whipping out The Witcher 3 when you’re not at home (or at work)? That’s right, hardly. Light work, or a casual Netflix stream? You’re golden.īut that’s to be expected from a power-hungry machine like this. That’s still not enough for an entire day, but it’ll suffice until you can get to a plug. Give the Neo 16 a break from gaming, however, and you’ll get around six hours of life before the warning signs start blaring. You’ve seen the specs – it’s no wonder we’re only netting two hours when Eskom strikes. The issue has less to do with the capacity, a standard for laptops in this price range, and more to do with the tech the Neo 16 is packing. We’d recommend parking yourself near a plug-point if you’re going to be doing serious gaming. It’s all well and good talking about the Neo 16’s outer shell, but a colourful keyboard won’t get you far in your quest to run Crysis, will it? Our review model came filled to the brim with a Core i7-13700HX processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and an RTX 4060 GPU with 8GB of its own GDDR6 VRAM. We’d recommend a decent stand to go with it. There are rubber feet on the bottom to prop itself up and create a slight air path, but none large enough to make much of an impact. Our biggest complaint? We weren’t a fan of Acer’s placement of the vents underneath the thing, which is where the laptop pulls in all the outside cool air it needs. Finally, the important stuff is found ‘round the back, with the power port, HDMI 2.1 and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-Cs all making homes there. Mirroring that side is two more USB-As (of the Gen 2 variety). Along the right side is the Ethernet port, headphone and mic combo jack, SD card reader and a singular USB-A port. Unsurprisingly for a premium gaming laptop, Acer’s included a full house of ports here. It was all worth it for the satisfyingly tactile keyboard we received, and an overly-large left-leaning trackpad we came to miss. And don’t even get us started on the oddly-placed dedicated Predator button that we accidentally hit more times than we’d care to admit. Sure, we had some issues – like the Left Shift and Ctrl keys being too small. All that RGB can be found in the backlit keyboard that, for the most part, we had no trouble using.
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