Acer Predator Triton 17 X (2023)

Verdict

With a great design, awesome screen and powerhouse spec, the Acer Predator Triton 17 X (2023) is one of the most exciting gaming laptops we’ve tested. Its main folly is that 14th-generation Intel rivals are now available, but it does manage to keep pace with the new machines.

Introduction

The Acer Predator Triton 17 X (2023) is both beauty and the beast. It’s a fantastic-looking gaming laptop built from premium materials and blessed with an incredible Mini LED screen. As for the beast bit, it’s massive and surprisingly heavy, and it combines high-end gaming grunt inside.

The specifications should give you more than enough performance to chew through today’s most ambitious games. I wouldn’t bet on tomorrow’s giving it any trouble, either.

Put it all together and what have you got? A very exciting gaming laptop, though it’s inevitably priced to match. For most of us, the Predator Triton 17 X will be a laptop we can only dream of owning, but if you do have well over three grand sitting in the kitty, it’s a gaming laptop that could make your frame-rate dreams come true. Here’s my full review.

Design and Keyboard

• CNC aluminium unibody
• Great connectivity
• Excellent keyboard and monster-sized trackpad

It might be massive, but the Acer Predator Triton 17 X is surprisingly unobtrusive by gaming laptop standards. It’s a vast slab of black CNC-milled aluminium measuring 358 x 280 x 29mm closed, with some restrained but elegant detailing in the grill at the top of the keyboard. The recessed area around the keyboard, a bevel at the front to make opening easier, and the thin silver speaker grills at the front edge and on each side.

There’s little in the way of extraneous RGB lighting, just programmable per-key RGB effects on the keyboard itself. With a plain backlight, it looks weirdly like a 13-inch business laptop that’s been scaled up for use by giants. As someone who’s not a huge fan of LED bling on their game machines, I’m a fan of this approach.

With all that aluminium it feels almost bulletproof, though the sheer size of the 17-inch screen means there’s a bit more wince-inducing flex in the lid than I’d prefer when serious pressure is applied. At 3kg it’s undeniably heavy, and this and the warmth emanating from the base and (especially) the rear-facing vents might put you off using this laptop on your lap. It’s more of a desk or tabletop animal, though surprisingly quiet even when it’s being pushed hard.

Unusually for a gaming model, most of the connectivity is on the sides, with the power socket, 2.5Gbit Ethernet, USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left, plus HDMI 2.1, USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 4 ports on the right. A 3.5mm audio socket on the left and a full-sized SD Card slot on the right tie things up, and with Killer Wi-Fi 6E connectivity you’re covered for high-speed wireless and wired networking.

The keyboard is a slightly odd one. Despite the space available, Acer hasn’t fitted a numeric pad, instead spacing out the normal keys and adding a column of gaming and media function keys on the right. It took me a day or so to stop hitting the dedicated Acer Predator key, which launches the Predator Sense utility, instead of delete but, otherwise, this layout is both simple and effective. What’s more, while I had half a mind to grumble about the lack of click and slightly heavy feel of the keys, I have to admit that it works brilliantly both for typing and for gaming. It’s a very quiet keyboard with great travel, tactile feedback and response. I’d happily use it every day.

I’d say the same about the sizable touchpad, stretching 13.5cm across and with a fingerprint sensor in the top-left corner. It’s smooth to the touch and handles motion tracking and multi-touch gestures flawlessly.

Acer is one of the leaders in building sustainable laptops, selling several models that make heavy use of post-consumer recycled materials and prioritise energy efficiency. However, sustainable gaming laptops are a tougher nut to crack. The Predator Triton 17 X comes in carbon packaging with partly-PCR foam inserts, while the device itself has all the usual power efficiency settings built into Windows. Otherwise, that’s about it.

Display and Sound

• Fantastic SDR and HDR
• Superb colour reproduction and 250Hz max refresh rate
• Solid audio

There’s been a few gaming laptops out over the past year with 17-inch displays, but the Predator Triton 17 X breaks from the norm by going for a taller 16:10 aspect ratio and a 2560 x 1600 resolution. This oddly makes the screen seem even bigger than it is, and you feel the benefit when working in general Windows apps, where the overall experience is much closer to using a big-screen desktop monitor than using an ordinary laptop screen. In games, your mileage may vary just because so many titles are set up to use a 16:9 aspect ratio, but many titles will support this resolution, and look amazing doing so.

That’s because this is also a Mini LED screen, rated for a maximum 1000 nits of brightness with support for 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and HDR gaming and video. The gaming experience is as good as you’re going to get outside of a big-screen OLED TV. Colours are spectacularly vivid and HDR highlights pop like you won’t believe in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Returnal or Destiny 2. It can also handle refresh rates of up to 250Hz, so if you want to use this laptop’s power to push frame rates through the roof, that’s very much an option.

If you’re interested in the numbers, we measured SDR brightness levels at 792.9nits, with a black luminance of just 0.0151, giving us a ludicrous contrast level of 52549.9:1. It covers 100% of sRGB with a 167% volume, but also 99.9% of DCI-P3 with a 118.3% volume. Colour accuracy isn’t quite flawless, with an average Delta E of 3.15, but even then it’s good enough for anything apart from professional image editing and video editing. If you’re as interested in content creation as you are gaming, you’re not going to have any issues.

The audio experience is a good match for the visual, with the mix of forward-firing and side-firing speakers delivering powerful sound over a wide soundstage. I’ve heard a few gaming laptops deliver more in the way of bass, but there’s enough boom and rumble here for play at ordinary volume levels, and some impressive 3D detail too. You’ll want headphones for more accurate positioning, but not because the sound quality here is in any way poor.

Performance

• Core i9 13900HX and 32GB of RAM make short work of creative tasks
• RTX 4090 will handle anything from Alan Wake II to Cyberpunk 2077, albeit with RT effects toned down
• Performance modes and DLSS 3.0 provide extra performance for advanced settings and future titles

With the Core i9-13900HX CPU, the RTX 4090 GPU and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, there was never any doubt that the Predator Triton 17 X was going to be a powerhouse. After all, we’re talking about a CPU with 8 performance cores and 16 efficient cores capable of smashing through 32 threads at speeds of up to 5.4GHz, while the mobile RTX 4090 has a ridiculous 9728 CUDA cores at its disposal for speeds close to the desktop RTX 4080.

Running office benchmarks is practically insulting, but the 17 X’s score of 8634 in PC Mark 10 puts it up there with some of the fastest laptops we’ve ever seen, including the Alienware M16, the Medion Erazer Beast X40 and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D. Only the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2023) is significantly faster, with a score of 9262. In Geekbench 6, it scored 2731 in the single-treaded benchmarks and 17505 in the multi-core tests, again putting it in the company of some of the fastest laptops we’ve reviewed.

It’s no slouch when it comes to heavier workloads either. In the Cinebench R23 benchmark, for example, it scored 27533 in the multi-core tests, putting it behind the Ryzen 9 Dragon Range-powered ROG Strix Scar 17, which scored 34,582, but ahead of the Acer Predator Helios 16 (2023), which carries the same Core i9 CPU.

It’s in games that this killer combo works best, though, delivering high frame rates in even the most demanding titles. Take Returnal, for example. Even at a near-native QHD resolution with Epic settings, you’re looking at frame rates in excess of 140fps, or 154fps with DLSS 3.0 engaged. In Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ultra preset, you can reach 76fps at QHD or 114fps at 1080p. Use DLSS 3.0 without Frame Generation on Balanced settings, and you can have 108fps at QHD and 76fps at 1080p.

Things get tougher with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset at the 1600p native resolution, but you can still hit 33fps without any resolution scaling tech or 65fps with DLSS enabled. Add DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation on top of that and you’re almost touching 100fps, at 98.09fps. And if you want high frame rates for eSports titles, that’s not a problem, either. The Rainbow Six: Extraction benchmark saw average frame rates of 220fps at Full HD and 162fps at QHD.

All the results above are on the default Balanced performance setting, with fans throttled to keep noise levels surprisingly low. The combination of Acer’s 5th generation Aeroblade fans, a liquid metal thermal grease and a vapour chamber does a great job of keeping things both quiet and cool. Switch up to the Performance mode, and Cyberpunk 2077 frame rates jump from 33ps to 38fps without too much egregious fan noise. In Turbo mode with overclocks enabled and the fans maxed out, you can push that up to 42.9fps. Just expect to get an earful from the cooling system.

The Predator Triton 17 X isn’t alone in reaching such levels of performance, and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D is even faster. Both laptops play things surprisingly cool and quiet while cranking out the frames as well. If you prioritise performance, the Asus has the edge over the Acer, but if you’re looking for the strongest all-round package, the Acer has it while still being more than fast enough.

It’s also worth mentioning that there’s plenty of storage on our test machine, with a 2TB Micron SSD to hold Windows, your apps and a decent selection of AAA games. It’s fast as well. Running the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, we saw sequential read speeds of 6494MB/sec and write speeds of 4810MB/sec.

Software

• Predator Sense utility is crucial
• Some bloatware included

It wouldn’t be Acer without some trials and bloatware, and it’s no surprise to find Express VPN, DTS Sound Unbound and McAfee LiveSafe pre-installed. You also get Acer’s Predator Sense utility to tweak clock speeds, fan speeds and performance profiles, along with an installer for the Planet9 client. You’ll want the former to max out speeds when you’re gaming, but the latter – an eSports social platform – can be left uninstalled and then ignored.

Battery life

• You’ll be lucky to get more than four hours from a single charge
• Don’t expect to spend more than an hour away from the mains if you’re gaming

Acer doesn’t make any bold claims on the battery life of the Triton 17 X, stating that it’s good for up to 4 hours. Given that it lasted three hours and 42 minutes in the PC Mark 10 Modern Office rundown tests, that’s right on the money. If you’re streaming video with the brightness turned right up, you can expect around three hours and fifty minutes of mains-free viewing before the Triton 17 X conks out. In short, this isn’t the kind of laptop you want to take on a long train journey unless you can guarantee a spot next to a handy mains socket.

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