Review Summary
Expert Rating
To say that the “budget gaming laptop” is one of the fastest-growing categories in the market would be an understatement. With an abundance of CPU and GPU options, every brand is trying its hand at offering the best performance on a budget for students and young professionals. In fact, most gamers can easily enjoy AAA gaming on a laptop that costs 70-80 thousand rupees.
So why is it that Acer is offering the Predator Helios Neo 14 at a price point of Rs 1.4 lakhs? On paper, that seems quite absurd, considering that while it does feature the newer Intel Core Ultra 7 – 155H processor, it’s coupled with a puny NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 graphics card. Surely, Acer must be offering additional things to complete the laptop package to make this make sense, right? Or is the hype just for the latest Intel chipset? Let’s find out in our Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 laptop review.
Table of Contents
Design and Display
Starting with the design, the Neo 14 has an all-black body that is mostly plastic, though the backside of the lid is made from aluminium. It features the signature illuminated Predator logo to bring that element of a gaming laptop to it. Thanks to the metal inclusion, the lid is quite sturdy and has minimal flex. The hinge is also near perfect, offering next to zero wobbling.
Using a single hand, you can open the laptop’s lid to reveal the 14.5-inch IPS panel. It’s a WUXGA display with a 1920x1200p resolution. The bezels are quite slim, which adds to the display’s overall immersiveness despite its smaller form factor. Also, thanks to the 100% sRGB colour gamut, the panel has excellent colour reproduction, making content consumption a great experience.
However, the panel’s 300 nits of peak brightness isn’t that great, and the laptop struggles when used outdoors. That’s a shame, considering the 16:10 aspect ratio is great for productivity, and you’d be tempted to use this laptop outdoors in a cafe or a co-shared workspace. It’ll still work, just try to avoid direct sunlight.
As for gaming, the display comes with a 120Hz refresh rate, with support for NVIDIA G-Sync. While most brands do offer a 144Hz panel, the slightly lower refresh rate isn’t something to crib about, especially considering that this panel is quite responsive. If you game with DLSS enabled, and you should, there will be occasional frame drops here and there (more on this in the performance section). However, the good news is that the added support of G-Sync ensures there’s no screen tearing.
Coming back to the laptop’s design, at 1.9 kgs, it’s not the most heavy laptop on the market, especially considering the overall decent build quality. I say that because, unlike the lid, there’s plenty of flex around the keyboard area, especially on the border where the keyboard meets the trackpad. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but you do get certain expectations with the price tag that this laptop carries.
Ports, Audio and I/O
Moving on to connectivity, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 offers a wide array of ports to cater to the needs of most users. On the left side, there’s the DC charging port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, followed by LED indicators.
Over to the right side, there’s a microSD card reader, a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port.
It’s worth noting that despite being a gaming laptop, the Neo 14 doesn’t come with an Ethernet port. Granted, the Intel Killer AX1675i is a fantastic wireless card with support for Wi-Fi 6E. But still, there was enough room for an RJ45 port on the chassis.
Interestingly, both USB-C ports on this laptop support USB Power Delivery and DP Alt Mode. As such, while you can carry the provided charger, you can also juice it with a USB-C charger. As for display out, there’s a total of 3 ports, including the HDMI port, which works very well.
What doesn’t work that well on this laptop is its audio. It’s evident that Acer was relying heavily on DTS and its software solutions to squeeze the most out of the tiny speakers on the Neo 14. Credit where it’s due, DTS: X app works very well, offering plenty of customisability.
However, the speakers lack bass on a hardware level, and they aren’t that loud either. They’ll still suffice for casual YouTube videos, but if you’re planning to watch a movie or TV show on this, it’s best to invest in a good pair of headphones or external speakers.
The story remains the same for the webcam as well, where the 2.1MP camera doesn’t win any awards. Sure, it’s a lot more accurate in terms of colours than competing cameras, but the webcam produces a very soft image, even with adequate lighting. There’s no physical camera shutter here either, which might be a bummer for consumers concerned with their privacy.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Next, there’s the laptop’s keyboard, which, for the most part, is pretty good. It has 3-zone RGB lighting, and the keys are well-spaced out. The layout is easy to adapt to, and it comes with full-sized arrow keys.
Additionally, Acer has added a handful of hotkeys on the right side for media playback and quick-launching the Acer Predator Sense app (which I will talk about in the next section). There’s also a dedicated key in the top-left corner of the C-part, which is used to switch between fan modes (or profiles) quickly.
The mushy feel of the keyboard spoils the party, at least for me. It’s quite soft, and there’s no feedback while typing. Again, that’s a personal take, and if you’re a fan of soft and silent keyboards, this is a solid option.
In fact, it’s one of the rare options on the market that offers this kind of keyboard. But for most users, I feel Acer could have offered a bit more feedback to make it an overall excellent keyboard.
Below it is the spacious and functional touchpad, which works very well. The palm rejection is excellent, with no ghost touches, and there’s enough area to easily fit my entire hand for gestures. It can attract smudges, much like the palm rests, but that’s something I’ve come to expect from plastic-built laptops, so no issues there.
Software
Before we talk about the hardcore performance numbers, a quick word on the software side of things. The laptop comes with Windows 11 Home, coupled with a 1-month trial of Xbox Game Pass. There’s the aforementioned Predator Sense software for managing the laptop, including changing the fan profiles, switching the dedicated GPU, changing the RGB lights, and the whole shebang.
Other than that, the laptop also comes with a good chunk of bloatware, both first-party and third-party. Acer also has plenty of tools that help you customize the webcam footage, fine-tune the microphone, and even generate AI art if you like. Then there’s ExpressVPN, Intel Unison, McAfee Antivirus, PLANET9, Dropbox, and an entire plethora of Microsoft apps. Of course, everything is easy to uninstall, and nothing is going to break the device’s functionality, so there’s that.
Performance and Battery Life
Okay, so let’s get down to the numbers now. Our unit of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 comes with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor coupled with 16GB of LPDDR5X-6400MT/s RAM. For graphical prowess, the laptop uses the budget-friendly NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, though Acer has boosted it to a whopping 120W of TGP. As for storage, the laptop comes with a SK Hynix NVMe Gen 4 SSD. As you can see from the benchmark screenshot below, the SSD is quite snappy and performs just like you’d expect.
It’s safe to say that one of the reasons why the Neo 14 is more expensive compared to other RTX 4050 laptops is that it comes with the newer Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor. When running this CPU through the tests, the numbers are pretty promising, with excellent scores across the board. The chipset manages a score of 103 and 1042 in Cinebench R24 Single Core and Multi Core tests respectively, while also scoring an excellent multi-core score of 13,064 in GeekBench.
Compared to the other gaming laptops, the Ultra 7 155H isn’t that far behind. The chipset easily manages to outperform both 12th and 13th-gen chipsets from Intel and gives close competition to the 14th-gen i7-14700HX processor.
Moving on to gaming benchmarks, the 120W RTX 4050 performs quite well, easily running AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 around the 40-50FPS mark with everything turned to Ultra. Of course, you can tweak the settings a bit to hit a stable 60 FPS or, better yet, enable DLSS to go well beyond that. Certain games will actually need you to do this. For example, Alan Wake 2, by default, hovers around the 35FPS mark with all settings High. However, with DLSS and Frame Generation enabled, I was easily averaging around 60 FPS.
As for eSports titles, I tried both Valorant and Apex Legends on the laptop, and both easily crossed the 200 mark on average. However, in Valorant, there are times when the FPS mark goes well beyond 400 FPS, only to crash down to 150 FPS in the next second or two. Thankfully, this can be easily tweaked from the in-game settings to get a more consistent frame rate. So, do take your time optimizing the games before heading out in a ranked match.
In terms of heat, the laptop does a good job of managing its thermals. The fans get quite loud, which is good, considering the CPU temps in my testing reached a maximum of 91 degrees after continuous benchmarking. While gaming, these temps were well under 85 degrees, which is pretty good.
Digging inside, you’ll notice that this is a pretty good feat, considering that the dual fan setup is coupled with the same number of heat pipes. In terms of upgradability, the RAM is soldered on, though you can upgrade the storage and the Wi-Fi card. I wish that they offered an additional M.2 slot for greater flexibility, but it’s not that big a deal, to be honest. That said, opening the laptop can be a tricky task, so unless you know what you’re doing, it’s best to reach out to Acer’s service team or a professional to do the job for you.
So far, everything that the Neo 14 offers is pretty good, except that it’s not that much of a jump from the previous generations of Intel Core i-series laptops. Then again, the biggest advantage of the Core Ultra 7 155H is its efficiency, and boy, does it show.
The Neo 14 lasted a whopping 7 hours and 11 minutes in PCMark 10’s Battery video loop test, which is miles ahead of the average of 3 hours that most budget gaming laptops produce. As such, you can easily take this laptop out for college and work, without having to worry about carrying a beefy charging brick with you.
On that note, too, while the laptop does come with a barrel plug 230W charger, you can juice it with a USB-PD charger at up to 65W. Of course, it’ll be slower, but it’s also a lot lighter in your backpack.
Verdict
At the end of the day, you’ll still find yourself wondering whether the new CPU upgrade is worth it or not. Priced at Rs. 1.4 lakhs, the Acer Predator Helios Neo 14 is well above most RTX 4050 laptops that can be had for under a lakh, without any sales offers. So what does that extra 40 grand get you? Well, it offers an efficient chipset with excellent battery life, a dedicated NPU on board to aid in AI tasks that Microsoft would roll out in the future, and a higher TGP graphics card for a handful of extra frames. It’s also a lot more portable compared to other gaming laptops. So essentially, if you require a gaming laptop with good power but also enough battery life to last you an entire workday, the Helios Neo 14 can be considered. Yes, it’s priced more than similar-performing laptops, but that’s the premium you have to pay for the latest chipset on the market.
That being said, if you explore the market, there are other options, such as the HP Victus, Acer Nitro V, and Lenovo LOQ, to name a few, that all come with a 13th-gen i7 processor coupled with RTX 4050 and offer similar in-game performance for under 1 lakh rupees. Alternatively, for the same price as the Neo 14, there’s the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 (yep, same company), which combines the Intel Core i7-14700HX with a faster RTX 4060 GPU. If gaming and multitasking are your priorities, that’s a much better package to choose from. If you still prefer the Neo 14, it’s best to wait for a price drop.
Editor’s Rating: 7.5/10
Pros:
- Latest Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor
- Portable design with a nice display and build quality
- Good gaming performance with support for DLSS
- Excellent battery life
- More powerful options are available at the same price
- Mushy keyboard
- Lacks an Ethernet port