The Acer Predator Triton 500 Laptop Review: Going Thin with GeForce RTX 2080

Battery Life and Charge Time

Battery life takes a back seat in gaming laptops, especially since the nature of G-SYNC requires that the dGPU has to be directly connected to the display, and therefore Optimus is unavailable. Update: Some readers have let me know that Acer offers an option in the BIOS or in their PredatorSense to choose between having G-SYNC or Optimus, meaning they have a MUX installed allowing the GPU to be directly connected to the display, or through the iGPU for battery life. The Battery Tests were re-run with Optimus enabled. Running a massive GPU to do desktop tasks takes a lot of power, full stop. Acer has offered an 84 Wh battery to try to compensate, and they also offer optional Optimus which means you can get some battery life savings by disabling G-SYNC and using the Intel iGPU for light loads.

2013 Battery Life Light

Our lightest test just cycles four web pages per minute, and isn’t very much work for a modern system. With Optimus enabled, the battery life is very reasonable for a gaming laptop system. The base power drain is still quite high, but compared to gaming systems that don't offer Optimus the Acer is far ahead.

2016 Web

Our newer web test is much more demanding of the processor, and generally results in quite a bit drop in time compared to the light test, but gaming laptops are a different beast, and the high base power draw generally masks any such changes in CPU usage. In fact, the more demanding test actually provided slightly longer runtime, and with Optimus enabled the battery life is downright reasonable.

Normalized Results

Removing the battery size from the results gives us our normalized results, where we can see the efficiency of the various platforms. The Acer Predator Triton 500 is actually a fairly efficient gaming laptop, even though it’s still not great. The industry is actually making progress here, just far slower than they are on the Ultrabook side. The Acer allows the GPU to be switched off with a multiplexer, and when Optimus is enabled the efficiency is significantly higher. The downside is it does require a reboot, and you lose G-SYNC until you re-enabled and reboot again, but if there are scenarios where the extra battery life is needed, the Acer offers the best of both worlds.

Movie Playback

Once again with Optimus enabled the battery life is reasonable here, and it's a fantastic option that Acer has to allow you to choose between Optimus and G-SYNC. The base power draw is still quite high compared to an Ultrabook, but the overall runtime is a lot better than a gaming laptop that forces the media playback to leverage the dGPU.

Tesseract

Dividing move playback time by the length of a long movie gives us our Tesseract score, and you can playback the Avengers about 1.5 times before this laptop shuts off with G-SYNC enabled, and two movies played back with Optimus enabled.

Battery Life Conclusion

Acer is one of a few manufacturers offering a multiplexer on the dGPU, allowing the end user to choose between Optimus and G-SYNC, and the results are worth it. If you are doing desktop work and need some extra battery life, the Triton 500 deilvers far more than most gaming laptops. It can't keep up with a low-powered Ultrabook here, but still easily outclasses the competition that does not offer the MUX.

Charge Time

Acer ships the Triton 500 with a 180-Watt AC Adapter with a barrel connector. For those wishing for USB-C charging, the maximum power for USB-C power distribution is 100 Watts, which is not enough for a gaming laptop, which is why they still rely on proprietary power connectors.

You can go from zero to full charge in just over two hours with this laptop, which is pretty good considering the size of the battery. But most likely, the battery will be a mini-UPS for moments when the power goes out anyway, since this laptop is made to be plugged in most of the time.