Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Review (i7-11375H+RTX 3060)

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Built around the rising ultra-mobile gaming concept, the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE features a 14-inch display, a weight of 3.5 Lbs for a thickness of 0.7”. It is one of the most exciting gaming laptops from a pure mobility perspective, as measured by “performance per Lbs.”

Before diving deeper into the review, let’s take a look at the configuration that we are testing, along with the order options you might have to choose from.

Specs Highlights

Our review unit is the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE (model PT314-51s-71UU) equipped with an Intel Core i7-11375H 3.3GHz, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD (475GB after formatting) model MZVLB512HBJQ-00007 from Samsung. The GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

There aren’t a lot of options, so it should be easy for prospective buyers to choose a model, and it mostly comes down to which GPU you want.

Upgradability

This laptop comes with 16GB by default, and 8GB are soldered, while the other 8GB comes in the form of one SODIMM DDR4-3200 module. If you replace the 8GB SODIMM with a 16GB one later, you can push the available RAM to 24GB.

After removing the back cover, the RAM, SSD, WiFi modules, and battery pack are accessible immediately, so I’d say that it is easy to upgrade the existing components. There are only one RAM, and one SSD slot, so larger laptops might have an advantage here, but for a thin and light, it’s pretty easy.

Industrial Design

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE design is on the slim side, especially for a gaming laptop. Although the chassis is made of aluminum but feels very thin. It has a brush-metal silver finish and would look (relatively) low-key in a corporate room.

There’s something slightly aggressive in the design that reminds us why the series is called “Predator.” By the way, the grill just above the keyboard is also a cooling vent and not a speaker.

The chassis does not feel as pleasant as a unibody chassis, but I’m guessing that it is a tradeoff people are willing to make in the name of superior portability.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The Predator Triton 300 SE keyboard has an extra key column on the right that includes a Power button, Media Playback keys, and a “Predator” key that launches Predator Sense, Acer’s performance, and LED controls.

I found the keyboard to be relatively easy to get accustomed to. The key travel might be a bit shallower than larger laptops, but that is hardly surprising since the computer is thin and there’s little space on the Y-axis.

The glass trackpad is very smooth and agreeable to use. Its 10.7 square-inch size is in line with other laptops of that size, and while you can find larger trackpads,  I find this one to be large enough unless you perform complex multi-finger circular gestures.

A fingerprint reader is integrated into the trackpad, but you can slide your finger right on top of it during swiping motions. The trackpad has a firm click, so the tactile feedback is clear and accurate.

Ports

The Predator Triton 300 SE comes with the latest Intel platform, and Thunderbolt 4 is part of the technology package, which is fantastic from an I/O perspective, especially if you want to get a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C dock in the future to build a neat desktop setup.

2x USB Type A, 3.2 Gen2

1x USB Type C, Thunderbolt 4

1x Standard HDMI 2.1

1x Anti-theft slot, Kensington

1x 3.5mm audio

Sound

The two-speakers audio stereo system is decent, but they are bottom-firing, which is not an optimum location. As a result, the audio is distortion-free but could have better volume and loudness with a different configuration. The DTS:X Ultra audio makes surround sound a bit better, but there’s only so much that software can do.

For video calls, the built-in microphones have sound-improvement technologies, which always help. That said, your gaming headphones microphones are typically better because they are closer to the mouth.

Display

This laptop’s display has a 1080p 144Hz display, which we find to strike the right balance in this situation. The color gamut is very satisfactory with a 99% sRGB color rendering ( 75% Adobe RGB, 77% P3).

However, the 310 NITs brightness might be weaker than you’d want. If you game in a dark setting, it’s more than enough, but if you happen to be in a brightly lit room or outside, the brightness could use a boost.

144 Hz is a good number, in my opinion. Some displays can hit 240Hz or more, but how many games do you run at 240 FPS?

The display can recline to 180-degrees, and this may be useful when using laptop stands that go near vertical to lift the screen as high as possible.

The webcam quality is average, and (unfortunately) that’s very common in the PC industry. If you are into game streaming, it’s probably better to get a standalone camera, like the Logitech Streamcam, which I recommend.

Performance

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE with Intel i7-11375H and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 laptop is very competitive with other thin & lights running on a similar platform, like the MSI Stealth 15M i7-11375H + RTX 3060.

In gaming graphics benchmarks like 3DMark TimeSpy and PortRoyal, this Predator Triton 300 SE did well, and that’s probably the most exciting part for gamers. It seems that Acer has tuned its thermal management to go as close to the hardware limit as possible.

Acer says that it has spent a lot of effort on the cooling technology, and usually, it is pretty difficult to gauge the reality of such claims. However, this kind of graphics performance might be the best evidence of Acer’s success as this laptop pushes the boundary of “gaming performance for the weight”

The multi-threaded CPU performance is okay for this SKU, but if you’re really into heavy CPU applications (like Cinebench), you might want to get something with a higher core count, such as the AMD 58xx or 59xx series.

The SSD performance is excellent and on par with some of the fastest we’ve tested, such as the Lenovo Yoga i9 15. That could help load games faster, and if you work with very large files, the sequential read and writes speed is a must.

Acer has a pre-installed software called PredatorSense that controls all performance aspects, including thermal controls. If you head into the Mode tab, there are four presets Quiet, Default, Extreme, and Turbo (very noisy!). These control the fan speed for cooling and probably some voltage and thermal settings.

Battery Life

Obviously, playing 3G games at high framerates will kill any battery quickly, especially since the 60Wh battery capacity isn’t awe-inspiring. That’s true for every gaming laptop.

That said, if you need to perform more basic tasks under “best battery” mode, you can expect about 6 hours and 45mn, which is not bad at all for a gaming laptop with a high-powered CPU.

If you need to have an extended battery life, gaming PCs aren’t an ideal choice, but for this level of system performance, the next step is to find models with larger battery capacities.

Battery Charge Speed

Fortunately, the relatively small size of the battery pack is somewhat compensated by the above-average charging speed of this laptop. You can expect to get a 50% charge in 30 minutes, and that’s one of the fastest charging speeds we’ve seen in a while.

Conclusion

If you approach the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE (i7-11375H+RTX 3060) from an ultra-mobility gaming computer, the objective gaming metrics like “performance per Lbs” are excellent.

Acer is using an aggressive but stable thermal management in addition to a sophisticated cooling system. That’s the likely reason for the higher performance than similar laptops we’ve looked at in the past.

If you need heavy CPU performance for video-editing or offline 3D rendering, perhaps something with more cores like the Acer Concept 3D could be interesting.

When it comes to ultra-mobility gaming, we give high marks to the Acer’s Predator Triton 300 SE as it performed even better than we hoped.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Reviews
Tags: Acer, Acer Reviews, Editorspick, Gaming Laptop Reviews, Gaming Laptops, Laptop Reviews