Michael Crider
Following NVIDIA’s announcement of RTX-powered laptops at CES, Acer showed off its first design, and it’s a doozie: the Predator Triton 900 features a 17-inch 4K touchscreen that folds down on a boom hinge, technically making it a massive “convertible.”
This no-holds-barred gaming laptop comes with the top-of-the-line RTX 2080 GPU, paired with Intel’s latest Core i7 8th-gen processor, up to 32GB of RAM, a pair of solid-state drives in RAID 0 configuration, and a built-in Xbox wireless controller module. The enormous body is nearly an inch thick, with a backlit keyboard on the very front of the bottom half (the better to show off the display) and trackpad to the right for more ergonomic use in gaming if you have no mouse handy.
A touch in the corner of the touchpad activates a 10-key mode, for those who prefer their keyboards full-sized. The onboard speakers are supplied by Waves Audio, and a clear window above the keyboard lets the user peek at the integrated liquid cooling system.
But the star of the show is the screen. In addition to its 4K resolution it’s rated for NVIDIA’s G-SYNC smoothing technology, it can fold back on itself. So if you have the room, you can connect a full keyboard and mouse directly in front of the laptop. It’s not the traditional “convertible” form factor, but it covers the same laptop-tablet-presentation viewing options. Neat.
The Predator Triton 900 will go on sale in the US, Europe, and China starting in March. It won’t come cheap: the MSRP starts at $4000 USD for the base configuration. Expect that price to climb even higher quickly if you want the most powerful components.
If that’s a bit rich for your blood, Acer also announced the more conventional Predator Triton 500. This laptop starts at $1800, also using NVIDIA’s new RTX GPUs, plus the company’s Max-Q cooling technology to cram the 15-inch laptop down to just .7 inches and 4.6 pounds. The smaller laptop’s screen is faster at 144Hz, with G-SYNC built in. Acer says the body is all metal and it can last for up to 8 hours on a charge. The Predator Triton 500 will hit the market sooner, in February.
