Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition Review

With the $3,499.99 Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition, Acer gave its gaming laptop formula the proverbial “one neat trick”: a glasses-free 3D display. While this muscle machine sports the fundamentals of an ideal gaming laptop, packing high-performance internals, Acer's display aims to set this machine apart from competitors like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 and the Razer Blade 18. However, as fleetingly neat as it can be to see some games and videos in 3D without glasses, the Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition needs a sharper edge to keep up with the competition. With a more current iteration of this laptop, the Predator Helios 3D 15, so close to release, and the appeal of its 3D screen questionable (it gave this reviewer headaches), we find it difficult to confidently recommend the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition.

Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition Build and Configurations

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition is a tank, and not just because all gaming laptops are. Between the high-performance hardware inside and the neat display technology, it’s packing a lot of hardware that needs both cooling and space. The combination makes for a machine that’s more sizable and weightier than you might expect out of a premium 15.6-inch laptop, even if it is a gaming one.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

At 6.3 pounds, the Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition is heavier than many of the machines we’ve recently tested, including the higher-performance 16-inch Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, and it’s almost as heavy as 18-inch models like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18. Making matters worse, it’s also thick at 1.1 inches, again larger than Lenovo’s killer gaming laptop. It might have fared better, but the special 3D display makes for a lid that contributes more than a quarter to the laptop’s overall thickness.

Much of this Predator is constructed with metal, giving it a sturdy feel, even if the display hinges wiggle a bit. The underside of the laptop is plastic, though, but that should help it avoid soaking up the heat and burning your thighs when used on your lap.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition has a special camera system for eye-tracking to present its 3D visuals correctly, but that doesn’t factor into the actual webcam. It’s a typical (and, for the price, dated) 720p affair that will just do for video chats but not pro streaming or serious presentations. The camera doesn’t support Windows Hello facial recognition, and you'll find no fingerprint scanner, either—also surprising omissions at this price.

Though the Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition has plenty of ports, they’re not as thoughtfully diverse or placed as I’d hope from a large high-end laptop like this. The left side includes a headset jack, a USB-A (5Gbps) port, and an Ethernet jack with a spring-action jaw. The right side includes two more USB-A ports. You'll find just a single USB-C (Thunderbolt 4) port on the back edge with a full-size HDMI port, a mini DisplayPort, and a power adapter port. While many laptops with back-edge I/O put labels above so you can see which is which without needing to twist or flip the laptop around, Acer neglected to do that, making it tedious to actually use the rear ports.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

At least this laptop's wireless connectivity is a stronger point, with high-speed Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radios built in. While Wi-Fi 7 is slowly showing up, it’ll probably still be a while before the recently introduced 6GHz band used in Wi-Fi 6E starts to feel commonplace, and even longer before the speeds available stop feeling like enough.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

You'll experience little fuss in picking out which Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition variant to get, as only one exists. For $3,499.99, this laptop comes packing an Intel Core i9-12900H processor with 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 2TB SSD, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics chip with 8GB of VRAM, and a 4K display running at 60Hz that hosts the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition’s key feature: glasses-free 3D. 

Using the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition leaves little to be desired when it comes to actually using it. At least for starters, the keyboard has slightly poppy keys with a bit more travel than most keyboards, giving it a fairly pleasant feel for typing. I am able to get up to 107 words per minute at 97% accuracy in Monkeytype. But sometimes, I trip up on the keys with their deep travel and unclear bottom if I press on the corners. The arrow-key placement also makes editing work more tedious.

Despite this being a larger laptop, Acer has gone with a relatively small touch pad. As a result, I often find myself clicking toward what I think is the left side and getting a right click by accident. The surface is pleasingly smooth, but it would have felt better if it were an inch wider.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The display is meant to be the star of the show here, but I find little positive to say about it. Acer made considerable sacrifices to deliver a glasses-free 3D experience. Acer nixed a high refresh rate and working HDR support, and a fine array of dots (presumably part of what makes the 3D possible) on the display surface affects the clarity of what should have otherwise been an exceedingly sharp 2160p resolution on a 15.6-inch display.

Acer's 3D display indeed works…but at a steep cost and underwhelming return. I owned two glasses-free 3D phones in the early 2010s, when 3D was experiencing a mild renaissance. The technology has progressed some, but it doesn’t feel like a decade's worth of progress. The Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition uses special cameras to try to keep the 3D visuals in your perspective, but it’s not immediate enough, so small head movements take me out of the sweet spot constantly. In 3D-supported games, you have several sliders to adjust the depth and separation, and finding a comfortable setting is a chore. I found a dearth of games (fewer than 100) that natively support the 3D mode, and even those have issues. For unsupported content, the laptop can try to provide 3D anyway, but the results are inconsistent.

While seeing content pop out that little bit more is neat, I find gaming and watching content on the 3D display more headache-inducing than compelling. All of the progress from the 2010s seems to be in the display’s higher resolution and the ability to shift the sweet spot—and the latter isn’t always on point.

Making matters worse, the display outside of 3D isn’t all that exceptional. It’s not terribly bright, failing to peak above 340 nits in our testing, and its adaptive contrast feature that I’ve seen elsewhere is frustrating for image color and brightness consistency. If the screen shows dark content for a while, it will lower the overall brightness. But then switching back to a light piece of content, white will appear a dimmer gray and slowly transition back to full white. It can take a second to react, and almost three seconds to fully switch back.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The laptop’s speakers live on the outside edges of the frame’s underside. They pump out modest volume focused on the midrange. The bass is low, so it won’t help much with impactful gaming. Of course, you’ll want to use headphones when you’re gaming on this thing, because when the fans kick in to deliver full power, they’ll make it hard to hear what’s coming out of the speakers.

At the very least, the laptop seems to stick to a minimum of extra software. It comes with the handful of preloaded games and social media apps that most Windows 11 machines appear to be coming with. It also has Acer’s Predator Sense for controlling system performance and lighting, as well as the relevant apps for 3D control. Beyond that, you won't find much extra.

Testing the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition: Outpriced and Outperformed

At $3,499.99, the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition has to run with the big dogs. It’s going up against the latest and greatest hardware, and that’s not a favorable spot for it to be given it’s running a 12th Generation Intel part when we’re now well into Intel's 13th Gen and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series GPU when we’re seeing plenty of RTX 40 Series options.

This means the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition can see competition from not only the new high-end products coming in at a similar price, like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 and Razer Blade 18, but also much-lower-cost models like the MSI Katana 15 (2023). We also compared it with one of its contemporaries running AMD parts, the Corsair Voyager a1600, to see how it stacked up.

Productivity Tests

We run each system through a series of tests to get an idea of how they hold up to real-world productivity. We start with UL's PCMark 10 to simulate office and content-creation workflows and measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Additionally, a series of CPU-intensive tests assess how powerful the processor is and how well-optimized the laptop’s cooling is for sustained loads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

We then evaluate performance for creative workloads and media editing using PugetBench for Photoshop from Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

We view any score above 4,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark as excellent. It’s a decent indicator that the system will hold up to almost any of the typical office tasks you throw at it. Given the high-performance parts in these five gaming machines, it’s scant surprise to see them all blow past that mark with scores in excess of 7,000 points. This will see them drive plenty of performance in the years to come. The Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition fits into the middle of the pack here with its core-packed processor and effective thermals—which likely helped it stay ahead of the Razer Blade 18 that should have taken the win for processor performance but likely was held back by more limited thermals.

Even with its older parts, effective cooling helped the Predator keep up in many cases. Regardless, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 was a dominant force throughout and more than $700 less than the Acer Predator. The worse matter is how often MSI’s midrange gaming laptop came out ahead for less than half the price of the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition. It was also a weak showing for Acer’s choice of storage, which scored less than half the points of most other machines.

Graphics Tests

To get a grasp of how much power each system’s graphics hardware is capable of, we test Windows PC graphics with a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations using UL's 3DMark Night Raid (low-intensity)  and Time Spy (high-intensity) tests.

We also run GFXBench 5 to gather cross-platform data through two tests that stress both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

For gaming machines, we run three real-world game benchmarks in a variety of settings to see how the systems perform their primary tasks. The specifically built-in 1080p benchmarks consist of a AAA title (Assassin's Creed Valhalla), a fast-paced esports shooter (Rainbow Six Siege), and a sports racing sim (F1 2021). We run each benchmark twice, using different image quality presets for Valhalla and Rainbow and trying F1 with and without Nvidia's DLSS anti-aliasing technology.

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition has some muscle, but it’s showing its age next to the competitors running newer hardware. It fairly easily trounced the Corsair Voyager a1600’s AMD CPU and GPU combo across most of the tests, but that’s about the only place the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition came out ahead. 

In most of our tests, the RTX 3080 in the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition was crushed by the RTX 4080 in the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 and the Razer Blade 18. And when the MSI Katana 15's RTX 4070 wasn’t keeping pace with the Predator, it outstripped it by a wide margin. Given both the Lenovo and MSI laptops are much cheaper than the Predator, we see little reason to consider Acer’s machine from a performance standpoint, leaving more of its value to hinge on the shaky merits of its 3D display.

Battery and Display Tests

To get an idea of how long each laptop can run away from a power outlet, we do a battery rundown test playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with the laptop’s display brightness set to 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also evaluate the display using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software. We measure the laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition’s display put up some impressive numbers. Despite using an IPS panel, it showed an exceptional 100% coverage of not only the sRGB color space but also Adobe RGB. The screen's DCI-P3 coverage was a lower 89% but still impressive. In this pack, only the much more expensive Razer Blade 18 kept up, thanks to its advanced display. Promising as these numbers might be for using this as a creative laptop for media work, the aforementioned array of visible dots across the whole display affects its clarity.

Colorful as the Predator’s screen is, it’s not all that bright: It peaked at just 340 nits in our testing. While this nearly tied the Corsair, only the cheap MSI Katana 15 was dimmer. Corsair’s laptop just edged it out, while Lenovo and Razer both hit more than 500 nits. Even if the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition were willing to display HDR content (something I struggled to get it to do), it wouldn’t be terribly impressive without higher brightness levels. 

Putting the final nail in the Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition’s coffin is its battery life. At just 5 hours and 10 minutes, it was still respectable for a gaming laptop, but it was also the shortest result of the bunch. 

Verdict: 3D Appeal Can't Save a Dated Pixel Pusher

The Acer Predator Helios 300 Spatial Labs Edition has an entertaining party trick in its glasses-free 3D display, but it falls behind competitors that kick it to the curb at every corner. Worse still, the 3D entails a lot of sacrifices, particularly from the screen, including brightness and refresh rate, and still feels like hardly anything more than a novelty. For more than $3,000, you can do a lot better. For less than $3,000, you can still do better, and that’s what makes it hard to confidently recommend this machine. Start with a performance grinder like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, and save a bundle. too.