Sometimes I feel like the magnificent Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 has ruined other laptop chassis designs for me. It's a milled aluminium wonder and makes just about every other slim 16-inch laptop look lesser by comparison.
That being said, while this Acer Predator Triton Neo 16 is less of a looker, the components you get inside are well worth the money—especially when you can find it at a discount for $1,500 at Amazon. It might not be quite as stunning to behold, but what you get here is seriously tempting for the cash.
Let's start out with one of the most important components in a gaming laptop build—the GPU. It's a proper 140 W RTX 4070, which is pretty impressive given that this is still quite a slim and portable laptop design.
The other most important component, I would argue, is the screen. There's no point pushing a load of glorious gaming pixels if the display's a bit of a turkey, but you should have no such worries here. This is a 2000p LED backlit IPS panel, with a 165 Hz refresh rate. Again, it's not going to be as gorgeous or as fast as the OLED display in the Asus, but it's still plenty speedy and very well-specced.
That 3200 x 2000 resolution might be a bit much for even a full-strength mobile RTX 4070, but you can always drop it down a touch, or lean on DLSS 3 and the wonders of Frame Generation to pump it full of frames at a decent rate.
As for the CPU? It's an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, with six Performance cores and eight Efficient cores. While Meteor Lake might not have been the most impressive generation of Intel's mobile processors, it should still have no problem delivering excellent gaming performance. It's been paired with a full 32 GB of DDR5 as well, which is very nice to see on a laptop at this price.
Just as well really as the RAM's been soldered to the board, so no upgrades here. Still, 32 GB is plenty for a modern gaming machine, and stops me having to write my usual caveat for 16 GB laptops: "It'd be nice to see more RAM at this price". Nope, it's fully kitted out, this machine, and I reckon it's a bit of a cracker for this sort of money.
But what of my lovely Asus? Well, it might not be quite as cheap as we've seen previously, but you can still buy one for $1,700 at Best Buy right now. Really, which of these laptops you pick is down to how much you can afford. But if money's a little too tight for the G16, this Acer delivers a ton of gaming bang for your buck for a tasty $200 less.
