(Credit: Rene Ramos)
Always count on Acer to bring a full wall display of new consumer and business laptops to Computex. This Taiwan-based mega-trade show, held next week in Taipei, is the world’s biggest computing/IT showcase, and, increasingly, an AI tastemaking conference. Acer’s laptops this year follow the same trajectory as the show: traditional computing ingesting the trappings of AI.
Take its flagship Predator Helios 18 AI, the company's biggest laptop for gamers. The 18-inch beast has been massively supercharged for 2026, not just with new high-end processor options and a ticked-up version of an already imposing screen, but a massive boost to its RAM overhead, poised to make it a dual-use gaming/AI monster.
I took a look at it and a host of other new Acer machines, including a new Nitro 16, detailed here further below, at a preview event in New York. Let’s look at what’s cooking with Predator and Nitro.
Acer Predator Helios 18 AI: Specs Gone Beast Mode, for Gaming and AI
Plenty about the Predator Helios 18 AI remains the same versus the last version of the machine, which popped up at IFA 2025 in Berlin. You can expect the same general design and signature front-edge RGB bling strip. The main visible change is a set of nuanced upgrades to the big display panel. The most consequential tweaks, though, are to the interior components.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)For starters, Intel’s “Arrow Lake Refresh” mobile processor family lands here in its first Acer machine, in the form of HX-class chips up to the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus. The mobile parallel to Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus-series desktop CPUs, this laptop silicon promises to boost the CPU’s support for faster gaming frame rates. (For Intel’s original Arrow Lake family, gaming was not a strength.) We haven’t yet had the opportunity to benchmark an Arrow Lake Refresh laptop, but I expect new ones to be plentiful at the Computex show next week.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Nvidia hasn’t made any recent moves in laptop graphics, and the new Helios will feature silicon at the top of the consumer-GPU food chain, in the form of GeForce RTX 50-series chips up to the mighty 24GB GeForce RTX 5090. Not just for gamers (indeed, it’s overkill for most of them), the RTX 5090 is also the darling of the AI crowd. However, a lusty CPU and GPU can only do so much in local AI processing if the system lacks adequate RAM and local storage to hold and manipulate large models.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)To that end, the Helios 18 received something of a staggering upgrade—”staggering” in a couple of ways. The maximum memory capacity is now an eye-popping 256GB of DDR5, via four SO-DIMM RAM slots. (Base models ship with two 32GB sticks standard, so if you want to max out the Helios 18, you’ll have to rebuy some of the memory and get four 64GB modules.) That’s impressive, not just for the peak memory allowance but also for how much those compatible modules will cost nowadays. I did a quick check of Newegg, and 64GB SO-DIMMs from Crucial were going for $1,400 in a twin kit. That would put the cost of maxing out the RAM in this Predator at around $3,000 for the memory sticks alone.
The storage scheme is no slouch, either. The Helios now features three PCI Express Gen 5 slots, supporting up to 6TB of storage via 2TB M.2 SSDs. Game libraries, big LLMs, and agentic AI workloads can all coexist, if you’re willing to shell out for enough SSD storage, too.
The Mini LED and the Keyboard Shine Under Duress
The Helios 18 is graduating to a dual-mode display with this revision. Increasingly common on desktop gaming monitors, dual-mode displays are now appearing in high-end gaming laptops.
With the new Helios, the panel peaks at a 240Hz refresh rate at 1080p, or 120Hz at 4K. This is a Mini-LED display with peak HDR brightness of 1,000 nits and full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. The latter spec also makes this machine a smart match for professional content creation, which, given the other components, should also be a real strength of this machine.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)The location where Acer held its preview has a balcony overlooking a busy New York City street. On a bright day, albeit out of direct sunlight, I spent a few minutes with the Helios 18 there, observing the panel outdoors, and found I could view it well in the naked daylight. Mini LED allows for deep flexibility in panel backlight brightness, and the screen looked vibrant even in these suboptimal conditions.
I tried the Helios 18’s upgraded keyboard and (enormous) touchpad. It clearly has some gamer service in mind here: RGB backlit keys, and a clearly outlined WASD cluster. The keyboard’s also unusual in that you can swap out the WASD cluster's underlying key switches for optional magnetically activated switches that come in the laptop's accessory kit. This option provides a different finger feel for those crucial movement keys, which is essential in games such as shooters.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Acer calls this limited key swappability MagKey 4.0. Even without the optional keys on the rest of the board, you'll feel a fair amount of travel and feedback from this keyboard. An effective keyboard may be table stakes for a weighty 18-incher, but I liked what I felt with this board.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)To be sure, the Helios 18 leaves quite the first impression, not just by dint of its sheer size but also thanks to the Mini-LED panel's imposing glow and vibrance. I couldn't fire up games, but Acer outlines its usual robust cooling mechanism, with its latest fans, dubbed 6th Generation AeroBlade, that pack more thin, fine fan blades per millimeter of circumference than ever.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Like with its other Computex-debut laptops, Acer didn’t have launch pricing for the Helios 18 AI, though it expects it to hit US shores around August. This beefy laptop blurs the line between an elite mobile gaming rig and a local-AI workstation. In the same way that content-creation machines and gaming laptops saw lots of crossover in the late 2010s/early 2020s, hardware that works well for two camps (gaming and AI) will once again feature across some new models. To my eyes, this Helios 18 AI refresh looks like a leader in that trend.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Acer Nitro 16: Bringing 3D V-Cache to the Battlefield
While the Predator line is strictly Intel-based, the Nitro line includes both Intel and AMD processor configurations. The interesting new models this time in the 16-inch Acer Nitro 16 family are AMD-based, and the CPU is the compelling bit. The laptop employs the same chassis design Acer has been using for Nitros over the past couple of years. Like on the Helios 18, the internal components are what’s news.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)The standout upgrade? This gaming laptop is the first Acer system to feature AMD’s gamer-friendly 3D V-Cache processors. Here, that’s up to a Ryzen 9 9955HX3D. The 3D V-Cache tech is a frame-rate booster, especially at lower resolutions and detail settings where the CPU might struggle to keep up with the GPU.
Nitro 16 models with V-Cache come with GPUs up to the 12GB GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Acer was also at pains to point out the large performance differential between the RTX 5070 Ti and the vanilla RTX 5070, which sounds similar.
(Credit: Rene Ramos)Other specs are right on for a midrange gaming laptop: 32GB max memory, up to 2TB of storage (with two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots), a 240Hz WQXGA panel (that’s 2,560 by 1,600), and Killer Ethernet.
In handling the machine, it’s clearly the familiar Nitro design we have come to expect over the last year or two, and the proof of this model's worth will be in the pricing and lab-tested performance. (Pricing, like with the Helios, is forthcoming, and the laptops should hit the US by late summer.) This machine is clearly more of a classic gaming play: fast frame rates, but not quite the memory or storage backing for parallel heavy AI work. More on both of these Acer entries as they come in for review later this year.