Acer has a new pair of 14.5-inch laptops for gaming on the go

Acer is kicking off its Computex announcements with a pair of 14-inch gaming laptops. The company's two new gaming laptops, the Predator Triton 14 AI and Helios Neo 14 AI, are both being targeted at both gamers and creative professionals.

The Triton 14 AI is extremely sleek (0.68 inches at its thickest point), but to get there, Acer is using a productivity-class processor. The Intel Core Ultra 9 288V is one of Intel's "Lunar Lake" processors with integrated RAM. This chip runs between 30W at base power, which isn't as powerful as most gaming laptop processors. We saw a similar case in the Razer Blade 16, which opted for a 28W AMD Ryzen chip to enable a thinner design.

Acer is using graphene on the CPU to serve as the thermal interface material, which the company says outperforms regular thermal paste by 14.5%.

Acer is pairing Lunar Lake with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU using Nvidia's Studio drivers, which are optimized for creative applications. The system goes up to 32GB of RAM (on the CPU) and 2TB of storage.

The Triton also features a 14.5-inch, 2880 x 1800 OLED touchscreen that runs up to 120 Hz and is Calman verified.There's also a haptic touchpad built into the wrist rest, similar to the MSI Titan and Dell XPS 13, that supports a stylus, which seems limited in terms of writing.

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The system looks sleek, with a sparse design and a silver hinge with diamond cut edge designed to reflect different colors from different angles. Despite the slim design, you still get some gaming accouterments, like a per-key RGB keyboard.

If you want a more traditional gaming laptop, the Helios Neo 14 AI is a bit more conventional in its components. Here, Acer is using Intel's H-series "Arrow Lake" chips, going up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, though still using up to 32GB of RAM, up to 2 TB of storage, and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU. It's also thicker than the Triton at 0.82 inches.

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The Helios Neo will have two screen options. You get a 14.5-inch panel either way, but one is 2880 x 1800 at 120 Hz with a MUX switch (that typically requires rebooting the system), while a lower-res 2560 x 1600 option is faster at 165 Hz and uses Nvidia's Advanced Optimus to switch between the integrated GPU and the discrete one.

The Predator Helios Neo has a metal lid with an RGB logo that you can customize, as well as a three-zone RGB keyboard.

Of the two laptops, only the Triton is certified as a Copilot+ PC. The Lunar Lake NPU, at 48 TOPS, is far more powerful than the Arrow Lake's 13 TOPS. Microsoft's Copilot+ PC requirements demand a minimum of 40 TOPS.

Acer is also using Computex to update its Predator Orion 3000 to the latest chips from Intel and Nvidia, including up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 265F and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070.

The company hasn't announced North American pricing or release dates for any of these machines. Acer said it will release that information for the U.S. and Canada "closer to market availability." In Europe, the systems will launch in July, which might give us a rough window of when to expect them elsewhere.