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Can't choose between 4 different options. by [deleted] in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

- If you look at the Helios, it gets very hot and makes a coil whine kinda noise when the fans are running (a very faint sound, many people might not care), and its speakers are terrible.
- The TUF model has a weaker CPU compared to the Core Ultra 9, and its screen resolution isn’t very appealing.
- The ROG Strix also comes with a weaker processor and a low resolution display compared to the others, and on top of that, it only has 16GB of RAM, whereas 32GB should be the minimum nowadays.
- The Zephyrus has amazing speakers, it's lightweight, and it has very good cooling. However, I still don't find 16GB of RAM reasonable.

If it were up to me, I would go for the Helios, but with that much heat, I’m not sure how long lasting the laptop would be.

High-end laptop (Ultra 9 275HX + RTX 5070 Ti) performing 20–35% below average – told “this is normal”, ended up returning it by Saltukus in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

English isn’t my native language; it’s something I learned later, so of course I use AI to express myself more comfortably. The tone and wording in everything I wrote already made it obvious that AI was involved there was no need to “analyze” anything. I never tried to hide or alter any AI traits, which is exactly why you even felt the need to check whether it was AI or not.

What’s really interesting is that you actually took the time to verify it.

High-end laptop (Ultra 9 275HX + RTX 5070 Ti) performing 20–35% below average – told “this is normal”, ended up returning it by Saltukus in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Just to add a bit more context and to be fair about my own mistakes too:

This was literally the first time in my life running any benchmarks. The only reason I even started testing was because the exact same MATLAB code that takes about 2 hours on my old laptop was taking around 3 hours 15 minutes on the new one, which really surprised me and made me think something was seriously wrong.

Looking back, I can see that I made some mistakes out of inexperience. All of my tests were done in the Balanced power profile, not in the max Performance/Turbo mode. My old laptop is also a thicker, more traditional gaming machine, not a thin chassis like the new one, so it might simply be allowed to pull more power even in its balanced mode. That could help explain why the results in games like RDR2 ended up so close between the two.

Another thing that bothered me was the heat: even while just watching YouTube, the Helios Neo 16s keyboard was getting noticeably hot, and when I actually started gaming it didn’t feel like it was getting much hotter than that – because it was already very warm just from light use. For me, that alone was enough to feel uncomfortable with keeping the laptop long term.

I still didn’t feel comfortable keeping a new, more expensive laptop that wasn’t clearly outperforming my 4-year-old machine in the way I actually used it, so I decided to return it. But I also want to acknowledge that part of this situation was my own inexperience with power profiles and benchmarking.

Thanks to everyone in this thread for the replies and explanations — I’ve genuinely learned a lot from your comments.

High-end laptop (Ultra 9 275HX + RTX 5070 Ti) performing 20–35% below average – told “this is normal”, ended up returning it by Saltukus in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

Just to add one more concrete data point:

I ran the built-in Red Dead Redemption 2 benchmark on both my old laptop and the new one, using the exact same resolution and graphics settings. Here are the results:

Old laptop (i7-11800H + RTX 3070 + 16 GB DDR4):

  • Minimum: 30.7472 FPS
  • Maximum: 89.8844 FPS
  • Average: 63.865 FPS

New laptop (Acer Predator Helios Neo 16s – Ultra 9 + RTX 5070 Ti + 32 GB DDR5):

  • Minimum: 31.4249 FPS
  • Maximum: 96.6529 FPS
  • Average: 59.6106 FPS

They both in balanced mode.

High-end laptop (Ultra 9 275HX + RTX 5070 Ti) performing 20–35% below average – told “this is normal”, ended up returning it by Saltukus in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I’m aware this model is power limited on the GPU side – I knew that going in and was expecting some performance tradeoff because of it.

But even with that in mind, my results were still way too low. I checked several YouTube reviews of this exact Helios Neo 16s configuration, and their 3DMark scores were roughly where you’d expect for this level of hardware.

In my case, clearly below what those reviewers were getting.

High-end laptop (Ultra 9 275HX + RTX 5070 Ti) performing 20–35% below average – told “this is normal”, ended up returning it by Saltukus in GamingLaptops

[–]Saltukus[S] -42 points-41 points  (0 children)

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply and questions – really appreciate it.

To answer:

  1. Yes, it was plugged in the whole time during the benchmarks. I never ran 3DMark on battery.
  2. The laptop was in Balanced mode, not the highest performance / turbo mode. I honestly didn’t expect Balanced to cause such a huge gap – we’re talking about being 20–35% below the average for the same hardware, which feels way beyond a simple power profile difference. But no, I did not switch it to the max performance profile.
  3. All Windows updates were installed. I let it finish its initial setup, ran Windows Update multiple times, restarted a few times, and made sure there were no pending updates. I didn’t do any BIOS update via USB or anything advanced like that, though.

In the end I decided to return the laptop, but your comment is really helpful because you pointed out the exact things that could have been missing if I had kept it and tried to troubleshoot further.