A while back when the Acer Predator Helios 700 was announced, it made headlines around the world as it “slides into your DM”. Literally, this is a laptop with a slider mechanism that reveals and allows two fans to breathe. Now at Computex 2019, Acer answered all of our burning questions.
Starting off with the sliding mechanism, how does it work? Surprisingly well, actually. You just get your finger on the gap and start pushing towards you. Or, you can pull the wrist rest towards you and it can slide as well.
Once the sliding is complete, the heatpipe that is in between of the two fans start to glow thanks to an RGB LED there, and it makes some sort of chime. The wrist rest becomes angled now and serves as an angled, ergonomic wrist rest.
Of course, sliding the laptop open is a must if you are doing anything intensive as the Helios 700 packs an 9th Gen Intel Core i9 and up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 graphics. Acer has once again specifically mentioned that this is not a Max-Q chip.
The Helios 700 in itself is not thin or light at all. Having beefy heatsink and cooler like this is actually beneficial as it can be quieter while still providing fantastic cooling performance.
Another main highlight of the Acer Predator Helios 700 is on the WASD keys. It has a new technology that they are calling the MagForce Keys, a patented switch that allows analog input – just like a joystick on a controller. Today, we also know that only this specific set of keycaps will allow analog inputs.
That is because these keycaps have a magnet and a spring under them. Making a smart guess on our own, we think that Acer’s patented MagForce Keys is actually a Hall sensor that responses according to the magnet’s distance. The spring is to provide a feedback and to linearize the key switch.
Surprisingly, the overall key press feel on the MagForce Keys is quite good. They really just feel like pressing on a spring and the resistance feels comfortable to be used for a long time. Though, I wonder if Acer will offer different springs on these keycaps to cater towards different types of gamers.
It is surely interesting to test the Helios 700 for ourselves in our lab. It’s a crazy concept, but Acer made it happen.
