Predator Helios 500 Review – Cool, stylish and powerful beast with 8th Gen Intel Core i9 processor

As the video games’ demand on performance is getting higher and higher nowadays, Predator has been paying huge effort on improving the performance of their products. The recently launched Predator Helios 500 is a gaming laptop with one of the best specifications in the market now, and we are lucky to be able to try it out. Check out our Predator Helios 500 review below for our comments on the powerful beast!

Design and Display

Predator Helios 500‘s appearance is kinda similar to Predator Triton 700‘s. It features an all-black aluminium alloy body along with the cool-looking silverish Predator logo located at its back. However, different from Triton 700, Predator Helios 500 is much thicker and heavier at 38.70 mm and 4kg. The triangular power button located at the middle-top of the keyboard area is shinning in blue, making the design looking futuristic than ever.

It comes with a 17.3″ FHD IPS display and thanks to its matte screen, your eyes won’t feel uncomfortable from a long period of gaming or working. It also features an incredibly fast refresh rate at 144Hz, as well as supporting the NVIDIA G-Sync technology.

You don’t have to worry about the overheating issue. Predator Helios 500 is featuring 2 AeroBlade 3D Fans, 5 heat pipes and an elevated laptop design that helps in expelling heat and allowing more cool air to cycle in.

Other than that, Predator 500 features something that we love to see on a gaming laptop – the RGB backlit keyboard. The WASD keys are highlighted, while the RGB area is separated into 4 zones where you can customize with plenty of the colours available. There are 5 dedicated hotkeys that you can adjust to your needs too!

Specifications

• Size: 428 mm x 298 mm x 38.70 mm
• Weight: 4kg
• CPU: Intel Core i9-8950HK
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
• Display: 17.3″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS panel
• Refresh Rate: 144Hz
• Memory: 32GB DDR4
• OS: Windows 10

Benchmarks

• UserBenchMark

With an outstanding result of 100% in gaming, Predator Helios 500 is obviously capable to run any recent 3D games at high resolutions and ultra level details without a problem. Its 32GB memory is enough to run any games seamlessly, as well as having a great performance during video editings.

• Final Fantasy XV Benchmark

For Final Fantasy XV Benchmark test, we got a decent score of 6784 under 1080p and high-quality graphics settings. The game is able to run smoothly most of the times during the test, only a few short delays occur during scene switching. However, the machine couldn’t get an ideal benchmark result when tested with 4K settings, and this is quite disappointing for us.

• 3D Mark

We got an impressive overall mark of 5729 for the 3D Mark test – 6591 for CPU score and 5600 for GPU score. Predator Helios 500 manages to get 31 to 36 FPS on both graphics test, while on CPU test it manages to get a result of around 22 FPS. We could say that the machine can handle high-graphics video games perfectly.

• PC Mark 10

We tested Predator Helios 500 with PC Mark 10 test too and it gets an amazing score of 5621. It got 7468 on App Start-up Score, while for Digital Content Creation, it got a high score at 7711. Other than using Predator Helios 500 for gaming, we tried using it to edit video as well. During the process of video editing, we do notice a few delays but gladfully the machine has no problem with rendering videos.

Gaming Performance

We tested the machine with a few popular PC games such as Monster Hunter World, Far Cry 5 and PUBG in their best settings. Playing MHW gives us FPS counts between 50-60, while playing Far Cry 5 gives us FPS numbers around 110.

We found out that playing FPS games (eg: PUBG) is really enjoyable on Predator Helios 500, mostly thanks to its 144Hz display. Using the best graphics settings, we can get a stable FPS around 90 without any delays or screen tearing while playing PUBG.

Conclusion

In short, Predator Helios 500 is getting a superb result on gaming performance. With all of these powerful features including Intel Core i9-8950HK Processor, GTX 1070 8GB VRAM GPU and 32GB RAM, you can expect it to run graphics and performance-demanding games seamlessly without a problem. Not to mention that Its design is an eye candy with the blue-lit touchpad, RGB keyboard and a sliver Predator logo at the back.

The only disadvantage of Predator Helios 500 is its massive size and weight, it won’t be easy to bring it around. It is pricey too at RM12999 (2499.99 USD), so you should only consider Predator Helios 500 if you are having a high requirement on gaming laptops and enough budget. You can find more information about the machine at their official site.