Coffee Lake H Benchmarks And Details Break Cover With Acer Predator Helios 500 Gaming Notebook

Acer has not shied away from offering big and burly desktops for gamers, even if it means attaching a price tag that many people will find cost prohibitive, like the $8,999 Predator X21. A little more sane (a lot more, actually) is the company's upcoming and unannounced Predator Helios 500. This is one of several laptops in the pipeline to incorporate Intel's also-unannounced Coffee Lake-H processors.

The Predator Helios 500 showed up on a Polish retailer's website, and though the listings have since been removed, the Internet has a speculator memory. In this case, there were two configurations shown, one with a Core i7-8750H processor inside and the other wielding a Core i9-8950H. Both are 6-core/12-thread processors, giving users plenty of multi-threaded muscle to throw at workloads.

Based on previous leaks, the Core i7-8750H has a 2.2GHz base clock, 3.9GHz all-core boost clock, and 4.1GHz single-core boost clock, along with 9MB of L3 cache and a 45W TDP. The Core i9-8950H is a beefier processor with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.3GHz all-core boost clock, and 4.8GHz single-core boost. It also has more L3 cache at 12MB, while maintaining the same 45W TDP.


Leaked benchmarks show both of these processors strutting their stuff in Cinebench R15, a particularly demanding benchmark that is tuned to tap into all available processing cores and threads. We need to take these with a grain of salt, of course, especially with the Core i9-8950HK posting the slowest multi-threaded score of the bench. All three are strong scores, though.

So yeah, the Predator Helios 500 means business. This is a 17.3-inch laptop with a Full HD 1080 (1920x1080) display by way of an In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel. This appears to be a gaming oriented screen with G-Sync support and a 144Hz refresh rate, powered by a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. Other features include 16GB of DDR4-2133 RAM and a 256GB M.2 solid state drive (like NVMe, though the listing did not specify between and SATA). For connectivity, it has three USB 3.0 ports, two USB Tyep-C ports with Thunderbolt support, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, a GbE LAN port, and both headphone and microphone jacks.

According to the listings, the Core i9-8950HK model will cost 11,999 PLN (~$3,500 USD), while the Core i7-8750H will run 8,999 PLN (~$2,630).