 |
| Acer Predator Helios 300 |
The Acer Predator Helios 300 is widely considered to be one of the best midrange gaming laptops in the market today, offering a class-leading performance, great thermals, and sleek design. In the US, the configuration with a 15.6 inches 144 Hz IPS Display, Intel Core i7-9750H Six-Core CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU, 16 GB RAM, and 256 GB PCIe SSD is sold only for $1,100, making it one of the best value gaming laptops in the US. However, in the Philippines, the closest configuration comes at P83,000 or about $1,600. Electronics being more expensive in the Philippines is nothing new. But paying almost 50% more for just about the same laptop model is pretty absurd. Thankfully, most Acer laptops get discounted frequently in the Philippines, and the Acer Predator Helios 300 is no exception.
Trinika Computers is having a big sale and offers huge discounts on many Helios 300 configurations (see listing here). The configuration normally sold at P83,000 can be had for P76,995 or about $1,500, which is a lot more tolerable but is still pretty steep. The one that really caught my attention though and the one I recommend is the cheapest configuration with a 120 Hz IPS Display, Intel Core i5-9300H Quad-Core CPU, Nvidia Geforce RTX 2060 GPU(!), 4 GB RAM (with an additional 8 GB for a total of 12 GB) and 1 TB HDD which can be had for only P58,995 ( about $1,150) from the usual P64,000 (about $1,250). There are a few things that I would like to point out about this configuration. First is that it packs a more powerful GPU (RTX 2060) than some of the more expensive GTX 1660 Ti configurations, which means that it would more likely fare better in GPU heavy games. Secondly, the powerful GPU is paired with a Core i5-9300H (a stepdown from the i7-9750H) which can bottleneck the RTX 2060 in some CPU intensive games. The last point is that both the RAM and storage are skimped. The RAM is only 4 GB, but Trinika adds a free 8 GB stick for a total of 12 GB. I would still recommend swapping the 4 GB stick for an 8 GB one for a matched dual-channel configuration. The storage is only HDD but adding a PCIe SSD is really easy and I really recommend doing so.
Sources:
Amazon
Villman
Trinika Computers
Comments
Post a Comment