****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I bought this laptop for my Mother to replace a good, but aging, ASUS ROG Strix laptop. Wow! I personally have a 10750H system with 3200 DDR4 (limited to 2933 lol), 2X512GB NVME PCIe 3.0 and an RTX 2070 Super with 8GB VRAM. My system is fast, but this Tiger Lake system is just worlds faster. Why?Pros1. It runs on PCIe 4.0, which was one of the main changes from Comet Lake to Tiger Lake. This means that this laptop reads and writes double what my PCIe 3.0 system does.2. Intel Core i7 11800H. Yes, the processor is locked, but man, this thing is scorching fast. It is an 8 core, 10 nm design and just rolls. I have read many reviews that called Tiger Lake 11900 a waste of money, but many also said that the best performance to money were the 8 core i7's from Tiger Lake. I agree.3. RTX 3060. It should really be the ti version for the price. 6GB is fine for my Mother, but for me, 8GB is the minimum amount. Still, Nvidia Ampere cards are good value and perform well.4. Lit keyboard. Beautiful colors, but again, should be all keys, not just 4 zone.5. Monitor. This is also falling into cons. It is very bright and easy to see. 144hz is more than enough frankly, and it scrolls nice.6. Cooling solution. It is good. Not quite as good as my Predator Triton 500, but much better than that ASUS I spoke of.7. Thunderbolt 4. Good stuff here. A definite upgrade.8. Wifi 6. Also, a major upgrade for Wifi.9. Ease of upgrading. So simple. Just take the screws out of the back and get yourself a set of PC specific plastic pry tools. DO NOT USE METAL SCREDRIVERS! Those will scratch and damage. Once you remove the bottom plate, you have access to everything. You can change RAM, add another SSD, clean the fans, change out the mousepad, on and on. Great design IMO.Cons1. Monitor. Should be Gsync and also, the colors are not as vivid as my Predator Triton 500, which I can't understand. The gamut is very similar so I don't know. Not bad but could be better.2. Should be 32GB of ram. DDR4 is still fine, but I am upgrading from 16 to 32. Many programs just use so much ram: Chrome absolutely sucks up resources.3. Price. Not bad, but should be a little less. I think for this price it should have come with either 32 GB of DDR4, or that 3060 Ti.4. Storage is not great. For some it is fine. If you game, you need to add a 2nd SSD. 512 GB is not good when you consider how big games are now. Luckily it does have a spot for a 2nd SSD, so that is simple.5. Loud fans. Doesn't bother me, but it might bother some. They can be loud when under load, but you can control this using the Acer PredatorSense App.SUMMARYMostly good value. I think the Tiger Lake CPU is scorching fast paired with the Samsung NVME running on PCIe 4.0. The screen is nice at 144hz. The keyboard types well, and the cooling keeps the system at a safe temp. Granted, Tiger Lake chips can go to 100 C, but that is too hot. Should have come with a slightly better GPU for the price. Either a 3060 Ti or maybe a regular 3070 for example. Cheap and simple to do the RAM upgrade as well. I recommend this one for a gamer, or an average user. It will surprise you if you are coming from an 8th-10th generation Intel Chip, or maybe AM1-AM3 from AMD.
