Horizon

1 ACER PREDATOR HELIOS 500

• £4,000, acer.com

Let’s start with a question: why on earth would Acer choose to dub its ultra-premium laptop Helios? The ancient Greek sun god is not, by any means, the deity anyone wants brought to mind in the context of a bundle of top-of-theline components crammed into a stiflingly small space. This is particularly true here, because Acer has brought its VortexFlow cooling to the party, which should keep the monstrous RTX 3080 graphics and overclockable Intel Core i9-11980HK plenty frigid. Perhaps next time invoke the name of Boreas, the bringer of the cold north wind? We’ll give you that one for free, guys.

There’s an arm-long list of killer features alongside that core package including, er, Intel Killer Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6, as well as a pair of NVMe SSDs running in RAID 0, a separate spinning drive for mass storage, DTX:Ultra audio and a ludicrous-even-in-this-context 64GB DDR4 3200 RAM. This is portable PC gaming done to the extreme.

A real heavy hitter, then, but those internals don’t