scavengers said:

"AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Desktop Processor, AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Graphics"

This is the description on the Amazon website of this laptop. I installed and used a number of monitoring programs while I was looking for a answer to the problem I was having that I listed above.
Finally something caught my eye. Every program I used reported power consumption of 120 watts.
Issue solved. Acer listed the GPU as "AMD Radeon RX Vega 56". The gpu is actually a AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 Mobile.
The desktop Vega 56 is rated at 210 watts, while the mobile part is listed at 120 watts.

Never would I even have considered buying a near $2000 laptop that would sometimes perform below the GTX 1060. And mine does.

Last for now. Im guessing that this is why that Acer's own store page lists nothing as far as the Video card in this $2000 laptop:

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/predator-model/NH.Q3GAA.001

Something is wrong if it's at 1060 level.  It should be at 1080 maxq level based on benchmarks.

Like I said, you can use wattman to lock the clocks if you want to but it doesn't do much.  If it's clocking much below what you have set in afterburner, that generally means you are CPU limited in that game or you are hitting temp/wattage limits (which it shouldn't very often).  Make sure you are using balanced performance, NOT high performance mode as this will limit your cpu boost clocks.

If you want it locked at 1360, go into radeon settings, global settings, wattman and then check minimum performance state to p7.  This will lock the clocks at near your max boost set in Afterburner.  It locks mine at 1425/950, but like I said, results in little to no performance difference as it only needs those boost clocks when there are no CPU limits, which unfortunately is not very often unless you have your cpu set up to boost properly.  If you set it in high performance mode, it will lock the cpu at 3.4ghz instead of letting it boost up to 4.1ghz.

I've used Ryzen master to set my CPU to 4ghz all core and Afterburner to set my v56 to 1450/950 (resulting in ~1425mhz boost clocks).  It absolutely flies with these settings, much faster than a 1060 and approaching my 2700x/gtx1080 desktop in some games.  These are the limits of what my system can do, it crashes under load at 4.1ghz and the v56 hits it's 120W limit with any higher clocks.  That said, I'm not sure there's another laptop out there that can touch it performance wise, exception possibly being some brand new 2080 maxq ones that cost 3k plus.

Does the amd helios outperform gtx intel version?

ercioo said:

Does the amd helios outperform gtx intel version?

In gaming in sure it goes back and forth depending on optimizations. 

I purchased as a mobile creation station and it's absolutely *****!! Pulled the factory RAM, and stuffed with 64g, a 2tb 2.5ssd and a 1tb m.2. 

I do wish the second m.2 was Nvme, but obviously far from a deal breaker.