Helios 300 reclamation

Acer Predator Helios 300 Overheating?

Scroll through any reviews of the Acer Predator Helios 300, and you’ll likely run across someone with stories of major overheating and falling performance.

To see how well the Predator Helios 300 holds up under a load, we cranked up the Unigine Heaven benchmark and let it loop for five hours while monitoring the GPU’s performance clock speeds. Because graphics benchmarks rarely push the CPU hard, we also ran Cinebench using four threads to see how much performance suffered. Cinebench results were consistent, and after five hours, the GPU’s clock speeds remained consistent.

We then let the Predator Helios 300 continue to loop Heaven overnight. In the morning we checked the GPU clocks and Cinebench results, and we found nothing had changed.

Does this mean the that some of the user experiences are invalid? No, but it means our particular unit had no overheating issues. We will say that this isn’t the end of the story. The CPU did occasionally hit its a power limit throttle and thermal limit throttle. Power throttling keeps the CPU within its thermal limit, while thermal throttling means the CPU is bumping right into its thermal limits. Both are indications that the Predator Helios 300 operates right at the margin of its design.