New Acer Predator Helios 18 and Acer Predator Helios 16 variants spotted online with eye-watering price tags

Acer was one of the many OEMs to join the 18-inch gaming laptop club last year. Our review deemed the Predator Helios 18 (US$2,500 on Best Buy) to be an excellent desktop replacement, praising its luminescent micro LED panel and blazing-fast Intel Core i9-13900HX. Its sky-high price tag puts it beyond the reach of most gamers, but Acer thinks that it is worthy of a successor, which may debut at CES 2024.

Amazon UK has two Acer Predator Helios variants listed ahead of time. The first one (Acer Predator Helios 18 PH18-72) has an 18-inch WQXGA ( 2560×1600) IPS screen clocked at 240Hz and a £3,200 (US$4,057) price tag, while the second (Acer Predator Helios 16 PH16-72) has a mini LED panel with a 250 Hz refresh rate and costs £2,800 (US$3,550).

Specs-wise, the Acer Predator Helios 18 and Acer Predator Helios 16 are powered by an Intel Core i9-14900HX Raptor Lake refresh processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card. The 18-inch variant packs 32 GB of memory and a 2 TB SSD, while the 16-inch version cuts it to 18 GB and 1 TB. Unfortunately, the listing does not reveal other specs, which is to be expected from an unreleased product.

A previous Geekbench listing shed light on the Acer Predator Helios 16 variant with 32 GB of DDR5 5600 RAM. Its Core i9-14900HX processor performs on par with the Core i9-13980HX from last year, which, all things considered, is acceptable for a mid-cycle refresh.