Deal | Powerful 18-inch gaming laptop with 64 GB RAM and GeForce RTX 5090 GPU scores $1,000 discount

Courtesy of an ongoing sale over at Best Buy, the RTX 5090-powered Acer Predator Helios 18 can now be purchased with a massive $1,000 discount once again. At just under $3,499, the Helios 18 gaming laptop is in many ways the best that money can buy right now - with a few downsides as well.

The Helios 18 gaming laptop is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU with a whopping 24-cores, bringing impressive multithreaded performance to the table. Our in-depth review of the desktop-replacement laptop tells a promising story, although raw benchmarks reveal CPU performance that is slightly below what one might expect from the Core Ultra 9.

A relatively quiet 18-inch gaming laptop with respectable performance

That said, sustained performance is decent, and the same applies to GPU performance. The Helios 18 once again falls behind the leaders by around 8% or so, as revealed by our testing of the RTX 5080 Laptop-powered variant. Thankfully, fan noise is quieter than the competition. Clearly, folks who demand absolute highest-end performance might be better off with beefier systems, such as the XMG Neo 16.

At the front, the beautiful 18-inch 4K display sports a peak refresh rate of 240 Hz, making it ideal for fast paced gaming. Our review of a different variant with a QHD mini LED panel revealed that gets plenty bright, and covers almost the entire DCI-P3 color gamut. In simpler terms, we found very little room for complaint regarding the display.

The Helios 18 also packs a whopping four SODIMM slots for easy memory upgrades, as well triple M.2 slots for plenty of internal storage. The entire chassis is made from plastic, and sports some nice illumination in certain areas. Finally, the I/O is pretty healthy, featuring a mix of USB-A, USB-C, 10G Ethernet, and even a Thunderbolt 5 port. WiFi 7 handles wireless communication, and is also easily replaceable.