Acer Predator Triton 14 AI Review: There Are Few Laptops as ‘Cool’ as This One

Damn, I feel cool. I feel cool in the abstract sense, and I don’t know how to accurately define this feeling from the perspective of a gadget-obsessed nerd plugging away at a review product like I do any day of the week. But I’m currently laid up with the Acer Predator Triton 14 AI on my knee, listening to John Coltrane put his soul into his sax, feeling like a smooth operator with every key, with a stylus shoved between my thumb and ring finger like a 1950s novelist about to take a drag from a cigarette. The gaming laptop has just enough of everything I want from a portable machine. It’s light, pretty, and relatively powerful—and, beyond all that, it has a sleek, seamless haptic trackpad and ultrabright RGB keys. The next person to come along and tell me RGB is a worthless expense can go ahead and tell it to the Predator Triton’s mini LED per-key backlit keyboard. It’s bright and fits the theme of this laptop—much like the system itself, it’s full of small surprises.

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The Predator is arriving at the tail end of 2025, a time when most big laptop launches have already come and gone. What’s more, it’s on the expensive end of 14-inch gaming laptops with these specs, demanding $2,500 for a system that may be overshadowed in just a few months when the next slate of next-gen CPUs arrives. Not only that, but it arrives just short of being the perfect “everything†laptop. Performance isn’t quite on par with that of similar clamshells of this size. Battery life won’t match the “all-day†span you can find among recent thin devices, from Apple’s M-series MacBooks to all those AMD, Intel, or Qualcomm devices that aren’t running a discrete GPU under the hood.

But those competing laptops don’t have a trackpad that also acts as a drawing pad for the included stylus, plus a touch screen. You pay more for unique qualities, and when the Predator Triton works so well, it becomes easier to overlook any flaws and—yes—even that price. There are more affordable options on the market that deliver a solid gaming experience—but feeling cool often requires spending more.

Sometimes, good design means stealing from the best

As soon as you unbox the Acer Predator Triton’s frame, you’ll quickly realize how sturdy this miniature beast feels in your hand. There’s very little flex on the lid or keyboard. Only when you press hard, directly in the center of the device, will you notice any bend whatsoever. That’s significant considering how light it is. The unit weighs just 1.6 kg, or around 3.5 pounds, equivalent to two and a half hardcover books. When you have that in hand, it doesn’t have any real heft thanks to its small size. Sure, it’s heavier than the best thin and light commercial notebooks, such as the Asus Zenbook S14, but in the end, you’re getting a rough-and-tumble design that will even resist the most overt smudges you find on most black-colored tech.

There are other things going on under the hood that set this device apart. It’s sporting a graphene-based thermal interface on the CPU rather than more traditional thermal paste. Acer promised this would improve thermal conductivity and enhance the device’s heat dissipation. The little laptop can get warm around the palm rests, but with the fan on the auto cooling profile, I never felt uncomfortable, even with my finger pressed closest to the screen and near the exhaust vents. Otherwise, you have a standard slate of ports, including HDMI, two USB-A 3.2 slots, one Thunderbolt 4 slot, and another USB-4 port for DC power. There’s an additional headphone jack and a microSD card slot that will prove handy for some creators, though I will remain wistful for a full SD card slot on a 14-inch Windows laptop, like the one my 14-inch MacBook Pro has.

Another prominent feature that sets the Predator Triton apart is its seamless haptic touchpad. It’s extra-large and stretches from the bottom edge of the laptop to the keyboard. There’s no bevel; instead, it relies on two LED strips to designate the cut-off point between the palm rests. I can’t physically tell what is and isn’t touchpad. There’s no physical “click†either: Instead, the middle portion is pressure-sensitive and provides force feedback. But I never found myself swiping where I wasn’t supposed to, unlike with the notorious Dell Pro Premium—the laptop formerly known as the XPS 13—which also lacks any barrier to mark where the touchpad starts and ends.

Acer borrowed heavily from Asus in designing its Predator Triton 14 AI. This laptop, from the keyboard to the thick, sturdy shell, resembles the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, down to the key layout and the lack of replaceable RAM (it’s built into the Intel Core Ultra 288V chip). The Zephyrus was one of the best shells from last year, so much so that the company reused it with its most recent ProArt designs, built with creatives in mind. This year’s G14 redux, with the higher-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU, is $100 cheaper than Acer’s new RTX 5070 SKU. Still, if I had to give the nod to either Asus or Acer, the Predator Triton has taken the win thanks to that haptic trackpad.

The Corning Gorilla Glass is smooth to use. I also didn’t have as many issues of palm rejection—where the laptop registers the mouse pointer when typing on the keyboard—as I do on other laptops with physical touchpads. The keyboard’s flat keys with 1.7mm of key travel also kept me feeling like a smooth operator. There’s enough of a clicky sensation with every push and enough separation between keys that I didn’t worry I could lose my place if I wasn’t paying attention. I also have to recognize the per-key RGB. The lights seem extra bright and remain clear even when I’m sitting next to a window. Combined, it all makes for the kind of experience the partitioned gamer component of my brain adores.

If you’re not here for the RGB and would rather turn it off, you can. You won’t be able to do the same with the haptic touchpad or the obvious Acer Predator logos stenciled into the palm rest and laptop lid. However, there’s a big reason this laptop is designed like it is.

Don’t forget your stylus… seriously, don’t.

The haptic touchpad acts like a drawing pad for a compatible stylus with the MPP 2.5 protocol. The box comes with Acer’s own Active Stylus, but you may have already noticed from the pictures that there’s no slot on the laptop where you can stick it. There’s no magnetic attachment, either. You’ll have to remember to stick the stylus back in your bag—preferably in your backpack, if it has a pencil holder—and hope you don’t forget it at your table at Starbucks.

Yes, the laptop has a touchscreen, but the stylus will not work on anything but the trackpad. If you were looking for a 2-in-1 laptop or tablet-like experience, this isn’t it. I tried out the pen in apps like Photoshop, where the trackpad essentially acts as a scaled version of your canvas. Positioning the tip above the trackpad indicates where you are on the canvas. However, this hover function sometimes didn’t work, and I would jab down on the wrong part of the picture. This could make selecting specific parts of the image more difficult than simply clicking with a mouse. However, once you master using the stylus as a faux pen, it starts to feel incredible. The stylus has tilt support and 4,096 pressure levels. Having the option to draw on the trackpad rather than the screen meant I could press the pen as hard as I needed without fear of damaging the display.

I’m no artist, so I couldn’t tell you how useful it may be when your drawing surface is barely any larger than your iPhone screen. The pen runs on a single AAA battery, with an estimated 12 months of life before you need to replace the cell. Unlike a device like the Apple Pencil Pro, there are no on-pen controls to make sure you don’t have to swap between your mouse and pen to select a new tool. This laptop’s pen situation will offer different strokes for different folks. If you want an all-in-one laptop and drawing pad, I can’t think of a better alternative than the Predator Triton 14 AI.

Don’t expect the most premium gaming experience

If I were judging the Acer Triton 14 AI purely on its gaming performance, it would come up short compared to recent laptops like the Razer Blade 14. Thankfully, the performance delta isn’t enough for me to say everyone should go out and grab a different device for a similar price—that may depend on the apps you expect to run. If the one thing you care about is in-game performance with the supported Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU, then there are other devices of similar scale that will perform better.

The last gaming-ready 14-inch laptop I reviewed was the Razer Blade 14. That device costs $2,700 without any discount, though it regularly sells for less. Compared to that slim gaming machine, the Predator is a loud beast that can’t quite keep up with Razer’s gazelle-like speeds. The Predator Triton uses the same RTX 5070 GPU with 32 GB of RAM, though instead of AMD, it’s one of the few laptops bearing Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V. It’s one of Intel’s Lunar Lake devices that promised strong performance with excellent battery life in lightweight laptops, though few, if any, sported the top-end SKU. It has the same eight-core configuration as the more ubiquitous Core Ultra 7 258V (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), but with a higher 5.1GHz clock speed and 30W power draw.

Finally getting the long-awaited Intel Core Ultra 9 288V in my hands proved underwhelming. On both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024, the Lunar Lake chip underperformed the Blade 14’s AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, especially in multi-core tests. That makes sense, considering that 10-core CPU has a possible TDP up to 54W. On the Turbo power profile, with the CPU overclocked, the system hit 10,704 points compared to the Blade 14’s 14,949. On Cinebench, which measures how well the CPU handles graphics, the system scored a 636 in multi-core compared to the Ryzen AI 9 365’s 1074.

The Core Ultra 9 288V is a lightweight laptop chip with a 30W envelope that can’t reach the heights of CPUs designed for gaming laptops. Intel’s Arrow Lake-H series has proved fairly strong across the many 16- and 18-inch laptops I’ve used this year. A 14-inch chassis will necessarily limit its performance in some apps. In our Blender tests, which measure how long it takes to render a BMW scene on both the CPU and GPU, the Intel chip took 3 minutes and 50 seconds, compared to just over 1 minute for the 16-inch Lenovo Legion Pro 7i with its Intel Core Ultra 275HX chip.

On several 3DMark graphics benchmarks, the Predator RTX 5070 and Intel Core Ultra 9 were a few hundred points below the Razer Blade 14 in all but the classic Time Spy test. On gaming benchmarks, that equated to a difference of around 3-5 fps, depending on the title. In Cyberpunk 2077, at the max 2,880 by 1,800 resolution and Ultra settings without ray tracing, the laptop could net around 41 fps. At max resolution with all the ray tracing enabled to make Night City glow with more realistic lighting, you can technically achieve at least 35 fps with DLSS upscaling set to auto.

It’s a similar story in games like Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered and Black Myth Wukong, where, at max resolution and with no frame gen, you can squeak by at just over 30 fps on the highest settings. The ceiling for an RTX 5070 and an Intel Core CPU may be lower than what you want, despite the asking price. I could barely make Marvel’s Spider-Man 2—which, to be fair, is notoriously hard on the GPU, especially with ray tracing enabled—playable at medium settings with DLSS enabled. Meanwhile, in Baldur’s Gate III, I found I could easily hit 60 fps in most settings without even needing to use DLSS, thanks to the latest updates.

All these trials were performed on the maxed-out Turbo performance setting in Acer’s PredatorSense software, which made the fans kick up such a racket that I felt like the laptop was about to VTOL off my desk and fly into the ceiling. It was so loud I could barely hear the game audio. Sticking to the lower power profiles will be good enough for most of those same games I described before, with a difference of a few fps, at most.

Being that it has a Lunar Lake CPU, the Triton qualifies as a Copilot+ PC, which ostensibly means you get access to all of last year’s AI features. That includes Recall, should you dare to let Microsoft screenshot almost everything you do on your PC. The NPU, or neural processing unit, central to this type of PC, isn’t anywhere close to the end-all, be-all. Again, this splits the difference between a creative-focused and a gaming-focused laptop. Luckily, I found the battery could make up for some of the limited performance, even if few current gaming-ready laptops with the latest RTX 50-series GPUs will offer true “all-day†battery life.

Better battery than most, but not an ‘all-day’ device

The Acer Predator Triton 14 AI is extremely portable for a gaming laptop. The device fit snugly into any backpack I threw it into, and it doesn’t require a proprietary charger. The accompanying 140W power brick was small enough that I could wrap it up and tuck it up into the bottom of my bag without much consideration to how much heft I had to bring to and from work.

Such a small brick is a nice change of pace after lugging around the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i’s 400W power brick—the most brick-like of any power adapter I’ve used. However, the device’s limited power draw is indicative of its overall performance. Like most traditional gaming laptops, the Predator Triton 14 will not last you from dawn till dusk. On Balanced power settings, I managed a maximum of 3 hours of battery life in general use. I was able to get close to 30 minutes more when I put the device on Quiet power settings and turned off all RGB lighting.

If you’re using this device on the go, you’ll need the charger with you. That’s the same story for every 2025 gaming laptop, and at least Acer’s device is far less cumbersome than other options.

Great screen, and (sometimes) good sound

When you use as many laptops as I do, coming back to an OLED display is like rubbing the sleep from your eyes every morning, thinking, “Oh, right, this is how things are supposed to look.†OLED, which stands for organic light-emitting diode, offers deeper black levels and better contrast than more traditional LCD screens.

The Acer Predator Triton’s panel offers a 120Hz refresh rate and a claimed peak brightness of 340 nits. OLED displays are notoriously dimmer than others, but you’ll find this one bright enough, indoors, for most use cases. Even hanging out near a window in full daylight, I wasn’t disturbed from my perch. When you go outside, that’s when you’ll start to see the visuals start to dim. At least the screen isn’t as glossy as those of some recent Lenovo devices I’ve used, and it wasn’t reflective to the point that I had to angle myself just to read my own text.

If you were hoping this laptop would be a full audio-visual suite for all your work, the Predator Triton’s sound quality does punch above its small stature. However, I wouldn’t say it’s anywhere near the perfect audio specimen. It sports six speakers, four downward-firing and two on the side. It’s the downward speakers that let it down the most. If you’re working on a table or desk, the noise becomes more muffled than it is if you’re holding it aloft. It creates an awkward echo effect that won’t occur when you’re using the laptop on your lap.

The device can get rather loud in a confined space if you turn up the volume. The overall experience feels balanced, for the most part. The one area where it starts to sound sharp is in the highs. If you listen to the crackle in the opening video of Cyberpunk 2077, you’ll start to identify when it’s a little too much. The device also comes packed with DTS: X Ultra software, with settings for various types of games. This can enable a small sense of spatial audio in some supported games, but the effect will be less reliable than you’d achieve with a good pair of headphones.

One more thing: Excellent display aside, this is still Acer we’re talking about, and the system itself comes preloaded with an obnoxious amount of annoying and intrusive bloatware, such as Acer’s Planet9, Acer Assist on Store, Acer QuickPanel, and on and on. It doesn’t help that Windows 11’s most recent update has ballooned the number of Copilot AI apps vying for your attention. Running the machine for the first time was like opening up a beautifully wrapped present on Christmas and needing to dig through 15 layers of bubble wrap, old newspaper, and expired coupons to get to the good stuff beneath.

Is the Predator Triton 14 the ‘everything laptop?’

I keep imagining the “everything laptop,†something that can handle everything well, from work to creative tasks to gaming. I can’t imagine anything that would look far off from the Acer Predator Triton AI 14—at least, as long as you have its power brick nearby and easy access to an outlet.

The product’s flaws don’t detract much from the overall experience. Even if performance may not be up to par with other devices at similar price points, I still prefer the other unique benefits Acer’s latest brings to the table. Or at least I will, until Acer decides to stick a Panther Lake chip in this thing and figures out how to give it all-day battery life. At that point, it may truly strike gold.