Acer’s super-slim Predator Triton 14 AI impressed me with its gaming power

Introduction

The Predator Triton 14 AI is a ultraportable gaming laptop that does things a little differently. Acer was first in line to drop one of Intel’s power-efficient Lunar Lake processors inside, rather than an H-class Core Ultra (or AMD equivalent). It’s also hoping to court creators as well as gamers with features like stylus support – of a sort – and Studio-grade drivers for its Nvidia GPU.

A dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) qualifies the Triton for Copilot+ PC status, and its sleek styling makes it arguably one of Acer’s best looking laptops in years – gaming or otherwise. Being a slender 17.3mm at its thickest point certainly helps. But it’s the RTX 5070 graphics chip and high resolution OLED display that’ll pique gamers’ interests the most.

It lands in Europe and the UK first for £2700/€2999, with no word on US availability being likely due to volatility around tariffs. That puts it squarely up against the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and Razer Blade 14, which have AMD internals. Could some added creator credentials make the Acer the best of the three?

Design & build: majors on minimalism

The 1.58kg Predator Triton 14 AI is a world away from the brash and bulky styling I’m used to seeing from gaming laptops. Acer has shown real restraint, with just an etched Predator logo on the lid and Triton branding on the brushed metal screen hinge. OK, so the way the lid lights up with RGB illumination slightly gives the game away, but this is still a machine you can use in public without everyone assuming you’re mid-multiplayer match.

The whole thing is machined from aluminium, with a gunmetal finish that looks particularly mean. It’s more incognito than the Asus Zephyrus’ silver finish and strobing lid LED, for sure. I wouldn’t say the anti-fingerprint coating Acer has applied is 100% effective, but it’s not like I was having to polish away smears and smudges after every use. It’s wonderfully sturdy, with very little flex to the keyboard tray and a screen that’ll hold pretty much any viewing angle you want, but with a hinge light enough I could open it with a single finger.

There’s a decent selection of ports at the sides, including a full-size HDMI video out, two USB 3.2 Type-As, and two USB 3.2 Type-Cs. One of the latter doubles as a Thunderbolt 4 port, and there’s also a 3.5mm headset port and MicroSD card reader. MicroSD won’t appeal to everyone, but creators with drones and action cameras will appreciate its inclusion. It’s a shame there’s nowhere on board to store the included stylus, but not a surprise given how slender the laptop is otherwise.

Compact dimensions aren’t the only reason this is an ideal machine for travel. The power brick is about a third the size and weight of a typical gaming notebook’s, and it can refuel over USB-C if you have a potent enough plug handy (just keep in mind only the included adapter will provide enough juice to run the GPU at full thrust).

Acer went with a Windows Hello-ready webcam instead of a fingerprint sensor; there’s no privacy slider or shutter, but I do like how it cane automatically lock the laptop when you walk away from it, or dim the screen when you look elsewhere so no-one can watch your working from over your shoulder.

Inside, the palm rest made entirely from glass marks the Triton 14 AI out from its unibody metal rivals. I really like how the touchpad essentially disappears until you go to use it, with two glossy strips lighting up in white to make it obvious which part of the glass will recognise your taps and swipes.

Keyboard & touchpad: art of glass

The sizeable touchpad uses haptic feedback, which is an unusual inclusion; most gaming laptops stick with physical clicks. You can adjust the strength of the vibrations – though I thought they were well-judged at the defaults – and it makes the Triton feel more like a premium ultraportable than a gaming machine while you’re navigating the Windows desktop.

This is also where you’ll be doodling using the bundled stylus; while the screen is touch-sensitive, it only recognises your fingers. The touchpad can pick up 4096 pressure levels, and the addition of haptics makes for quite the convincing sensation of drawing on paper. Creative sorts will love it.

I wish the keyboard didn’t default to a rainbow assault on the senses whenever you turn the laptop on. The per-key illumination is customisable through Acer’s software if you want something a little more subtle, but I couldn’t find a way to set specific colours for the animated profiles, so ended up sticking with static colour. Light coverage is excellent on every key, at least.

The keys themselves have a decent amount of travel for an ultraportable laptop, with a crisp action and springy feel that meant I was typing at full speed in no time at all. The island-style layout doesn’t feel at all cramped, and only the up and down arrow keys have been made half height in order to fit. I appreciated a dedicated button above the function row, for quickly toggling between power modes without having to open Acer’s customisation app every time I wanted maximum gaming power – or to silence the fans when web browsing.

Screen & sound: all about OLED

The Triton 14 AI’s 14.5in screen will be a highlight for both gamers and creative types. Skinny bezels on all four sides put all the focus on the simply gorgeous OLED panel, which pops with impactful colours and deep, inky blacks. Contrast is impeccable, and viewing angles are superb as well. Handy, as the glossy finish means it’s very reflective. It’s also quick to pick up fingerprints, so I largely avoided using the touchscreen.

This isn’t the brightest laptop screen around, so I did sometimes struggle to spot details in darker areas of games when playing in a brightly lit room – but at night, Doom: The Dark Ages‘ bloodstained hellscapes looked stunning. Regular desktop use posed no problems during daylight hours, and the 16:10 aspect ratio is ideal for side-by-side working on multiple documents.

I’m in two minds about the 2880×1800 resolution. It’s wonderfully crisp and ideal for image editing, with a serious amount of detail squeezed into a small screen size – but it’s also asking a lot from the Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU, which only has 8GB of dedicated VRAM. Games with massive texture pools essentially demand DLSS upscaling even if you don’t plan on using demanding ray tracing effects. More on that in the performance section below.

The 120Hz refresh rate is suitably speedy, with OLED’s inherently rapid response times preventing any kind of ghosting, but there’s no G-Sync or variable refresh support here. That’s a bit of a blow for games that can’t quite hit the magic 60fps mark – though admittedly those were few and far between during my testing, once DLSS and frame generation were enabled.

Acer has done well to squeeze a lot of sound out of the Triton’s six speaker setup; they get impressively loud, the vocal range is clear, and there’s even a moderate amount of bass. I still preferred headphones for gaming, but you can certainly get by without a pair for movies and music here.

Performance & battery life: the main event

With Intel’s ‘Lunar Lake’ Core Ultra 9 288V running the show, the Predator Triton 14 AI treads the line between ultraportable efficiency and gaming grunt. It has two thirds fewer cores than the Predator Helios Neo 16 AI I reviewed recently, split between four performance cores and four efficiency cores; the former can officially nudge 5.1GHz when thermals allow.

Acer has given it the best opportunity to do so, being the first gaming laptop with graphene thermal interface material (TIM) – improving heat transfer compared to traditional thermal paste. There’s also a vapour chamber inside, and two of the firm’s Aeroblade fans, which have super-slim 0.05mm metal blades for maximum blowing power.

Elsewhere the Triton is packing 32GB of RAM (which is soldered directly to the motherboard, so don’t plan on upgrading later) and 1TB of NVMe SSD storage. The combo puts in a strong showing on the Windows desktop, being evenly matched in single-core tasks to the larger Razer Blade 16 and its AMD Ryzen 9 AI 365 chipset. It falls a bit behind in multi-core, but wins back some ground in tests that favour Intel’s hardware. For daily duties it was always responsive, even when churning through high resolution image edits in Photoshop.

The Ultra 9 chip’s neural processing unit (NPU) also has up to 48 TOPS for powering through AI-based tasks, though my tests suggest it’s 40% slower than an HX-class processor you’d find in larger 16in laptops.

This CPU is a lot more efficient than Intel’s HX-class chips, which helps the Triton last a respectable length away from the mains – as long as you’re not calling the dedicated GPU into action. With the integrated Arc graphics handling Windows, I saw over seven hours of video playback at half brightness. That’s a pretty good showing for a 76Whr battery and an OLED screen, even if the AMD-powered Razer Blade 14 lasts slightly longer.

Acer Predator Triton 14 AI productivity benchmark scores
Geekbench 6 single-core	2796
Geekbench 6 multi-core	11143
Geekbench AI	6244

It’s gaming where the Triton 14 AI gets interesting. It’s the first laptop I’ve tried with a vanilla RTX 5070 GPU, rather than the more potent 5070 Ti; Acer can deliver it up to 95W of power in Turbo mode, which is plenty for such a skinny machine, but its 8GB of dedicated video memory is a little on the low side.

In older games this isn’t a big deal. Gears Tactics managed a smooth 78fps at the laptop’s native resolution with every detail maxed out, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider hit 79fps as long as ray traced shadows were disabled. Cyberpunk 2077 is a lot more demanding, managing 41.4fps at Ultra details without any kind of ray tracing.

DLSS upscaling really comes into its own here, with multi-frame generation taking the frame rate to a heady 148.1fps. Importantly it feels smooth and objects don’t shimmer like previous versions of DLSS would, so there’s very little reason not to use it.

Ray tracing is asking a lot of this GPU, with Cyberpunk’s RT Overdrive preset being a slideshow at native resolution and struggling to nudge north of 40fps even with DLSS working at its hardest. An RTX 5080 and its extra memory represents a significant step up here, though laptops with this chip are much larger – and more expensive.

Acer Predator Triton 14 AI gaming benchmark scores	Native rendering (2880×1800)	DLSS upscaling
3DMark Steel Nomad	2901	N/A
Gears Tactics	78.1fps	N/A
Cyberpunk 2077 (RT Overdrive)	2.8fps	40.3fps
Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, RT off)	41.4fps	148.1fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (RT on)	48fps	77fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (RT off)	79fps	101fps

While the Triton manages to keep its GPU temperatures tamed in games enough that frame rates didn’t fluctuate, its fans do get very loud in the process. This is the real reason you’ll want to wear headphones when doing anything that taxes the hardware.

Acer Predator Triton 14 AI verdict

After two weeks of testing, the Predator Triton 14 AI feels more like a gaming laptop with some creator-friendly extras to me than a machine meant to please both camps.

The stylus is a neat inclusion, and only being able to use it on the glass touchpad doesn’t feel like a major restriction. The stability Nvidia Studio drivers promise sounds niche, but could be a boon over rival gaming laptops for those that need it. For those that don’t, it pushes the price up over Acer’s main rivals, making it just a little harder to recommend in spite of the gorgeous screen.

The GPU is as quick as you’ll find in a laptop so thin and light, but isn’t the perfect soulmate for that high display resolution and requires some pretty loud cooling. If portability isn’t your top concern you’ll definitely get more oomph from a 16in model – and probably pay less for it too. But if you want a powerful laptop you can lug pretty much anywhere, this is an excellent choice.

Acer Predator Triton 14 AI technical specifications

Screen	14.5in, 2880×1800 AMOLED w/ 120Hz
Processor	Intel Core Ultra 9 288V
Memory	32GB RAM
Graphics	Nvidia RTX 5070 Laptop
Storage	1TB SSD
Operating system	Windows 11
Connectivity	2x USB-C, 2x USB, HDMI, microSD card reader, 3.5mm headphone port
Battery	76 Wh
Dimensions	320x221x17.3mm, 1.6kg