Glory days for gamers and graphics

PACKED WITH power and ready to crunch data and generate complex imagery, Acer’s Predator G9 laptop is great for gamers and anyone learning about computer graphics.
The notebook is sleekly designed, lovely to look at and yet still rugged in its performance. The sound system is impressive, enhancing game play and movie watching.
The body is brushed aluminium alloy, black with red accents with a large logo in red LED lights on the black of the lid. Even the exhaust vents at the rear look cool in their red and black livery.
Acer categorises its Predator series as “premium” and they’re all powerful, from the desktop models and laptops to the peripherals like the advanced monitors.

That might earn a testimonial last month from the School of Digital Media at Sripatum University, which bought more than 80 Predator G3s and monitors. The school wants to become an Asian hub for producing digital content, and this purchase makes it the Asia-Pacific region’s first computer lab to embrace the Predator line.
I got to try out the G9-591-77FN, “merely” the entry-level Predator G9 notebook, but even so was blown away by the power and the |performance.
The 77FN gets its super-strength from a sixth-generation Intel Core i7-6700HQ quad-core processor running at 2.66GHZ. You have a generous 16 gigabytes of working memory (RAM), so there are no delays in number-crunching, plus another terabyte on the hard drive. The speed of transfer from storage to working memory is further enhanced with a fast 128GB SSD (Solid State Drive) serving as the bridge.
The display is 15.6-inch IPS Full HD LED at 1920x1080-pixel resolution. The graphics horsepower comes from an Nvidia GeForce GTX970M with 3GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory.

This is why 3D rendering for games and graphics seem to fly. Nvidia says the GTX970M has 1,280 CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores set out in parallel to hammer out the numbers. The memory clock is 2,500MHz and a memory bandwidth of 120GB per second, both blazingly fast statistics.
At this pace, with a Core i7 and speedy GPU (graphics processing unit) like the GTX970M, you’re going to generate a lot of worrisome heat that will gradually slow performance. But the Predator is designed to dissipate that heat with three fans and an unusual ventilation system.
Two of the fans are at the back of the chassis. If you spend hours playing 3D-intensive games or using other power-hungry applications, you can easily swap the DVD drive with a Cooler Master fan.
Ventilation is dust-proof thanks to the Predator DustDefender, which uses alternating airflow directions, and the AeroBlade, an ultra-thin all-metal fan with advanced aerodynamics that stops dust from building up inside.
Sound-wise, the Predator 77FN is a marvel, with two speakers and a subwoofer and Dolby Audio providing a genuinely immersive experience. The Dolby Audio has options for games, movies or just listening to music.
With a good pair of headphones it gets even better, because there’s a built-in 600-ohm amplifier for them. Even the headphones packaged with the notebook sound pretty good through the amp.
Connections are fast via the 802.11ac wireless and 1GB LAN. You have Killer DoubleShot Pro technology for preventing lag time during game play. It lets you connect to both an LAN line and a Wi-Fi router simultaneously.
There’s a button just for activating PredatorSense to get access to the gaming features, such as keyboard macro profiles that can be switched around mid-game.

PredatorSense also lets you adjust keyboard lighting. You start out with red back-lighting and the numeric keys in blue, but there are some 16 million colours to choose from and customise.
You’re running on Windows 10 Home 64-bit. I thought the laptop started up very fast and has no problems running business applications like Microsoft Office, graphics applications and video clips.
I tested the graphics performance by playing a demo of the game Unreal 4. The 3D graphics were gorgeous, the texture highly detailed and the colours vivid.
The Predator G9-591-77FN has a suggested retail price of Bt59,900, including VAT.

Key Specs
- Operating system: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
- CPU: Sixth-generation Intel Core i7-6700HQ 2.6GHz processor
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX970M with 3GB DDR5 memory
- RAM: 16GB DDR4 memory
- Storage: 128 SSD plus 1TB hard drive
- Optical drive: DVD writer
- Display: 15.6-inch IPS Full HD LED
- Ports: Four USB 3.0, one HDMI, one DisplayPort, one Thunderbolt 3 (USB Type-C), one SD card slot
- Connection: 802.11ac, 1G LAN
- Battery: Eight-cel Lithium Ion 6,000 mAh
- Dimensions: 38.5x391x299.5mm
- Weight: 3.40 kilograms