For those wondering about the 1080 Max-Q laptops and how they perform, I thought I'd share my own little review of the Acer Triton 700.
I bought it mid November 2017, and have been using it as my main gaming platform since.
Quick specs:
15.6" FHD IPS Acer ComfyView™ 120 Hz GSYNC
Intel Core i7-7700HQ
32GB DDR4 RAM (2x16GB @2667Mhz)
2x 256GB SSD (RAID 0)
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 (Max-Q) 8GB
802.11ac + BT
HD Camera with 2Mic
Dual AeroBlade 3D CoolBoost fan
Backlit RGB mechanical keyboard
Thunderbolt 3
Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Size: H1.89cm x W39.3cm x D26.6cm/H0.74" x W15.5" x D10.5"
Weight: 2.45kg/5.29lb
My main reasons for buying it, were to allow me to game while on business trips and move from the man cave to the living room. (We recently moved to a bigger appartment and while having a dedicated office is nice, it can be quite taxing in a relationsship to disappear every night after dinner).
My main gaming rig was (note the past tense) a watercooled beast, built in 2012-2013, and I've always strived to balance performance vs. noise levels. I hate fan noise and coilwhine and will go to extreme lengths to avoid it. By todays standards it was a good machine, and was able to run most newer games at decent settings, at around 60 fps at 1440p.
With the purchase of the Triton my hope was, that I'd be able to at least replicate that performance while being at least somewhat mobile. I've always disliked the high end gaming laptops mostly due to their design and high pitched fans, and after seeing a few reviews on Youtube, I settled on the Triton because of the less flashy aesthetics, compared to the Asus ROQ Zephyrus (They were the only two 1080 Max-Q laptops available in Denmark, at the time of my purchase).
Performance wise there is absolutely nothing to complain about. It runs Witcher 3 on ultra without blinking, at around 80 fps at 1080p. It drops to about 70'ish at 1440p, but that's still very good. Most of the other benchmarks are available on the Internet somewhere, and I havent experienced any difference between those benchmarks and my own experiences. The harddrives are very very fast, and bootup is roughly 10-15 secs from power off to windows logon. I havent had any issues with wi-fi or other connected devices through Bluetooth or cabled. The screen is fine and works as advertised, nothing extraordinary. Battery power is nothing fantastic. When the laptop is unplugged, it automatically throttles everything, and batterylife is roughly an hour or two depending on the workload.
It is by no means silent. Once the fans start going full tilt, I have to crank up the volume on my headphones to cancel out the fan noise, and my wife usually ask me to head back into the office with the laptop, defeating the purpose entirely. While travelling it is not an issue. The fans only come on when gaming. During several hours of Netflix, the fans are at their slowest setting and not audible. When unplugged, everything is throttled and Witcher 3 runs at about 30 fps because of the throttling. It is however very silent when doing so, and remains so until the battery runs out. I cannot fathom how reviewers tested it under load and found the noise to match light breezes or a running living room fan. It is only that silent when unplugged and under throttled load.
To combat the noise issue I undervolted the CPU by a -0.110 modifier, which lowered the average temps on the CPU by around 8-10 degrees Celcius. This meant that the fans dont have to ramp up to the higher settings even under 100% load, and thus are less of a nuissance. It's still louder than I'd like, but it's better than the stock profile by far. After that I built a laptop cooler out of some spare parts, which lowered the temps even more and resulting lower fan noise. And now it is within acceptable levels, but still louder than light breezes... I wager that the undervolt and laptop cooler has resulted in an average drop in temps from 85C til 65C under full extended load. One note to DYI laptop cooler-builders: Because of the keyboard placement, you have to build a very small/low profile chassis for the laptop, so that the front edge of the laptop rests on the table, in order to have proper wrist placement. Alternatively a much bigger chassis with a wrist rest built into the chassis. My current DYI cooler is 3.5 cm tall and includes two 120mm x 15mm fans that have about 5mm of space between laptop-fans and fans-table.
The mechanical keyboard is excellent, and the placement is fantastic in my opinion. It is low profile enough that a wrist rest isnt needed. I dont mind the odd touchpad placement, since I usually use a mouse (And Acer actually included a decent one in the package). The touchpad works fine for browsing etc. but I'd never use it for anything work or gaming related, unless I had no other options.
It has Dolby Atmos and with a headphone amp and good headphones it is an amazing experience. It is on par or even better than my main gaming rig with a dedicated soundcard, tubed headphone amp and Grado headphones.
Size wise it is a bit wider than your typical 15.6 inch laptop, and it doesnt fit into a normal sleeve very well. And when you include the power brick and 3-4 meters of cables + mouse it isnt exactly a very portable package, unless you have a dedicated bag for it.
Construction is great, and it feels very solid.
There is very little bloatware on it, and the included PredatorSense works fine for reporting temps, and creating custom profiles for fans, keyboard lightning and mild GPU overclocks.
I am very happy with the purchase, and it has fully replaced my old gaming rig, something which I did not expect at all.
