How Acer Predator (G9-791) notebook deals with the extra heat

cover predator

One of the main features Acer is advertising in its brand new Acer Predator notebook is the cooling system. It is said to be the most advanced one on the market and we are eager to see how it performs under heavy loads and higher temperatures. But first, let’s start off with explaining some of the nifty tricks Acer is using to prevent the notebook from overheating.

You can check the current price of Acer Predator 17 here:
http://amzn.to/21rbrAo

First of all, let’s talk about the elephant in the room – the additional fan module. Acer has a number of nifty tricks up its sleeve when it comes to exclusive features. We had the pleasure of playing around with some of them in selected models, but this time the Predator offers an additional cooling solution when things heat up. It’s a simple module that can be swapped with the optical drive on the go. Whether or not this additional fan has an impact on the cooling system, we are not sure yet, but we hope to clear things up in this short article.


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Another interesting addition for aiding the cooling system is the redesigned cooling fans. The propellers are made of aluminum and they are attached to the casing of the fan only on one side. This way when the fans hit higher RPMs, the angle of the fan starts to change for better airflow and thus more CFM (cubic feet per minute) is achieved. We were also able to distinguish when the fans change the angle just by listening to the buzzing sound. It was quite amusing to be honest. Furthermore, you can push the fans to their limits with just one click thanks to the provided software for tuning by Acer. That’s all we can say for now, so more information to come in our upcoming full review.

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Temperature tests

Before we begin, we would like to note that we perform extreme torture tests on the CPU and GPU with 100% load, so under normal circumstances these conditions cannot be achieved. However, these tests do help us determine the overall stability of the system in the long run and check how the cooling system handles high temperatures. Also, this time we did one more run, but without the additional fan module in order to see the difference and conclude whether or not the additional fan has any positive effect.

With fan module

We start off with 100% CPU load for at least an hour. As you can see, the CPU in idle state keeps temperatures a tad higher than the normal room temperature (26-28, which is, by the way, really impressive. Either the new Skylake CPUs run really cool or the Predator’s cooling system does its job well. The latter might be it judging by the maintained maximum frequency of 3.1GHz. Keep in mind that the maximum operating frequency for four active cores is 3.1GHz. No throttling occurred, but the CPU kept relatively high temperatures as you can see on the graph below. The red line is for temperatures and the green line indicates CPU load.

predator cpu

After an hour of CPU torture, we ran the GPU stress test as well. It seems like the CPU and GPU share some of the heat, because the temperature of the silicon rose up to 97 °C, which is 3 degrees below the maximum allowed operating temperature. Also, the clocks of the CPU went down a bit (2.8GHz), but no excessive throttling occurred. As for the GPU, we were quite surprised by the temperatures reached. The GPU ran at around 67-68 °C, which is considered to be extremely low since most notebooks go as high as 78-79 °C. At these temperatures, no throttling is possible. The notebook did pretty well in both stages of the test and it maintained quite low temperatures on the outside, meaning you won’t feel a thing during long hours of gaming. Here is the heat map to prove it:

predator gpu

temperatures-bottom with fan

Okay, so now we know the Predator’s cooling system does a pretty nice job cooling the hardware. But what if we swap the extra fan module with the optical drive included in the package? Will that affect the overall temperatures?

Without fan module

Before we do this cycle again, we left the notebook to “rest” for about an hour, switched off. We wanted to make sure the notebook has completely cooled off before doing stress test.

Without any significant change as you can see from the image below. The CPU ran a bit hotter in idle, but we also saw a slight decrease in the temperatures (1-2 °C of the CPU compared to when the machine had additional fan. This indicates that the cooling system is absolutely sufficient for keeping the CPU cool under heavy load.

predator cpu no fan

The situation, however, changed a bit when we ran the GPU torture test. Compared to when the laptop had an additional fan, now the machine seems to run the GPU with a difference of around 1-3 °C, but even this wasn’t enough for the temperatures to cause throttling. Neither the CPU’s nor the GPU’s clocks went down despite the missing fan. So in practice, the cooling system is fine as it is and the additional fan module seems to help the GPU by a fraction of 1 to 3 °C.

predator gpu no fan

To sum things up, the cooling system presented in the Acer Predator is spotless. We didn’t observe any excessive throttling or overheating and the inner temperatures didn’t affect user experience. Palm rests remained cool throughout all tests.

You can check the current price of Acer Predator 17 here:
http://amzn.to/21rbrAo

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Eilasiti
Eilasiti
8 years ago

What tool did you use to stress CPU and GPU?

Viktor
Viktor
8 years ago

wow! excellent test.. I actually bought the laptop and found this review the day I was waiting for delivery… 🙂 you guys made probably the most conclusive and extended test I could find online..well done

Hal Davis
Hal Davis
2 years ago

Just for reference: In the g9-791 especially, the extra fan is for the nvme and ram to keep cool under stress, not the processor. The fact that the processors came down a bit shows efficient airflow, but is of little consequence. At the time this was written NVME ran really hot, sata ran pretty warm as well in the m2 slots. They throttle to keep cool also, or they simply shut the system off, flush their buffers, and the system restarts.