Personally, I'm not convinced this will be particularly practical in everyday use - after all, pushing a flat key down is quite different from pushing a vertical stick in any given direction - but it's nevertheless an interesting addition that I'm keen to see in practice as soon as review samples become available. Press it half way down, for instance, and you'll walk at half speed, a bit like pushing an analogue stick just a teensy bit forward instead of all the way to the edge. The neat thing about these, however, is that they also work a bit like an analogue stick on a controller. That's because they're MagForce keys, which use linear switches for that short, sharp mechanical-like feeling of a full-blown gaming keyboard. Now, the eagle-eyed readers among you may have noticed that the Helios 700's WASD keys look slightly raised compared to the rest of the keyboard. Open up the Helios 700 and it looks like an ordinary gaming laptop, but slide it down. In this position, the touch pad also drops down at an angle to hopefully give your hands somewhere comfortable to rest – although I’ll have to wait until I’ve tried it out in person before I can say how comfortable it is in practice. This provides more scope for overclocking, which you can do with a single click thanks to its dedicated Turbo button, and getting the maximum amount of performance from it. Only here, the whole of Acer's so-called HyperDrift keyboard (because everything sounds better with the word 'Hyper' in front of it) slides down to reveal the fans beneath it.
It’s actually not too dissimilar from the design of the Asus ROG Zephyrus S I reviewed yesterday, which shunts the keyboard down to the bottom of the laptop to make more room for its fans. It’s a mad concept – although not quite as bonkers as the Asus ROG Mothership I saw at CES, which has a fully detachable keyboard – but the idea is to allow more air to reach the laptop’s processor and GPU to help prevent it from throttling and overheating.
Just make sure you don't whip it out on the train, or you might accidentally puncture a lung. Dubbed the Predator Helios 700, Acer’s new flagship laptop promises “desktop gaming performance on the go” thanks to its full-fat Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics chip and one of Intel’s brand-new 9th Gen Core i9 mobile processors. Acer have unveiled a new monster 17.3in gaming laptop that has an extendable keyboard to help keep it cool.
0 kommentar(er)
