The 14-inch gaming laptop market has seen some notable additions over the past couple of years, and the Acer Predator Triton 14 is particularly interesting, especially here in Malaysia. After all, the range-topping model comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, making it one of the most powerful 14-inch gaming laptops on our shores right now.

Of course, this hardware also comes with a matching price tag, positioning the gaming laptop as a premium offering. But while its value proposition isn’t fantastic, the Triton 14 brings fast performance, an equally fast (and vibrant) display, as well as surprisingly good battery life despite its beefy hardware.

This, in my opinion, is a winning combination for the Predator Triton 14, and it could be well worth it for folks who are willing to fork out the money for this premium gaming laptop.

What It Is

The Triton 14 in this review is the range-topping RTX 4070 model, which is priced at RM8,999. There’s also a more affordable RM7,599 configuration, which swaps out the GPU for an RTX 4050 paired with less RAM at 16GB. In my opinion, the performance gain offered by the RTX 4070 model – not to mention the extra RAM – is worth the additional RM1,400.

For other markets, the Triton 14 is actually configurable with a brighter, more vibrant mini-LED display clocked at a blazing fast 250Hz. This display option is not available in Malaysia, unfortunately enough, though this particular hardware would have further increased the price tag of this premium gaming laptop.

The Good Stuff

Let’s get to the most important aspect of any gaming laptop first: performance. Powered by an RTX 4070 GPU with a Core i7-13700H processor, there’s no denying that the Predator Triton 14 is a capable gaming laptop. Judge for yourself with these benchmarks:

Though only Control couldn’t hit the sweet 60fps mark at the laptop’s native 2560 x 1660 resolution, I can still get this frame rate by just tweaking some of the graphics settings. To get this level of performance, I put the laptop in Turbo mode, which does increase system noise quite a bit – more on this later.

Thermal performance of the Triton 14 is adequate too. After prolonged gaming, the GPU and CPU hit peak temperatures of 85% and 86% respectively, which is not bad at all. While the left palm rest area does get a bit warm in heated gaming sessions, it never gets too hot to the touch.

Next, we have the display quality of the 14-inch WQXGA IPS panel with a 165Hz refresh rate. Not surprisingly, it’s a bright screen with wide viewing angles and vibrant colours, though I do wish the saturation is turned down a tad. Nonetheless, I appreciate the 16:10 aspect ratio of the display; the extra vertical screen real estate makes it great for productivity tasks.

While we’re on the topic of productivity, the Predator Triton 14 has reasonably good battery life. On average, I can get about six to seven hours of use on a single charge out of the 76Wh battery. This isn’t quite long enough to comfortably last me through a typical workday, but it’s certainly above average for a gaming laptop of this calibre.

Input devices of the Triton 14 are good too. The keyboard offers just enough travel to not feel shallow, and the keys have a good amount of tactile feedback as well, not to mention the fact that the keyboard is surprisingly quiet with every keystroke. As for the trackpad, it’s smooth and accurate, allowing me to use it comfortably for my everyday work, though I do wish it was slightly bigger.

Last but not least is the sheer portability of the Predator Triton 14. Even though it’s not particularly lightweight with a 1.7kg chassis, the laptop’s 14-inch form factor makes it easy to lug around in my backpack. I’ve always loved the idea of a powerful gaming laptop in a compact chassis, and with that in mind, I’m a big fan of the Triton 14.

That being said, it does have some notable shortcomings, which I’ll get to in the following section.

The Bad Stuff

One of the biggest downsides of a compact gaming laptop like the Predator Triton 14 is system noise. With limited space for heat to dissipate, the fans do have to work quite a bit harder to cool the laptop, resulting in higher fan noise. This is especially evident in Turbo mode to squeeze out every last bit of performance from the machine.

To be fair, the fan noise is not unbearable by any means, though I’d still put on headphones when I’m going into a game for the best gaming experience. For what it’s worth, at least the fans are whisper quiet outside of gaming.

I’m not a fan of the Triton 14’s keyboard layout either. As Acer added an extra column of keys on the right side, the whole layout of the keyboard is shifted slightly to the left. I eventually got used to this layout after a short adjustment period, though I still occasionally pressed on the PredatorSense button by accident when I wanted to hit the backspace key instead.

Is It Worth It?

If you want one of the fastest 14-inch gaming laptops in Malaysia now, then the Acer Predator Triton 14 is a great option. While its RM7,599 starting price is quite high, it’s a premium laptop through and through with solid performance, great-looking display – albeit a tad saturated for my liking – and most importantly, a compact form factor.

I am thrilled that more brands are releasing compact gaming laptops like the Predator Triton 14. It may have its shortcomings, but I can happily live with them for the sheer portability (and performance) of this 14-inch gaming laptop. The fact that it can also serve double duty as a pretty darn good productivity machine is a nice bonus too.