Acer – Predator Triton 300 SE-14” 165Hz Creator/Gaming Laptop–Intel Core i7–NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060-16GB LPDDR5–512GB SSD-Gray

I’ve been using this for about a month now, and it is pretty much exactly what I was looking for in a laptop of this size. With it being a 14″, lightweight gaming laptop, there are obviously some compromises that need to be made, but I think they did a good job of balancing everything.
Great:
-Great screen: screen looks great, 165hz refresh is nice and smooth, gets plenty bright.
-Performance: I don’t know how they managed it, but they crammed a 20 thread cpu into this thing. It being a laptop cpu, it still won’t perform on the same level as a desktop cpu, but for any multithreaded workloads, it can handle them easily enough, and single threaded workloads benefit from intel’s typical prowess there.
-Size/Looks/Build Quality: this laptop looks great and is lightweight and compact without compromising too much on performance. Feels very well built, hinge is sturdy and doesn’t wobble much
Okay:
-Touchpad: touchpad isn’t the biggest in the world but it gets the job done. Tracks motion well and the included fingerprint scanner is a nice touch
-Battery life: battery life is passable, but does seem to suffer from the typical 12th gen gaming laptop battery issues that have been reported in other laptops. Being able to charge through the thunderbolt port is a nice touch and means you don’t always need the stock charger, though even that isn’t too bad in terms of gaming laptop chargers.
Lighting: keyboard has rgb if you’re into that. It does look pretty good, but it’s 3 zone rgb rather than per-key.
Fans/Temps: fans can get loud like with any gaming laptop, but it’s mostly a good balance between heat and noise. No real complaints here.
Not so great:
-Keyboard: the keyboard is pretty lackluster. The keys are small and don’t feel great. It’s usable, but I’m spoiled by thinkpad keyboards.
-Power mode optimization: the power modes all work well when plugged in with the stock charger, but as soon as you use anything else, even a 100w usb-c charger, performance gets a lot more spotty, even if the workload doesn’t hit 100w. Not sure why this is and it’s a minor annoyance at best, but something to watch out for.
Overall, I am pretty happy with this laptop and it filled my want for portable gaming without being too bulky while still providing good performance. The only real competitors in this size class are the Asus Zephyrus G14, Alienware x14, and Razer Blade 14. Alienware and Blade are both much more expensive for not much different internals, and Alienware has the typical Alienware aesthetic. G14 is often closer in price, but offers AMD cpu and gpu, which might be a dealbreaker based on your workloads.
This laptop strikes the perfect balance between portability and performance without too many compromises.