Acer Predator Triton 14 Review follow-up: Cooling does play a part in performance, especially the GPU. (Quick Volare Cooler Review)

Now last week, when I reviewed the laptop I was actually very happy with its stock performance right out of the box. Got me thinking, if cooling does play a part in performance, how much would it?

Just a refresher, the Acer Predator Triton 14 PT14-51 has it specced to the following:
- Intel Core i7 13700H, 14 Core, 20 Thread CPU (6 Hyperthreaded Performance Cores, 8 efficiency cores)

- RTX 4070 8GB, set at 105W TGP

- 16 GB LPDDR5 at 6,000 MT/s

- 1TB PCIe nVMe Samsung 980 Pro OEM SSD

To test I have a new Laptop Cooler from Volare, with 2 big fans and 2 smaller fans. The cooler doesn't get drowned in noise by the Turbo fans and even at max speed of 6 it is plenty quiet. For benchmarks reference we will take the reference scores from both Time Spy and Fire Strike Runs that we posted up last week.

Time to add some cooling. Volare AC38 has 2 large and 2 mini fans

During the benchmarks, with more cooling to give, means more clock speeds. It used to boost to around 2350MHz, but this time round I've seen clocks go as high as 2450 Mhz on Time Spy and even 2535 MHz at Fire Strike which results in these comparisons. Temperatures we are hitting nowhere near the TGP of the RTX 4070, even without it. With it sees the RTX 4070 stabilizing at 76 degrees, which is pretty impressive even from the base scores.

Time Spy Without Cooler from Last week:

Time Spy With Cooler

Cooled down resulted in a bit of a performance boost across the board.

That places the RTX 4070 in the typical score that's a bit higher than average for both the CPU and GPU across the board.

Fire Strike Without cooler:

Without cooler: 25244, with 28727 on GPU and 30783 on CPU

Fire Strike with cooler:

The scores got a noticeable bump: 28727 to 30545 on the GPU. CPU scores did drop slightly
but still resulted in a higher score overall from 25244 to 26421.

That places the overall score: slightly higher than average again, but the GPU score is very high and inching ever closer to an overclocked RTX 3070.

I did run a second run on Fire Strike to see it's not really an abnormally. Weirdly, the GPU score remained EXACTLY the same. But at least the CPU scores are now in line with the previous results that were not cooled.:

Fire Strike Cooled, Run 2:

In all, it was a 5.7% improvement over the previous total score and a 6.32% boost on the GPU alone.

It goes to show, cooling does play a part in affecting the laptop's performance. With more cooling will allow the GPU to further boost itself. But I think we've found couple of things:

1. Actually temperatures have never been an issue for the RTX 4070 even without a cooler.
2. But still has some untapped performance by sustaining at a higher clock.
3. The one that needs the cooling more is the CPU, as much as it has been amazing for us.

Because CPU intensive tasks will still cause the hotspot to immediately spike up to 100 C regardless. It did help scores in Cinebench just slightly, by about 300 points higher.

To be fair, bottomline is that the Core i7 13700H is still a 14-Core CPU. So it is bound to get hot in a jiffy.

Now the only thing, I hope that I can get sent is one of those IETS GT500/600 Coolers. As sufficient the Volare is, this laptop deserves the best laptop cooling pad possible. If anyone can give me a IETS GT500/600 cooler.

Sure, surfaces get hot on this regardless. But that says it all as to how well heat is actually managed on the Acer Predator Triton 14 despite its beast specifications. Still worrying for me is the CPU though, but for now is enough.