Upgrading from a 6 year old HP pavilion 15 series was emotional beyond description. A core i5 3rd gen, 8gb ram and nvidia 720M turned out to be too less for straining Photo editing and other gruesome media functionalities, especially with the constant updates demanding more performance from the hardware. A powerful gaming laptop with a good screen at a not bad price point, well, that was the sweet spot that this Helios 300 touched smoothly. Received the Predator yesterday from Amazon (delivered to the Middle East) and it met every expectation I had.Prior to purchase, I knew about the three key issues: Below average battery life, screen backlight bleeding and the cooling fan being noisy. To be frank, the issues concerning battery life and cooling fan is quite obviously understandable in a gaming laptop. However the backlight bleeding was more than I was expecting. My old HP (got it for about $650 in 2013) has lesser backlight beeding than the Helios which I found ironic considering the pace of technology growth in display screens. Cost cutting, may be? Backlight bleeding can be extremely distracting especially in situations where you play dark horror games. However, I do not play such games and photo-editing can be significantly worked around this weakness. So, I think it is tolerable for my usage. Should Acer look into a particular weakness that has to be strengthened for the future versions, this bleeding is a potential place to improve by leaps.