Acer’s Shockingly Light Gaming Laptop Has a Surprise Trackpad Feature

Many light gaming laptops also try to bill themselves as creative laptops as well. Few provide any features beyond a pretty screen that actually support artistic types. Acer’s 14-inch Predator Triton 14 AI has a glassy, haptic touchpad that also works with a stylus. This means the touchpad can act as a digital drawing pad for creatives who prefer a PC and don’t want to draw directly on a touchscreen.

For those who haven’t tried a haptic touchpad like that on the Triton 14 AI, it’s a slightly different experience than a traditional mechanical pad. It uses force feedback on your clicks, but the benefit beyond looks is uniform force feedback along a wider surface area. Despite this, few devices have thought to take advantage of a flat surface with full stylus support. Unlike Dell’s XPS 13 design from last year, the Triton 14 AI breaks up the flat palm rest with plastic brackets when your finger or pen is trying to draw outside the lines.

The size of the Triton AI’s trackpad won’t stand up to a full drawing pad or a quality creative-minded tablet like an iPad Pro M4, but stylus support without covering up a laptop screen could be handy in a pinch. I had the chance to try out the Triton 14 AI, but Acer wasn’t about to let me put the laptop through its paces. Just like every other laptop brand, Acer has a slate of new gaming laptops sporting Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, but it’s still hard to get excited for most of them. And then the company dropped the Predator Triton 14 AI on my lap, and I was immediately intrigued. It seems Acer took a page from the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 from last year—still one of the best-feeling gaming laptops you can buy for this size. The shell has a very sturdy frame based on my short time with it. Save for its large Predator logo on the back, the Triton can pass as a non-gaming machine if you opt to not show off the per-key RGB.

Other devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro or Asus ProArt PZ13 may also fit the bill as Windows machines for artists, but the Triton AI has one element those devices don’t—a discrete GPU. The device sports an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V CPU, the top-end Lunar Lake processor from last year that only now seems to be featured in today’s mobile devices. As for graphics, configurations top out with an Nvidia RTX 5070 laptop GPU. The device also supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2TB of SSD storage. That’s about what we expect from a device of this size, and we can expect with that GPU it should be enough for 1440p gaming in most intensive titles.

The laptop isn’t too heavy either at 3.5 pounds. As is necessary for a modern creator’s laptop, the Triton 14 AI houses an OLED display with a 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 resolution panel and a stated peak brightness of 340 nits. That might not be enough for working in bright daylight, but at least you should be able to hold onto it without burning your fingers. Acer packed a graphene thermal interface material on the CPU, which it claims is far better at transferring heat than traditional thermal grease or paste.

The touchpad works with Acer’s Active stylus which comes bundled with the laptop. The one missing piece is a magnetic attachment point for users to keep their pen close during use. At least, the Active pen includes pressure sensitivity and tilt response, plus it has built-in haptics for force feedback when pressing down on the tip. It supports AES 2.0, USI 2.0, and MPP 2.5 protocols, which encompass the majority of digital pens that work across capacitive touchscreens and pads.

Acer did not reveal pricing for the Triton 14 AI or when we can expect it to hit store shelves. The company was one of the early few that explicitly raised prices on its devices, citing Trump tariffs. The Zephyrus started at $1,600 but the RTX 4070 model with more RAM cost closer to $2,000. If the Triton 14 AI costs more than that, it may be a hard machine to justify, even if you want to practice your penmanship on your laptop.