Many light gaming laptops also try to see themselves as creative laptops. Few people offer any features except for a beautiful screen that really supports the art genre. Acer’s 14-inch Predator Triton 14 AI has a glassy, tactile touchpad that can also be used with a stylus. This means that the touchpad can act as a digital drawing pad for creatives who like PCs and don’t want to draw a touch screen directly.
For those who haven’t tried such a tactile touchpad on the Triton 14 AI, this is slightly different from the traditional mechanical pads. It uses force feedback on your clicks, but the benefit of appearance beyond appearance is uniform force feedback along a wider surface area. Nevertheless, few devices are considered to be able to utilize flat surfaces with full text support. Unlike Dell’s XPS 13 design last year, the Triton 14 AI breaks down the flat palm with a plastic stand when your finger or pen tries to draw outside the line.
The Triton AI’s trackpad won’t fit in the size of a full drawing board or a quality creative tablet like the iPad Pro M4, but the stylus’ support without covering the laptop screen can be easily clamped. I had a chance to try the Triton 14 AI, but Acer wasn’t about letting me put my laptop at its pace. Like other laptop brands, Acer has a bunch of new gaming laptops, including the Nvidia Geforce RTX 50 series GPUs, but for most people it’s still hard to get excited. The company then put the Predator Triton 14 AI on my legs and I was immediately interested in it. It seems Acer has started the page of the Asus Rog Zephyrus G14 since last year, one of the best gaming laptops you can buy in this size. Based on my brief time, the shell has a very solid frame. In addition to the large Predator logo on the back, if you choose not to show off every key RGB, the Triton can be passed as a non-game console.
Other devices like Microsoft Surface Pro or Asus Proart PZ13 may also be suitable for artists’ Windows machines, but Triton AI has one element that these devices don’t have—a discrete GPU. The device comes with an Intel Core Ultra 9 288V CPU, the high-end Lunar Lake processor from last year, and it seems to be only emerging in today’s mobile devices. As for graphics, configuration is on top of the laptop using NVIDIA RTX 5070 GPU. The device also supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. That’s what we expect from a device of this size, and we can expect the GPU should be enough to accommodate 1440p games in the most intensive titles.
The laptop is not too heavy either. For modern creators’ laptops, the Triton 14 AI has an OLED display that includes 120Hz, a 2,880 x 1,800 resolution panel and 340 Nits peak brightness. This may not be enough to work in bright sunlight, but at least you should be able to hold it without burning your fingers. Acer fills the CPU with graphene thermal interface material, which claims it is much better at transferring heat than traditional hot greases or pastes.
The touchpad works with Acer’s active stylus, which is bundled with the laptop. A missing piece is a magnetic attachment point for the user to keep the pen closed during use. At the very least, the active pen includes pressure sensitivity and tilt response, and in addition, it has built-in tactile feedback when pressing the tip. It supports AES 2.0, USI 2.0 and MPP 2.5 protocols, which include most digital pens used on capacitive touch screens and mats.
Acer didn’t disclose the price of the Triton 14 AI, or we can expect it to be available on the market. The company is one of the few people who explicitly raise the price of its equipment, citing Trump’s tariffs. Zephyrus starts at $1,600, but the RTX 4070 model costs closer to $2,000 in RAM. If the Triton 14 AI costs more than that, it may be hard to justify even if you want to practice your brushwork on your laptop.
