My Helios Neo 16S experience has been a rollercoaster ride
Title pretty much sums it, I had quite a few highs and lows with this laptop that I just wanted to share with the other users and probably potential new users.
I had mine for a few weeks now. I bought it refurb for $1K from the Acer store in ebay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/257213818024). It came on a generic box but overall the laptop was basically flawless and there isn't any scratches or dents in there. The battery has been probably replaced upon checking the initial cycle. I already did my research before buying this and came to the conclusion that I'd accept all the flaws regardless cause of the performance you're getting for the price.
Immediately, I setup up dual booting and installed linux on it thinking it would have better performance but there are some quirks like the temperature spikes here and there and that the battery life is way down (got only 2 hours at most and usually lower on eco) which made the overall experience worst especially since I wanted to use this for work as well, doing some programming and documentations. But anyways, here's a few lows I've encountered and experienced so far:
First, again I'm a dumbass thinking that linux will make it better. Well it does give you the ability to go to 60hz but there is no effect on the battery life. You could stick with that 60hz refresh rate or even enable the variable refresh (48-60 which is the lowest) and still get around 2 hours or less battery life and this is on eco with predator sense / linuwu installed.
Second, on gaming, the CPU just gets too damn hot (100c hot). Again, I was able to install the predator sense but there isn't really a better way of taming the temps without doing a lot of modifications on the BIOS (which I had some issues as well). I tested it initially with just freakin Metal Slug, the first one. It's not even 3d and I'm getting 100c on the CPU? like what in the actual F.
And speaking of the BIOS, basically, the BIOS sometimes has a bug where in if you try going to the advance menu, everything hangs (some users encountered it already). The first and second time I encountered it, you can easily just fix it by reverting everything to optimized default, but then the next time it happened, even if you use F9 to revert everything to default, nothing happens and the screen just hangs (I managed to fix it somehow by switching the graphics back and forth from nvidia to intel and then doing a lot of restarts hoping that would fix it). This is a major issue cause you can't really reflash a BIOS. I encountered this multiple times already. Right now I had it fixed but for now I'm pretty much afraid of doing a lot of changes on the BIOS.
And so I went back to windows, disabled the aggressive power settings on battery but left it enabled while plugged in, then enabled all power efficiency settings, I didn't use throttle stop, have a laptop cooler, nor change the BIOS settings for turbo power (cause I'm afraid the BIOS might be borked again) and just switched to 120Hz on intel, adjusting the brightness and contrast a bit and everything's near perfect now. Yesterday I had 54% battery on eco mode starting at 9:30am and managed to use it for casual browsing and streaming til 1:30pm. That's around 4 hours on half the battery which is good enough for me. I was still doing some test with 60hz and managed to have it only somewhat working (still very dim but can easily be adjusted) but I'm still figuring out how I'd be able to remove the random flickering (or if it can be removed at all, not sure, I just used claude for my test).
So for now atleast I've completely transferred my workflow back to Windows and just did some optimizations here and there. I was able to play games straight without hitting 100c or constantly having temp spikes even without changing the thermal paste/LM. I still wanted to go back to linux but its just not worth the extra headaches (atleast for now).
TL;DR: What I'm trying to say is that, this laptop isn't something you can really enjoy out of the box without doing a lot of configurations and modifications first. Probably the same as other gaming laptops as well? But once you've managed to tweak it and do a lot of test, the overall experience isn't really that bad. And for the price, I'd still recommend this laptop.