Acer Pack Chromebook Acer Cb514-1ht-c1sq 14

Verdict

The Acer Chromebook 514 is light, dainty-looking and good value for money. If you only demand a laptop for writing, spreadsheets and email, and you're looking to salvage coin, this is an ideal pick.

Pros

Good value for money
Slim and calorie-free
Metallic chassis

Cons

Display quality is non bang-up
Performance tin grind to a halt if overloaded
Some apps like Spotify won't work

Key Specifications

Review Toll: £370
xiv-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) touchscreen display
323 10 232 x 17mm
Intel Celeron N3350 1.10GHz processor
i.5kg
32GB flash memory
Chrome OS
4GB LPDDR4 RAM

What is the Acer Chromebook 514?

The Chromebook 514 is the latest Chromebook from Acer. Information technology's nicely priced and aimed primarily at buyers on a shoestring budget who want a laptop for word processing, spreadsheets, and the usual kind of PC tasks on the become.

The 514 model I've been sent for review is the CB514-1HT model, which features an Intel Celeron N3350 processor, 4GB of RAM, and internal storage of simply 32GB – only 21GB of which is available to the user.

That's a very low corporeality of storage, until y'all call up that Chromebook users are intended to leverage the 15GB of Google Bulldoze storage offered for free, as well as the 100GB you tin can get from £1.59 a month.

If your calculating needs don't really extend much across writing and filing copy, spreadsheet maintenance and a spot of Netflix on the side, and so the Acer Chromebook 514 will meet your needs, for less than a Windows-equivalent device.

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With its metal chassis, the Acer Chromebook 514 looks more expensive than it actually is

Acer Chromebook 514 design – Information technology's a slimline metal laptop that won't suspension the bank

Chromebooks are inexpensive and cheerful laptops running Google'southward lightweight Chrome Bone, typically priced somewhere in the £300-£500 bracket.

Until recently, Chromebooks accept also been fashioned from rather naff-feeling flexy plastic and at that place hasn't been much consideration on the aesthetics front end. This changed with the launch of the Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14 7000 2-in-1, Google's ain Pixel Slate and the Acer Chromebook 514.

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While this Acer Chromebook isn't quite equally nice to look at every bit the Dell or the Google Slate, its lid and chassis are made from aluminium, which immediately makes information technology feel more premium than a standard run-of-the-manufactory Chromebook. The merely parts of the Acer Chromebook 514's body that aren't fabricated from metal are the screen bezel and the swivel, which are plastic.

I'm a little lamentable to say that the review unit I picked up appeared to showroom some superficial harm on the top left corner of the display side. Some of the silver paint had come away, making me wonder what this will await like after a couple of years – probably not as bad as the LG Gram ii-in-1, but yet.

Pigment job bated, the Acer Chromebook 514 weighs a very spry ane.5kg and, as it measures a slim 17mm when closed, information technology will slip nicely into your bag and take up very little space.

You get ii Type A USB ports and 2 Type C USB ports – handy if you're using external drives or peripherals that use the older connexion. The left-paw USB-C port supports Power Delivery, which, in applied terms, means it's going to function as the port for the mains adapter well-nigh of the fourth dimension.

You lot as well go a microSD card reader, if you want to transfer folders or bolster that non-very-generous corporeality of local storage, a iii.5mm jack for headphones, and a lock slot. All of this is par for the form for most Chromebooks these days.

The Acer Chromebook 514'southward keyboard benefits from the metal chassis, as there'southward no flex here

Acer Chromebook 514 performance and specs – Does the basics, and simply the basics

If your PC usage involves basic function work, checking emails and social, with a bit of YouTube rumbling away in the background, the Acer Chromebook 514 will practise all of that well plenty.

The keyboard layout is the aforementioned as every Chromebook, as is the typing experience. Yous become the same sparse-feeling plastic keycaps here, with the same low travel and relatively low spring action – typing on the Acer Chromebook 514 is fine, merely it's non exactly snappy. The solid metal chassis, nonetheless, means that the deck effectually the keyboard is complimentary from whatsoever obvious flex. The board is backlit equally well, then working at night won't exist an issue.

The trackpad is well sized, responsive and accurate, if a fiddling wearisome for my tastes, only zero that some footling in the settings couldn't gear up.

The keyboard layout is slightly unlike to a typical Windows laptop, merely it won't have long to get acquainted

If yous demand to edit photos, however, yous're not in luck. You can just about get abroad with cropping snaps in Photoshop Express on the Acer Chromebook 514, but the experience will most likely be frustrating. If y'all need a Chromebook to do light photo piece of work, check out the Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14 7000 2-in-1 instead.

You should be judicious with your tab use with the Chromebook 514 – I tend to have no fewer than 10 tabs open in Chrome at whatever one fourth dimension (with one of those typically YouTube on autoplay), and found that, on occasion, when writing documents, everything would slow to a crawl for about five seconds before easing up again here. Chrome can exist very retentivity-hungry on Windows laptops, and you lot become 4GB of RAM to play with hither – but get used to regularly closing and refreshing Chrome to keep things running smoothly.

Benchmarking options for Chromebooks are few and far betwixt, but I was able to install and run Geekbench iv for Android from the Google Play Store. Geekbench 4 features a CPU (central processing unit of measurement) stress exam, and can give y'all an thought of how fast any system will run.

The Acer Chromebook 514 I tested featured an Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor with a ane.10GHz base clock speed.

Running Geekbench 4 gave me unmarried and multi-core scores of 1391 and 2733 respectively, a footling nether the Dell Chromebook 3100 2-in-1 (1769 and 3327), and far lower than what I saw when I benched the Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14, which gave me 4436 and 8763.

It should be noted that the Inspiron Chromebook features an 8th gen Intel Core i3, which is a much more advanced processor than the Pentium chip of the Acer Chromebook 514, and the Celeron N4000 of the other Dell Chromebook.

Note that Geekbench iv pegs single-cadre scores of 4000, and multi-core scores of 8000, based on the performance of a Core i7-6600U laptop CPU clocked to 2.60GHz, as the baseline.

I also ran Google's defunct Octane 2.0 benchmark and got ten,703 – again, this doesn't compare that well with the Dell Inspiron Chromebook 14 7000 2-in-ane, which gave me 31,575.

In summary, while you can easily write, electronic mail, and crisis numbers on sheets on the Acer Chromebook 514, not all of the apps I tried to run worked. Netflix ran just fine and dandy, but while the Spotify app would install, I was greeted with a blank screen whenever I tried to run it. With such limited storage infinite, it's unlikely that you're going to be installing many apps on the Acer Chromebook 514 anyway.

The Chromebook 514's brandish is fairly middling, but the skinny bezel partially makes up for it

Acer Chromebook 514 brandish – Is the Acer Chromebook 514's screen adept enough for Netflix and photo editing?

The Acer Chromebook 514's fourteen-inch touchscreen brandish is non one of the brightest I've seen, meaning that Netflix and YouTube streams, particularly night-time/interior scenes, can sometimes look gloomy. Things aren't then bad that they're not viewable but the brightness, paired with not-fantastic viewing angles, limits the Acer Chromebook 514's usability as a Netflix and arctic companion. The display is also unsuitable for photo editing.

As we've already established, this Chromebook'southward components struggled to run the most bones editing software, so the functioning of the brandish in this regard is moot, but for what it'south worth, I recorded colour gamut coverage scores of 57.0% (sRGB), 39.vi% (Adobe RGB) and twoscore.6% (DCI-P3), using DisplayCAL three and an 10-Rite i1 colorimeter. That's far below what you need if you're looking to practise photo editing of whatever kind.

With the same device and software, I recorded a maximum brightness of 257.9 nits. This volition simply about let you lot work comfortably in most lighting conditions, though you may struggle outside on a sunny day. Ideally, y'all want tiptop brightness of 300 nits. Black levels recorded at maximum brightness were 0.205, adding up to contrast ratio of 1254:ane. That'south pretty good, and about what you'd await from a decent laptop. I as well recorded a color temperature of 6212K, which, again, is very adept, and close to the 6500K ideal.

In short, video streams will await expert enough, simply you'll want to creepo that brightness all the fashion up. Photo work? Forget it.

1 of the two USB A and USB C ports on the Acer Chromebook 514

Acer Chromebook 514 battery – Can I get a day's use out of the Acer Chromebook 514?

You can wring a working day's amount of power – i.east. seven to eight hours – out of the Acer Chromebook 514.

Running the Geekbench 4 battery criterion, which simulates basic PC utilise in the background with the display's brightness locked at 150 nits, I got a result of seven hours and 21 minutes. That's very much in line with what I observed day-to-day. If you can stand up to dip the screen'southward brightness below 150 nits so you can brand information technology last even longer.

If y'all have to piece of work away from a mains socket for a while, the skilful news is the Acer Chromebook 514 only takes about 90 minutes to fully charge upward. From empty, I was able to get around 73-75% of the tank full after an hour on the mains.

On the other side you get the other USB C and USB A ports, plus a microSD card reader and a 3.5mm jack

Should I buy the Acer Chromebook 514?

The Acer Chromebook 514 is bang-up value for money. The model I tested is priced at £370 and is absolutely fine for bones PC piece of work, and the metal chassis means it'south resilient and doesn't look like a inexpensive laptop. There is likewise a cheaper variant (CB514-1H) which features many of the same specs, but a lower res (1366 x 768) non-touch display.

While the brandish isn't perfect, it'south proficient enough for writing essays, and, at a push, streaming video.

You do accept to exist patient with the Acer Chromebook 514. If you throw lots of work at it at once – multiple tabs and YouTube streams, while trying to download several things from Google Play – information technology'll falter.

Merely if y'all need an inexpensive laptop for word processing and yous don't want to shell out for Microsoft Office, then the Acer Chromebook 514 is an excellent option.

Verdict

A nicely priced laptop in a metallic case that'll practice the basics (and merely the basics).

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