Acer Chromebook 15 Review: An Elegant, Massive Display Laptop

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Acer Chromebook 15: At First Glance

Unlike its predecessors, the Acer Chromebook 15 offers a larger FHD 15.6-inch screen, making it quite fit for streaming videos and pictures.

Considering the fact that Chromebooks have embraced hybrid designs, one would have expected this laptop to be a convertible, but it isn’t. This would have placed it at a more advantageous point. 

Nevertheless, the Acer Chromebook 15 comes with other interesting physical features. One of the beautiful features of the Acer Chromebook 15 is how Acer arranged the keyboard keys shaded in black with hints of white markings that give it an elegant finish.

Another factor worthy of note is the 12-hour battery life Acer has promised for this Chromebook. Will Acer be able to fulfill its promise?

Let’s find out as we go into the details of this review.

Acer Chromebook 15: Design, Dimension & Weight

When I had the Acer Chromebook 15 in front of me, the beautifully inscribed Acer logo on the lid was the first thing that attracted my attention. The logo has a glossy mirror effect that spreads over the lid itself when a ray of light shines on it.

This smooth silver metal lid also has a chrome logo finely paralleled atop the Acer logo – giving the laptop a more elegant look.

While looking at this laptop, I constantly marveled at how nice it looked considering it is a business laptop. 

At first glance into the interior, I couldn’t help but notice the overwhelmingly large display. This massive display is surrounded by thick bezels, with a webcam centralized at the top bezel.

At the bottom bezel, you will see a neatly printed Acer logo.

Talking about the 15.6” display itself, Acer designed the Acer Chromebook 15 with an IPS panel. This IPS panel makes the screen content look accurate from every angle. 

Aside from that, this IPS display has a matte surface that makes the display content remain intact in average lighting conditions. However, the display content doesn’t look good when you attempt to use the Acer Chromebook in a brightly lit environment.

This is because the laptop’s maximum display brightness isn’t high enough.

Moving down to the deck, Acer offers a brightly backlit keyboard. This keyboard is well partitioned with speakers flanked on both sides. 

Before I share my experience with the keyboard with you, I think you should know how good these speakers sound. First off, these speakers are confined to the keyboard area by a robust aluminum frame. 

Having these speakers at this position felt quite enjoyable to me. Asides from what I think, I believe other movie lovers will also applaud these speakers. 

The direct feel of sounds and bass that resonated out of these speakers while streaming videos was an incredible feeling. 

However, I would advise music lovers to get external speakers or headphones to get the exact bass sounds they would enjoy. The major reason for this is that most sound specialists may find the speaker to be a bit inadequate at producing the perfect pitch of sounds.

Going back to the keyboard, I personally felt it did not require too much pressure to insert characters. In fact, it made absolutely no noise during my entire typing session. 

Also, it has smooth travel that makes it very efficient and comfortable for typing.

Have I mentioned how amazingly smooth and precise the trackpad is? I was impressed by how smoothly it enabled multi-touch gestures and graceful movements without lagging.

Moving to the sides, the fine slant sharp finishing around the edges of the Acer Chromebook 15 gives the lid smooth and balanced support when it is closed.

Like most Chromebooks, the Acer Chromebook does not have too many ports. However, judging by the size of this Acer Chromebook, one would expect it to have more ports.

Nevertheless, the ports available on both sides of the laptop are enough. To the left, there’s a Kensington lock slot, 1 USB Type-A, and 1 USB Type-C. 

Meanwhile, there’s a headphone jack, a micro SD card slot, and 1 USB Type-C on the right side of the Acer Chromebook 15. 

In terms of size, the Acer Chromebook 15 weighs 1950 g and measures 365.7 x 248.9 x 17.7 mm. Comparatively, the Acer Chromebook 15 is bigger than the Samsung Chromebook Pro that weighs 1088 g, and measures 280.9 x 220.9 x 15.2 mm.

Regardless, this laptop still stands out in terms of size and simplicity. However, due to its dim display quality, I will be rating the Acer Chromebook 15 an eight in this design review. 

Acer Chromebook 15: Processor (CPU) Performance

To start with, it is important to know that most Chromebooks are specifically designed to handle simple office tasks. This is why they don’t come with powerful processors most times.

They are always designed to carry out tasks ranging from; web browsing, word processing, and streaming videos.

Moving on to the subject of this section, the Acer Chromebook 15 is powered by an Intel Core i3-8130U processor. This processor offers a base frequency of 2.2GHz and a 4MB cache.

It offers a maximum frequency of 3.4GHz for increased thread performance.

I would call this processor a dual-power efficient processor because it has two cores. Furthermore, this processor enables the Acer Chromebook to handle operations gracefully and react swiftly, making it extremely easy to switch between different running operations.

Moving on to the benchmark test, I made use of the Geekbench 4 synthetic tool. Geekbench 4, is a synthetic test tool used to measure a processor’s performance.

This test tool shows the minimum and maximum performance of the processor. Hence the higher the score of the processor in this test, the better the performance of the processor. 

In the single-core Geekbench test, the Intel Core i3-8130U of the Acer Chromebook 15 seemed to be doing great as it scored 4513 points. Its score was a bit higher than the Acer Aspire E15’s.

The Acer Aspire E15 which features an intel core i5-8250U processor scored 4243 points in the single-core aspect of the test.

However, in the multi-core Geekbench test, I observed that the Acer Chromebook 15 was expressly thrown off. Its 9140 score was nowhere near the Acer Aspire E15’s 13486 score.

The result I got from this test proves that the Acer Chromebook 15 offers a much better single-core performance. Hence, I will rate the Acer Chromebook 15 a seven in this performance review.

Acer Chromebook 15: Memory (RAM) Performance

The Acer Chromebook 15 comes with 4GB DDR4 SDRAM. Also, it offers two memory slots with a minimum of 4GB each.

These two memory slots make it possible to upgrade the Acer Chromebook’s memory. You can increase the laptop’s overall memory size to a maximum capacity of 16 GB.

Before I proceed to the performance review, I will briefly talk about the Acer Chromebook’s memory configuration. The DDR4 SDRAM is a type of Random Access Memory with a high bandwidth interface.

This is why most laptops that come with the DDR4 SDRAM are known for their high data transfer speed.

In use, the 4GB RAM on the Acer Chromebook 15 offers a fair performance. I had anticipated that this 4 GB RAM would easily facilitate web browsing, word processing, and online video streaming simultaneously. 

To validate this, I carried out some real-world tests. I was able to conveniently open 15 chrome tabs and three YouTube channels. 

While at this, I was able to switch between tabs without any delays. Overall, the Acer Chromebook 15 gave remarkable multitasking abilities. 

Furthermore, I carried out a benchmark test using the webXPRT synthetic test tool. The webXPRT 2013 simulates basic computing tasks for the purpose of testing the web performance of a laptop.

In the above test, the Acer Chromebook 15 scored 153 points. For comparisons, the Acer Chromebook 13 on the other hand, scored 528 points. 

Having seen the results of this test, it is only fair to say that the Acer Chromebook 15 is suitable for simple internet, and office tasks. For this reason, I will be rating this laptop a seven in this processor section of the review.

Acer Chromebook 15: Storage Options and Performance

It is more of a norm for Chromebooks to come with small local storage, and Acer Chromebook 15 is no exception. This is so because Chromebooks are designed to save user files on the Google Drive cloud storage.

The Acer Chromebook 15 comes with 128GB eMMC storage and an SDXC slot. The SDXC card slot offers room for external SD card storage expansion.

In case you are wondering, eMMC, also known as the embedded multi-media card, is internal storage usually soldered onto the device’s motherboard.

It is a low-budget storage device. If you are aiming for a budget-friendly laptop, then I strongly recommend laptops with eMMCs.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, Chromebooks to come with small local storage. For Acer Chromebook 15, you get just 128GB eMMC storage, some of which are occupied by the Operating Systems and some systems apps.

As I hinted earlier, Chromebooks are designed for users to save files to Google Drive. Fortunately, Chromebooks offer free 100GB Google Drive cloud storage and the Acer Chromebook 15 is no exception.

If you want to know how to activate this free Google Drive cloud storage, you can follow the detailed guide in this link.

Regardless of this free cloud storage, the Chromebook 15’s small storage space works quite efficiently since the tasks carried out on the laptop are simply lightweight.

Moving on, I will briefly consider the performance of this storage device.

To start with, the transfer rate for eMMC is not entirely slow, as long as your tasks do not exceed web browsing, streaming, and other simple tasks.

Unfortunately, I was unable to run the benchmark test for the eMMC storage of the Chromebook 15. This is because Chrome OS that runs on Chromebooks does not support most of the storage benchmark tools we use for Windows laptops.

So, I will be rating Acer Chromebook 15 based on just its storage options. Hence, I will rate the Acer Chromebook 15 an eight in this storage review section based on its storage options.

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Acer Chromebook 15: Graphics Card Performance

The Acer Chromebook 15 comes with an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620. This integrated graphics card has a base frequency of 300MHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 1000MHz  

If you’re wondering what an Integrated graphics card is, it is a GPU that is built into the processor and shares memory with the CPU. The plus side to an integrated GPU is that it creates less heat and uses less power.

Unfortunately, the Intel UHD graphics does not have a dedicated VRAM. The VRAM is a type of RAM used by graphics cards to facilitate graphic processing.

GPUs with dedicated VRAMs perform better than those that share the system memory with the CPU.

Though it doesn’t feature a VRAM, the integrated graphics card on the Acer Chromebook is enough for simple games like temple run, Zuma, and regular video streaming.

For the performance test, I made use of the WebGL Aquarium Graphic test. The WebGL is a synthetic benchmark tool that uses javascript API to test a laptop’s GPU performance.

In this test, the Acer Chromebook 15 GPU was able to display 500 fish at 51 frames per second, beating the Samsung Chromebook Pro that scored 48fps. Both laptops exceeded the average of 39 fps for Chromebooks.

Note that Fish in this test depicts points. Therefore the higher the points the better.

From the above test, the Acer Chromebook 15 tops the Samsung Chromebook Pro with 3 fps – not much but quite ok. Therefore, I will give the Acer Chromebook 15 an eight in this GPU performance review.

Acer Chromebook 15: Battery Life & Performance

Acer laptops over the years have been able to build a standard for themselves in the laptop market due to their high-end battery performance. They’ve tried keeping up with expectations with Acer Chromebook 15.

The lithium-polymer battery that the Chromebook 15 comes with is an efficient battery type. Over time, users have continuously appreciated the work time the lithium-polymer batteries offer on a full charge.

To be specific, Acer Chromebook 15 is powered by a 4-cell, 3690 mAh lithium-polymer battery. Acer promised that this laptop’s battery will provide up to 12 hours of battery life under maximum operations. 

Unfortunately, the Acer Chromebook lasted for nine hours on our continuous web surfing test. This test involves a continuous web surfing session with Wi-Fi under medium screen brightness till the laptop runs out of power.

Comparatively, I expected the HP Chromebook G1 with a 51-Wh battery to have more extended battery life. However, at nine hours, the Acer Chromebook 15 battery life exceeded that of the HP Chromebook.

The longevity of the Acer’s battery is one to desire. Therefore it is ideal to say the Acer Chromebook battery can take you through the day when fully charged – this is ok for a Chromebook.

Due to the outstanding performance of the Acer battery, I will be rating the Acer Chromebook 15 a nine in this battery performance review.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The Acer Chromebook 15 is the most sturdy, massive, and elegant low-budget Chromebook I’ve seen so far. 

The longevity of its battery gives it an edge and makes it more efficient and user-friendly. After all, there’s no use in having a laptop if its battery capacity cannot take you through your daily tasks.

If you are looking for a budget-friendly, elegant, and lightweight laptop, then the Acer Chromebook 15 is just perfect for you.

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