A solid Chromebook at a low price

Verdict

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is a solid all-round Chromebook with nippy performance, good looks and a marvellous port selection. Its display isn’t the best we’ve tested, yet this Chromebook remains a solid choice at a reasonable price.

Introduction

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is one of the brand’s smaller entries into the latest fold of Chromebooks, known as Chromebook Plus.

My sample is AMD-flavoured, packing in a Ryzen 3 7320C processor and a 128GB SSD, alongside a 14-inch WUXGA-res IPS screen – all that, and more will run you £399.99/$399.99 in this configuration.

As for its competition, it’s naturally fierce at this price point with other Chromebook Plus laptops recently launching such as the Asus Chromebook Plus CX34, as well as this Acer laptop’s bigger brother, the Chromebook Plus 515. I’ve been testing the Acer Chromebook Plus 514 to see how well it stacks up, and to see whether it’s one of the best Chromebooks we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Stylish looks with solid build quality
• Reasonable port selection considering the price.
• Tactile keyboard and big trackpad

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 follows in the footsteps of its bigger brother, the Plus 515, in offering stylish looks at its price alongside generally solid build quality. The chassis here may well be entirely plastic, but it isn’t hollow, feeling sturdy and looking almost like a metal alloy from afar.

There is also a slight two-tone nature to the Chromebook Plus 514’s pattern, with some elements a straight dark grey, with a small dividing line between that and a thin striped pattern on the lid, for instance. This adds a small accent and a little bit of extra flair compared to other laptops at this price.

A weight of 1.45kg makes this one of the heavier 14-inch Chromebooks I’ve used, but it remains compact and lightweight enough to be easily portable. The Chromebook Plus 514 is easy to slot into a bag or backpack and take with you to lectures, coffee shops, offices, or wherever you need to use it.

It’s also reasonably thin, but remains thick enough to pack in a decent port selection for a laptop of its price. On the left-hand side comes a USB-C port for charging, as well as a full-size HDMI port and a USB-A port for connecting external devices. The right-hand side is home to another USB-C and a headphone jack, as well as a Kensington lock.

As for the keyboard, the Chromebook Plus 514 is home to a slightly odd-shaped 65 percent key layout, complete with arrow keys and a handy function row. While this is a convenient layout for a more compact laptop like this one, there is one small sacrifice that makes it a small pain to use from time to time. The enter key is slimmer than the equivalent on a dedicated keyboard, and this can lead to inadvertent hits of the neighbouring hash key.

Otherwise, the Chromebook Plus 514’s keyboard is excellent, with lots of tactility, feeling comfortable to use for extended periods. It is also backlit, which is a useful addition for after-dark working, although the function row is more vividly lit than the alphanumeric keys. For a laptop of its size, the trackpad is large and feels reasonably responsive. It isn’t as tactile as with other Chromebooks I’ve used, but is still passable for a laptop at this price.

The packaging that the Chromebook Plus 514 comes in is in-keeping with Acer’s environmentally friendly mission, as the laptop itself is packaged in cardboard and a paper bag, while also being partially comprised of PCR plastics. The only piece of plastic used in the construction of the packaging is a small plastic bag that houses the charging cable and power brick. Otherwise, this is plastic-free.

Screen and Sound

• Solid viewing angles and resolution
• Isn’t the brightness panel, however
• Speakers are harsh at higher volumes

For a Chromebook Plus to be certified as such, it needs to have at least a Full HD (1080p) resolution display. With the Chromebook Plus 514, Acer has actually exceeded that requirement by bundling a 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS screen.

In testing, this proved to be a solid display for day-to-day working and when kicking back with shows on Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. It may not be the most vivid of displays with a quoted peak brightness of 250 nits, which is below the 300-nit average, but it should still be fine for day-to-day work and the productivity workloads that you’re likely to be undertaking.

With that in mind, being an IPS panel meant colours were solid, and viewing angles were suitably excellent. The slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio is convenient for providing more real estate for modern workflows, too.

As for its speakers, these are usable for movie watching or listening to music over Spotify at lower volumes, but turn it up too much and things can become a little too harsh. There also isn’t much in the way of bass, so even if they don’t sound muddy, there isn’t much in the way of low end punch, either. I am grateful for the fact they are upwards-firing speakers, meaning placing them on a softer surface such as a bed won’t muffle audio.

Performance

• Nippy for day-to-day workloads
• Lots of headroom for multi-tasking
• Storage feels quite stingy

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 offers a set of decent specs for a mid-range Chromebook. More affordable Chromebooks tend to stick firmly in the Intel sphere, but with this option, Acer has turned to AMD – specifically the quad-core Ryzen 3 7320C.

The presence of a newer Ryzen chip powered the Chromebook Plus 514 to some solid results in the Geekbench 6 benchmark suite, one of our only benchmark programs that works on ChromeOS. It sits in the middle of results from similarly-priced Chromebooks with Pentium processors falling behind, although options with Intel’s chips from their last two generations are better in multi-core workloads, given they tend to have six cores as opposed to four, as this Ryzen 3 7320C does.

With this in mind, the Chromebook Plus 514 felt nippy when running numerous Chrome tabs with Google Docs and Spotify running, as well as when having YouTube open in the background. The 8GB of RAM present provided enough headroom for multi-tasking, and while the 128GB SSD is a little stingy in size compared to some other Chromebooks at this price point, it’s still a good amount for installing apps, considering a lot of the usual documents that would fill the space up are contained on the cloud with the Google G Suite of applications.

There is a small amount of fan noise when the laptop first starts up, but it otherwise remains quiet under load, and also doesn’t get particularly warm either. The Chromebook Plus 514 therefore is a laptop you can actually use on your lap, as opposed to needing to have it placed down on your desk.

Software

• Magic Eraser and Offline File Sync are immensely useful
• Web-based Photoshop!
• ChromeOS is light and easy to navigate

Being a Chromebook Plus also means that this Acer Chromebook Plus 514 reaps the benefit of the gains that this new sector of Chromebooks have made in terms of software and new features. The most noteworthy addition here is Magic Eraser, a photo editing program previously found on Google Pixel phones which automatically erases unwanted objects or people from photos.

It works the same way on Chromebook as it does on a phone, where you select an item in the background to remove, and then the app puts a grey outline around it and removes it instantly, making it look as if it wasn’t there in the first place. It’s seriously clever, and a handy addition I got some use out of when checking photos I’d taken on a recent trip to London.

More useful for me than Magic Eraser, though, was Offline File Sync, which automatically downloads your files from Google Drive in the background so you can use them offline if you’re in a remote area, or if you’ve just got a patchy home Wi-Fi connection as I have. While convenient in the end, it is a faff to enable, being hidden in the Advanced section of the Chromebook Plus 514’s settings.

Google has also bundled in convenient AI video calling features with Chromebook Plus to help improve overall call quality. For instance, the Improve Lighting button makes a reasonable attempt at improving poor lighting environments, while the Cancel Background Noise attempts to make sure your voice is the only thing that’s heard during an important meeting. What’s convenient about these features is the fact they are cross-platform and work on both Zoom and Google Meet, among other platforms, so no one is left out.

For a lot of people, the biggest addition will be the presence of web-based Photoshop. This is another attempt from Google to position Chromebook Plus as a laptop for more than just simple web browsing, and it is convenient for providing features from full-fat Photoshop that people will use including light adjustment and marquee tools. While more advanced features are absent, you also get the headline-making AI Generative Expand and AI Generative Fill features here for adding in details with AI based on the prompts you provide.

Alongside all these new features, it’s worth remembering that this is ChromeOS, so it’s easy to use and is lightweight. We’re also seeing apps such as Steam work on ChromeOS, so they can conceivably be used for gaming workloads too, especially considering that cloud services such as GeForce Now also play nicely with ChromeOS, too. Of course, you are still limited on what can be done compared to Windows laptops, but it’s pleasant to see that Google’s OS isn’t as limiting as it once was.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 10 hours 24 minutes in the benchmark test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 impressed with its solid endurance. Over a video loop test at 50 percent brightness, it lasted for just shy of 10 and a half hours before conking out, which is in-keeping with a lot of other power-efficient Chromebooks, although falls short of Acer’s quoted 12 hours of run-time. You lose 10% charge over the course of an hour, so you’ll be able to keep chugging for a working day before needing to reach for the charger.

The convenient thing here is that the Chromebook Plus 514 bundles a power brick with a USB-C charger, meaning you can also use your own cable if you take this laptop with you on your travels. Battery recharge time from zero to full is also a touch over an hour at 65 minutes, meaning if you do need to charge up, then you won’t be waiting around for too long.

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