Acer TravelMate Spin B3 FHD 11.6" Laptop (Celeron N4120,4 GB DDR4 SDRAM,64 GB eMMC,Windows 10 Pro) Black

Product Information

With the one glaring exception of the Sk Hynix SSD, this is a good machine, and including a Thunderbolt port elevates it to be much more useful than we’d anticipated. It doesn’t cost much to boost the SSD to something much more suitable, and thankfully with this machine, that type of enhancement is possible. The new TravelMate P6 offers an Intel 11th Generation Core i7 at 2.8GHz, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 1,900-by-1,200-pixel display with Intel Xe Graphics. That should be plenty of power for business apps such as spreadsheets and word processing with moderate graphics needs. Yet this laptop weighs just 2.2 pounds, hitting the 1-kilogram milestone that signifies the very lightest of the ultraportable laptop market. The unit measures 0.66 by 12.28 by 8.9 inches (HWD).

Cinebench R23, a muti-core CPU test, uses the company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene. Here, the TravelMate came in third, behind the MacBook's high score of 6,804 points and the HP's 4,730 points, just 20 points ahead of the TravelMate. Both the ThinkPad and the Latitude lagged the TravelMate by more than 1,000 points. Primate Labs' GeekBench 5.4.1 Pro simulates multi-core performance of popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Here, the TravelMate was second only to the MacBook's 7,679 score, at 5,080 points. This 256GB Sk Hynix BC501 SSD has a firmware issue that is well documented, and as we’ll discuss in the performance section, where write speed drops to HDD speeds in certain circumstances. What doesn’t need any help is the battery score as tested by PCMark10. At over ten hours, with the screen brightness turned down to 120 nits, that’s more than a working day of use. To summarise, the processing power of this model is probably overkill for general office use, but the GPU isn’t anything special. Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).Given its low cost and relatively modest specification, the P4 could have been an easy justification for getting something with a more modern processor, like the P2. What doesn’t help is that this machine uses DDR4 RAM, and newer designs with DDR5 memory tend to run better with this integrated GPU as it uses system memory, not VRAM. GFXBench 5.0 is a cross-platform GPU performance benchmark that stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. We run two tests: Aztec Ruins (1440p) and Car Chase (1080p), which exercise graphics and compute shaders—but Aztec Ruins relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API), while Car Chase uses hardware tessellation. We record the results in frames per second (fps); higher numbers are better. On Aztec Ruins, the MacBook was far in front at 78fps, followed by the TravelMate at 48fps, on down to the Latitude at 40fps. With Car Chase, likewise, the MacBook blew the others away, at 178fps. Again, the TravelMate was second, at 114fps, down to the Latitude, at 97fps. Setting aside from the MacBook's strong performance on GFXBench, the TravelMate was the top graphics performer among the laptops with Iris Xe, but they are a close clustering.

Users don’t want to have Norton leap up five seconds after the first boot to tell them the sky is falling or some of the other dubious software installed on this machine. If users want those things badly enough, they will install them, and to assume otherwise is just rude. One side note to our internal investigations was the battery, the one that Acer claims is 56 Whr. Based on a quoted voltage and amperage printed on the battery, our maths says 54.5 Whr is a more accurate number.Primate Labs' GeekBench 5.4.1 Pro simulates multi-core performance of popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Here, the TravelMate was second only to the MacBook's 7,679 score, at 5,080 points. The highlight of this P2 SKU is undoubtedly the 12th Gen Intel Core i5-1235U processor, a design we’ve seen previously that sports ten cores and can process 12 threads simultaneously. The performance offered on this machine is something of a mixed bag. We’ve previously tested other machines using the same Core i5-1235U and got better scores than these, and the difference may be down to the memory specs. MIL-STD 810G/H is a testing protocol conducted in controlled settings and does not guarantee future performance in all situations. Do not attempt to simulate these tests, as damage resulting from this will not be covered by Acer's standard warranty.