Acer Chromebook Plus 514 (2023) Laptop Review

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is available in a Silver or Steel Gray color. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The build quality is passable. The laptop is entirely plastic and feels cheap. There's a fair amount of flex on the lid and keyboard deck, and the display twists when manipulating it. Its overall construction feels pretty rough; there's a gap between the display and the bezel on one side of the screen, and some parts creak when handling the laptop. The feet feel reasonably sturdy, though there's a high chance they'll fall off in the future as they're glued on.

The hinge is sub-par. It's quite stiff, making it impossible to open the laptop with one hand. It doesn't wobble much when typing heavily, though it moves a bit when touching the screen, which isn't great if you want to use touch input.

Accessing the internals is straightforward; you need to remove 10 screws and undo the latches holding the bottom panel with a prying tool. The service guide indicates that the SSD is user-replaceable; however, our 128GB unit has a soldered eMMC drive. The 256GB and 512GB likely have a user-replaceable M.2 PCIe Gen 3 NVMe SSD, though we can't confirm.

Get the service guide here.

• 65W power adapter and cord
• Documentation
• Laptop sleeve

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is available with the following displays:

• 14" IPS 1920 x 1200 60Hz (45% NTSC)
• 14" IPS 1920 x 1200 60Hz (Touchscreen, 45% NTSC)

The two available displays are visually identical; the only difference between them is the support for touch input. Configurations without touch input have a model number starting with CB514-3H, while those with touch input have a model number starting with CB514-3HT. In terms of sharpness, although a FHD+ (1920 x 1200) resolution isn't particularly impressive, it looks fairly sharp on a 14-inch display. The 16:10 aspect ratio is great for productivity; it gives you slightly more vertical space than a standard 16:9 display, allowing you to see more information at once when reading a document or website.

The ASUS Chromebook Plus 514 is only available with 60Hz displays. This panel has a fairly slow response time, resulting in some ghosting behind fast-moving objects.

The display's contrast ratio is decent and within the typical range for most IPS panels; however, it's still relatively low compared to other display technologies like VA and OLED. This contrast level makes blacks look gray in dim settings. The non-touch panel has the same advertised contrast ratio.

The touch-sensitive IPS display's maximum brightness is acceptable. It's fine for most indoor settings but isn't ideal for sunny rooms or outdoors in broad daylight. It gets very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing as it causes less eye strain. The non-touchscreen has the same advertised brightness.

The display's reflection handling is decent. While its coating is technically matte, it behaves like a cross between a matte and a glossy display. Direct reflections look more defined than most matte finishes, but there's less halo effect around bright light sources. For the most part, reflections aren't a problem when viewing light-color content with the screen at maximum brightness, but you may still have trouble sometimes because the screen just doesn't get very bright.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out quickly as you move to the side. You can still share the screen with someone else for text documents and other casual content; however, it's best to be directly in front of the screen if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work.

The display's vertical viewing angle is okay. Like the horizontal viewing angle, the image dims and washes when viewing from above and below, so you need to look at the screen more or less straight on to see an accurate image, which can be challenging in tight places where you have little room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The display's accuracy is bad out of the box. Most colors are inaccurate because the panel has a narrow color gamut, and the white balance is noticeably off, especially at mid-brightness. The color temperature is on the warmer side, giving the image a slight reddish tint. As for the gamma, almost all scenes are too bright.

The 1080p IPS display has a poor color gamut. It doesn't even have full sRGB coverage, so most content, like websites and YouTube videos, will look slightly washed out. Its coverage of the wider Adobe RGB and DCI P3 color spaces is too low for color-critical work like photo and video editing. The non-touch panel has the same color gamut.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514's keyboard feels good to type on. Its layout is easy to adapt to; it just feels a little cramped, which can cause some fatigue if you aren't used to it. The keys have a good amount of travel and require little force to actuate; however, they're on the mushy side, and many keys on the second and third rows aren't stable. Backlighting is optional, so check the specifications if it's important to you.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 has a good touchpad. It's reasonably large, and except for the left and right edges, where it seems less responsive, it tracks movements and gestures well. Palm detection works as intended. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad; the buttons feel fairly tactile.

The speakers get pretty loud with minimal compression at high volume levels. Unfortunately, they sound tinny and unnatural, with no bass and very little treble.

The webcam's video quality is decent. Although the webcam has a 1080p resolution, the image looks soft, with fine details lacking definition. The colors are a little off, but not enough to be a major issue. Voices come across loud and clear over the microphone with little to no background noise. The privacy cover is only a physical barrier, meaning the system can still record audio with it closed.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514's port selection is okay. All USB ports (type A and C) support USB 3.2 Gen 1 data transfer speed of up to 5Gbps. The HDMI port can only output at a maximum resolution of 4k at 30Hz.

The wireless adapter is a MediaTek MT7922A22M. Wi-Fi 6E gives access to the 6GHz band, providing faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous Wi-Fi standards. However, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen  3 7320C (4 cores/8 threads, up to 4.1GHz, 4MB L3 Cache)
• AMD Ryzen 5 7520C (4 cores/8 threads, up to 4.3GHz, 4MB L3 Cache)

Based on AMD's older Zen 2 architecture, the Ryzen 3 7320C and Ryzen 7520C are low-power CPUs designed for budget Chromebooks. They can only handle light productivity tasks and media consumption. The Ryzen 5 7520C is only slightly faster than the Ryzen 3 7320C, as it's basically the same as the Ryzen 3 7320C but with faster clock speeds, which typically results in only a small performance boost.

The AMD Ryzen  3 7320C and Ryzen 5 7520C have the same AMD Radeon 610M integrated GPU. Based on AMD's RDNA 2 micro-architecture, this last-gen graphics processor can only handle light tasks like web browsing, text processing, and video playback. You can play some games from the Google Play Store, but you'll have to play with low settings to get playable frame rates. Also, know that some titles from the Google Play Store might not work, as they're primarily mobile games designed to work on Android smartphones and tablets. Some even lack keyboard, mouse, and controller support.

You can get this laptop with 8GB or 16GB of RAM. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage. Acer's specifications indicate that the storage drive is an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD, but upon inspection of the internals, we found that the 128GB model has a soldered eMMC drive, which is much slower than SSDs. The 256GB and 512GB models likely have user-replaceable M.2 SSDs, though we can't confirm as we haven't tested those models.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 has a mediocre overall score in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. AMD's Ryzen 3 7320C CPU can only handle light, general productivity tasks like web browsing, text processing, and video playback. The system still feels reasonably snappy and responsive because Chrome OS runs well on low-end hardware; however, you'll likely experience slowdowns and stutters when multitasking with multiple Chrome tabs or applications. The AMD Radeon 610M integrated GPU also performs poorly, so don't expect to do anything remotely intensive.

Cinebench R23 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 performs poorly in Blender. The CPU is slow to render 3D images, and there's no support for GPU rendering. If you need to render images, it's best to get a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU, like the Dell XPS 16 (2024), or a MacBook Pro with Apple silicon, like the Apple MacBook Pro 14 (M3, 2023).

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514's AMD Radeon 610M integrated GPU performs terribly in the Basemark GPU benchmark, which isn't surprising since it's a low-power graphics processor designed for light productivity tasks. You can play some mobile games from the Google Play Store, but you may have to play with low settings to get smooth gameplay. Even then, performance can vary depending on the game because most titles from the Google Play Store are mobile games designed for Android smartphones and tablets.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514's 128GB eMMC drive is slow. However, the system still feels reasonably responsive because Chrome OS is a lightweight operating system that mostly runs web-based applications. The slow read and write speeds mainly affect processes like copying files and installing or launching large apps.

Borderlands 3 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Civilization VI doesn't work on Chrome OS.

Counter-Strike 2 doesn't work on Chrome OS.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn't work on Chrome OS.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514's keyboard deck is relatively cool under load, and the heat spot is at the top of the deck, away from where most people rest their hands. The fan is audible under load but isn't distracting at all.

We can't test the performance over time because UNIGINE Heaven and Cinebench R23 aren't compatible with Chrome OS. There's likely some thermal throttling on the CPU and GPU, as this is a relatively compact laptop with a single fan.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 runs on the 64-bit version of Chrome OS. There's no additional pre-installed software other than those that typically come with Chrome OS. Every Chromebook has an 'expiration date' at which it stops receiving software updates, and according to Google's official document, the Chromebook Plus 514's end-of-life is June 2033. Google may extend this date as they have in the past for other Chromebooks; it's best to check their official document for any changes.