Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE (2024) Laptop Review

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE (2024) is only available in Obsidian Black. Here's a photo of the bottom of the laptop.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE feels well-built. It has a metal lid, bottom, and deck with plastic trim and hinges; this combination of materials feels durable and exhibits minimal flex when pushing on the top or bottom covers and through the keyboard deck. The finish isn't the most scratch-resistant, though, and it's a fingerprint magnet. The feet feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE has a decent hinge. It's quite stable, displaying minimal wobble when typing aggressively, and there's a fair bit of hinge resistance. While the hinge resistance means it's easy to adjust, the downside is it's too heavy to lift with a single finger.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE has bad serviceability, as there are almost no user-replaceable components. Nevertheless, accessing the internals is straightforward; you only need to remove 11 Philips screws and undo the clips holding the bottom panel with a prying tool. You can download the user manual from Acer's website for more information.

• Documentation
• Carrying case
• 65W USB-C power adapter and cable

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE is only available with a QHD+ IPS display with 100% sRGB coverage. It looks sharp for the 16-inch display size, and its 16:10 aspect ratio gives you some extra vertical screen real estate for browsing websites or reading documents. The downside is that you'll almost always have black bars at the top and bottom when viewing videos.

Although the display has a 120Hz refresh rate, its response time is slow, resulting in visible ghosting behind fast-moving objects. Even though the display is a 120Hz panel, it doesn't mean you'll get 120 fps (and the responsiveness of a 120Hz display) all the time when using cloud gaming services; the frame rate and input lag depend on your internet connection.

The display's contrast ratio is decent and within a normal range for IPS panels. However, it's low compared to other display technologies like VA or OLED. The effect of this lower contrast is that blacks look gray in dark environments.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings but not 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.

This display's reflection handling is decent. The matte finish diffuses reflections from direct light sources across its surface. In practice, reflections are still faintly visible when the screen is at maximum brightness, but it isn't too noticeable. Reflections will be noticeable and distracting when viewing dark content, however.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is okay. The image dims and washes out relatively quickly as you move to the side, so you need to be more or less directly in front of the screen to see an accurate image.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. Again, the image looks dimmer and more washed out from above or below. You need to look at the screen more or less straight on if you need perfect accuracy, which can be hard in tight spaces with very little room to tilt the screen, like on a bus or airplane.

The out-of-the-box display accuracy is decent. Most color inaccuracies are minor. The color temperature is on the warmer side, giving the image a slight yellowish hue. As for gamma, it's too high in almost every scenario, so content looks darker than intended; the exception is in very dark scenes, where the gamma is too low, resulting in content that's brighter than it should be.

This display offers full coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space, so it's great for SDR content. It also offers good coverage of the Adobe RGB and DCI P3 color spaces; however, it's insufficient for professional print photography or HDR video production.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE (2024) provides a great typing experience. Its keyboard layout is fairly standard, and the keys are a good size; it's easy to get used to. There's a good amount of key travel, and while the keys feel responsive, there's a fair bit of resistance; depending on your preference, the keyboard could be tiring to use for long periods of time. The backlighting is good. You can see the LEDs from all sides of the keys, and while they're bright enough to be serviceable, they could be brighter. This would make it easier to see the key legends with the RGB backlighting. Finally, there are four RGB zones that you can set to a variety of colors or to match your wallpaper.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE has a good touchpad overall. It tracks movements and gestures well, and palm rejection works great. Unfortunately, dragging and dropping is a problem, as the item often gets dropped prematurely. As for the fit, it would've been better to see a larger touchpad that fills up the lower deck more. This is a diving board touchpad, so you can only click towards the bottom. The touchpad provides decent feedback (clicks are crisp enough), but you have to press down harder than expected for your input to register.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE's speakers get loud with minimal compression at high volumes. However, they sound boxy, particularly at higher volumes, and while there's some bass, there isn't enough to provide a full sound.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE has an okay webcam. Fine details are generally clear, albeit a bit soft at times, and there's visible noise in the image. There's also a noticeable green tint, particularly in darker areas of the image, and the exposure is generally too low resulting in a darker image overall. The microphone is not great, however. While you can understand what's being said, there's noticeable white noise in the background.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516GE has a decent port selection. The USB-A port supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10 Gbps. The two USB-C ports also support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed, as well as DisplayPort Alt Mode and charging.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE's wireless adapter is an Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211. Wi-Fi 6E gives you access to the 6GHz band, providing faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous wireless standards; however, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE is available with the following CPUs:

• Intel Core 5 120U (10 cores/12 threads, up to 5.0GHz, 12MB cache)
• Intel Core 7 150U (10 cores/12 threads, up to 5.4GHz, 12MB cache)

These processors belong to Intel's Raptor Lake refresh that was released alongside the newer Meteor Lake architecture. They use a hybrid architecture, with two performance and eight efficiency cores; unlike Meteor Lake processors, there's no NPU (for AI tasks) or low-power Efficiency cores (LP-E). These U-series CPUs are low-wattage processors (15-watt TDP) intended for general productivity and multitasking. The Core 7 150U is faster than the Core 5 due to its higher clock speeds, but the difference isn't huge. Performance-wise, they have more than enough processing power for a lightweight operating system like Chrome OS and nearly any productivity tasks you can do on it. Cloud gaming isn't particularly CPU-intensive; you just need a good internet connection.

You can read more about Intel's new naming scheme on their website and more about the hybrid architecture employed in these U-series processors in the product brief.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE is only available with integrated graphics.

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

You can get this laptop with 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, or 2TB of storage. The SSD is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

The Acer Chromebook 516 GE has a great overall score in the Geekbench 5 benchmarks. However, while single-core performance is higher, the 12th generation Intel Core CPUs found in the older Acer Chromebook 516 GE (2022) actually offer better multi-threaded and GPU performance. Nevertheless, the Intel Core 5 120U has no problem handling general productivity tasks like text processing, web browsing, and video playback, and it can also handle some light photo and video editing. The Core 7 150U is only slightly faster thanks to its increase in clock speeds. As for GPU performance, the integrated Intel Graphics aren't suitable for demanding workloads. If you need a lot of GPU processing power, it's best to get a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU or an Apple MacBook Pro with an Apple ARM-based SoC.

Cinebench R23 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

The Acer Chromebook 516 GE's Intel Core 5 120U performs well in Blender, and the Core 7 150U should be somewhat faster due to its increase in clock frequency. However, it's still far slower than rendering on a Windows device with a dedicated GPU; even an entry-level discrete GPU, like an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050, can render images much faster.

The Acer Chromebook 516 Plus GE performs poorly in the Basemark GPU benchmark. Its Intel iGPU isn't designed for gaming. It can handle most mobile games from the Google Play Store, but you may have to lower the graphics settings slightly to get smooth gameplay.

Borderlands 3 doesn't run on Chrome OS.

Civilization VI doesn't run on Chrome OS.

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

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

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE is silent when idle; the fans ramp up under load, but not to a level that is bothersome or annoying.

We can't test the performance over time because our testing software isn't compatible with Chrome OS. Like most thin and light laptops, there's likely some thermal throttling on the CPU and GPU. The performance loss isn't noticeable if you only perform light tasks like web browsing and video playback, but it is when you push the system to near-maximum capacity, like when gaming.

The Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE runs on the 64-bit version of Chrome OS. There aren't any pre-installed applications other than those that typically come with Chrome OS. However, it does come with a few trial periods, like NVIDIA GeForce NOW.

GeForce NOW is a cloud-gaming service; NVIDIA has a few subscription tiers, and the highest tier offers game streaming at up to 4k @ 120 fps, or up to 240 fps at lower resolutions if you prefer a higher frame rate over visual fidelity. Unfortunately, the ChromeOS version of the app caps the frame rate and resolution to 120 fps at QHD+. As with any cloud-based streaming service, your internet connection is the limiting factor; NVIDIA states that an internet connection of 35 Mbps and no more than 80 ms of latency when connecting to their servers are the minimum requirements for QHD+ streaming on the ChromeOS app. In addition to keyboard and mouse support, NVIDIA advertises controller support for XBOX and Sony controllers, as well as a series of Bluetooth controllers designed for mobile devices.

Finally, every Chromebook has an 'expiration date' at which it stops receiving software updates. According to Google's official document, the Acer Chromebook 516 GE's end-of-life is June 2032. Google may extend this date as they have for other Chromebooks; it's best to check their official document for any changes.