Acer Ryzen 3 Chromebook Spin 514 Appears at Best Buy and MEH

The latest Chromebooks powered by AMD’s Ryzen C-Series APUs offer great alternatives to Intel devices that don’t like options. That said, our first hands-on tests with a few Ryzen 5 Chromebooks give us a hint that Intel’s Comet Lake processors are still king of the hill when it comes to raw power, but that’s okay. If Chromebook makers can offer the same features and build quality, but replace an Intel with an AMD and it saves consumers a lot of money, it is a victory.

Sadly, I don’t think we’re going to see these huge price differences between AMD and Intel devices and a new Best Buy listing backs up my theory. We recently took Acer’s new Chromebook Spin 514 for a test drive and while it’s a well-built machine with proper horsepower, it didn’t impress me more than devices like the Spin 713. or even the Lenovo Flex 5. The model we tested was the Ryzen 5 with 8GB of RAM and yes it is powerful enough for corporate users but it did not perform as well as the 10th gen Core i5. from Intel and this is a problem as I almost guarantee the 514 we tried will be priced higher than the Spin 713.

Anyway, back to the Best Buy list. This morning, Best Buy added an upcoming listing for the Ryzen 3 Acer Chromebook Spin 514. It comes with 4GB of RAM and just 64GB of storage. Now I know that’s enough for casual users who just surf the web, verify their bank account, and watch YouTube but let’s take a look at the price. The model listed on Best Buy at the moment has an MSRP of $ 479.99. It’s a decent change less than the Spin 713, but at the same time, there’s a lot of trade-off going on here.

Let’s talk about these processors first. Benchmark scores aren’t everything, but they give us a good idea of ​​what to expect from a device. AMD’s Ryzen 3 is no slouch and it even crashes very close to the 10th gen Core i5 when it comes to single-core scores. The problem is, AMD has two cores and four threads. The Intel switches four cores and eight threads. As a result, the Intel processor more than doubled multicore speeds in Geekbench 4 tests.

Then this particular model offered at Best Buy has only 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of eMMC storage. Now, we have argued that most users won’t notice any difference between eMMC and the NVMe offered by Acer’s Spin 713. Still, the Spin 713’s storage is faster and it comes with 128GB. Just say. RAM, however, is a big deal. High-end Chromebooks should have 8 GB of RAM. I understand this is probably the mid-to-low end for this device, but remember, its price is close to $ 500. For that price, you can get a Lenovo Chromebook Flex 5 Core i3 with 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and accessories right now on Amazon.

Other than that, the Spin 713 has that pretty bright and super crisp 3: 2 display. The 514 isn’t a bad screen but it’s 16: 9 and it doesn’t have the pop you find on the Spin 713. You’ll get a backlit keyboard and USI compatibility with either Chromebook, but the AMD powered 514 is a tough sell in my opinion when you can frequently buy the Spin 713 or the HP x360 14c for as little as $ 529. Even at the retail price of $ 629, I should recommend the Spin 713 over this 14 ″ AMD model from Acer. Hopefully when the more rugged models arrive, they’ll be more in tune with the pricing we’re seeing of Lenovo’s discounted ThinkPad C13 Yoga. For now, I’m going to have to step up to the consumer model Acer Chromebook Spin 514. Anyway, the Ryzen 3 version of this Chromebook is slated to launch on March 21 at Best Buy and you can check out the details. below .

Acer Chromebook Spin 514 at Best Buy