Gaming isn’t one thing you’d sometimes affiliate with Chromebooks, however Google and its {hardware} companions have made strides towards shaking that up with a handful of cloud gaming laptops lately. One of many extra common choices is the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, which simply obtained up to date for 2024 with a brand new processor whereas maintaining all the pieces nice concerning the earlier mannequin. It is a modest improve, nevertheless it’s nonetheless one of many best Chromebooks you should buy.
Let’s get this out of the best way first: If you have already got the earlier Chromebook 516 GE, there’s little or no purpose to improve to the 2024 Chromebook Plus mannequin. Outdoors of some small aesthetic updates, that is largely the identical system. The processor is now an Intel Core 5 120U as a substitute of the older mannequin’s Core i5-1240P, and also you probably received’t discover a lot of a distinction in velocity.
{Photograph}: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster
Nonetheless, efficiency on the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is implausible, and the battery saved me chugging by way of common eight-hour workdays. Mixed with 8 GB of RAM, you’ve loads of room and horsepower for multitasking. The laptop computer steadily dealt with fast swaps between completely different apps and greater than a dozen tabs with ease throughout my testing, and the twin followers maintaining issues cool by no means obtained loud sufficient to be annoying.
In distinction to Home windows gaming laptops, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is geared as a cloud gaming machine, and it suits that function nicely. You’ll do most of your gaming through Xbox Cloud Gaming and streaming by way of Nvidia GeForce Now, and ChromeOS handles each nicely. The laptop computer has Wi-Fi 6E and a devoted Ethernet port on board to maintain issues working easily, and I didn’t expertise any main hitches or points with even aggressive video games.
The one gaming space that was hit-or-miss was Steam, which remains to be in beta on ChromeOS. Light-weight indie video games like Vampire Survivors run like butter on the Chromebook Plus 516 GE’s {hardware}, and that’s the lane I’d follow if I wished to run video games natively as a substitute of streaming. Heavier video games can have some hassle, which is to be anticipated with built-in graphics and a light-weight (by gaming requirements) processor. I couldn’t get Useless by Daylight, one in all my favourite time killers, to open by way of Steam past the preliminary loading display, for instance.
{Photograph}: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster
