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 in recent times. One of many extra well-liked choices is the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, which simply received up to date for 2024 with a brand new processor whereas protecting every part nice concerning the earlier mannequin. It is a modest improve, but it surely’s nonetheless one of many greatest Chromebooks you should buy.
Let’s get this out of the way in which 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. Exterior of some small aesthetic updates, that is largely the identical gadget. The processor is now an Intel Core 5 120U as a substitute of the older mannequin’s Core i5-1240P, and also you seemingly gained’t discover a lot of a distinction in velocity.
{Photograph}: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster
Nonetheless, efficiency on the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is improbable, and the battery saved me chugging by common eight-hour workdays. Mixed with 8 GB of RAM, you have got loads of room and horsepower for multitasking. The laptop computer ceaselessly dealt with fast swaps between totally different apps and greater than a dozen tabs with ease throughout my testing, and the twin followers protecting issues cool by no means received 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 matches that function nicely. You’ll do most of your gaming by way of Xbox Cloud Gaming and streaming by 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 operating 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 continues 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 keep on with if I needed to run video games natively as a substitute of streaming. Heavier video games can have some bother, which is to be anticipated with built-in graphics and a light-weight (by gaming requirements) processor. I couldn’t get Useless by Daylight, certainly one of my favourite time killers, to open by Steam past the preliminary loading display, for instance.
{Photograph}: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster
