Acer Chromebook Plus 516 review: The new king of big-screen budget Chromebooks?

The biggest challenge with the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 is dealing with what it is, not what it isn’t. Acer’s latest big screen Chromebook is not a successor to its superb Chromebook 516GE: the 16in Chromebook that was built for gaming, but turned out to be brilliant for business. Nor is it an XL upgrade of 2023’s Chromebook Plus 515: one of the best of the first wave of Chromebook Plus devices, with a spec that punched above its price. Instead, it’s a rather solid but unexciting budget Chromebook with a larger-than-average display. It makes a decent desktop replacement, but as Acer’s new big-screen Chromebook Plus, it’s just a little disappointing.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516: Design

The Chromebook Plus 515 was already one of the biggest Chromebooks, and the Plus 516 is larger still, with a 359 x 253mm desktop footprint and a chassis that’s 19mm thick at its thickest point. It’s not particularly heavy, at 1.7Kg, but it is a little unwieldy if you’re used to an ultraportable device. The design is also a little dull in comparison to the Plus 515, with a simple silver plastic lid instead of the old, two-tone styling with its faux-brushed aluminium textures.

Still, there are some positives. The construction might be all plastic, but it feels robust. Unlike some slimline Chromebook Plus models, there’s no need to treat the Plus 516 with kid gloves. There’s also plenty of room for connectivity, with two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and an HDMI 1.4 for hooking up external monitors and projectors. It’s a slight shame that both Type-C ports are on the same side when you need one of them for charging, but not a deal breaker in most scenarios.

Acer integrated Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6E depending on the specification, and all models have Bluetooth 5.3 for hooking up a mouse or headset.

You also get room for a full-sized keyboard, complete with a numeric pad. The layout is sensible, though we’d like to see larger Ctrl and Fn keys on the left-hand side, and you also get the new Quick Insert key, giving you immediate access to context-sensitive options and Gemini AI capabilities, including Help me write text generation. You might not get the crisp, clicky feel of the keyboard on Acer’s Chromebook Plus 714 or Chromebook 516GE, but it’s quiet, comfortable, and reasonably speedy. The OceanGlass touchpad is also smooth and responsive, even if Acer could have stretched it out a little further to make use of the available space.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516: Display

The Chromebook Plus 516’s screen is pretty good by the standards of budget Chromebooks, but not so great if you’re looking for a more premium device. Part of the problem is its resolution: 1920 x 1200 looks slightly blocky on a 16in display, and while the 2560 x 1600 display of the Chromebook 516GE would have pushed the price up, it also would have made for a sharper, higher definition image with smoother text.

In terms of brightness and contrast, it’s a cut above the cheapest Chromebooks with a maximum luminance of 280cd/m2. However, it can only display 61% of the sRGB color gamut and under 44% of DCI-P3. Chromebooks aren’t generally viable for creative professionals, but if you’re looking to do anything beyond lightweight image or video editing for social media, you’re really going to need something with a better display.

On the more positive side, the 1080p webcam produces good, well-exposed video in daylight and bright artificial lighting, albeit with some noise creeping in at lower light levels. Audio is also surprisingly good, with more bass than you’ll get from most sub-£500 Chromebooks and a slightly higher volume ceiling before the tone grows harsh and wearing. For video calls and meetings, it’s not a bad choice.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516: Performance

The Chromebook Plus 515 pushed ahead of most of the other first-wave Chromebook Plus devices by giving you a choice of Core i3-1215U and Core i5-1245U processors, where most rivals stuck to slower Ryzen 3 or Core i3-N300 series processors. We tested the Core i5 version, and it could go toe-to-toe with significantly more expensive models. The Chromebook Plus 516 can be found with a choice of 13th-generation Core i3 and Core i5 processors, or Intel’s newer Raptor Lake Core 3 100U, Core 5 120U, and Core 7 150U chips. Our test model features the Core 3 100U; a six-core processor with two faster P cores that can handle four threads through SMT, and four E cores that can manage one thread each. It’s matched with the standard Chromebook Plus 8GB of RAM.

This spec is faster than the Intel Core i3 N305 and AMD Ryzen 3 Chromebooks we’ve seen from some manufacturers, including HP with its Chromebook Plus 15a, and feels pretty snappy in everyday use while running mainstream productivity apps. It scores 1916 in Geekbench 6’s single-core benchmark and 5670 in the multi-threaded tests. However, it’s still slower in multi-threaded benchmarks than the old Core i5 Chromebook Plus 515, which scored 1802 and 6019 in the same tests, not to mention the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus with its Core 5 120U, which scored 2072 and 7608.

3D performance isn’t bad, with a score of 8054 in the 3D Mark Wild Life benchmark, against 6855 from the Chromebook Plus 515 and 9873 from the Galaxy Chromebook Plus. All the same, if you’re looking for a serious business workhorse or want to run Linux or more demanding Android apps, we’d push upwards to the Core 5 or Core 7 variants instead.

You can get a working day of use from the Chromebook Plus 516 before a recharge, but you’ll need to keep the screen brightness levels down and avoid working after hours. In our battery rundown test it kept going for 10 hours of video playback, which is a few hours less than the new Chromebook Plus 514 or the Samsung, but an hour longer than the old Chromebook Plus 515.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516: Is it worth it?

We described the old Chromebook Plus 515 as ‘a superb business-ready Chromebook if you’re on a budget’, but the Chromebook Plus 516 doesn’t look quite as good over eighteen months on. The screen is decent, but far from brilliant, and you really need to take a step up in the spec to get the same kind of performance. The new model doesn’t feel like a bargain in the way the old one did. However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t good value, and it’s still a better option than the HP Chromebook 15a if you’re operating on a tight budget and need to roll out a small fleet of Chrome OS devices. If you have more money to work with, then the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus is the big-screen Chromebook to beat, but if you need to keep below £500 per unit, the Chromebook Plus 516 should be added to your shortlist.

Acer Chromebook Plus 516 specifications