Acer Chromebook Spin 713 Convertible (2022)

Acer hits peak Chromebook with this speedy, slender and versatile laptop – and the price is unbeatable

- TIM DANTON

The impressive IPS screen sailed through our technical tests

PRICE £542 (£650 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk

Google’s Chromebook initiative began way back in 2011, and with a decade of progress behind it Chrome OS has graduated from its education niche into the business world. This slim convertible – dressed in sober grey livery – is an excellent example of Chromebooks’ maturity.

Cast aside any thoughts of cut-down specs, as the Spin 713 Convertible offers a similar amount of power to a mid-range Windows laptop. It’s built around 11th generation Core chips, as opposed to the tenth generation processors you may see in last year’s models. The clue, as always, is in the prefix of the model name; here, the Core i5-1135G7 as opposed to the Core i5-10210U of 2021’s mid-range Spin 713. The G7 suffix also denotes the Iris Xe graphics inside, as opposed to Intel’s far less powerful UHD Graphics chip found in older CPUs.

This produced a magnificent set of results in our regular Chromebook tests. Scores of 163 in JetStream2 and 103 in Speedometer 2 would have put it towards the top of the table in our most recent Chromebooks Labs (see issue 321, p76), while its Geekbench 5 scores of 1,174 (single-core) and 4,729 (multicore) beat all comers. It averaged 135fps in GFXBench’s offscreen Manhattan 3 test, and 73fps in the Car Chase benchmark, so 3D acceleration is there when you need it.