What is the game? While it’s usually associated with Chromebooks, Google and its hardware partners have made great strides in recent years to shake up that convention with the release of several cloud gaming laptops. One of the most popular choices is the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, which has been updated for 2024 with a new processor but retains everything that was great about the previous model. It’s a modest upgrade, but it’s still one of the best Chromebooks you can buy.
First off, if you already have the previous Chromebook 516 GE, there’s little reason to upgrade to the 2024 Chromebook Plus model. Aside from some minor cosmetic changes, it’s pretty much the same device. The processor is now an Intel Core 5 120U rather than the Core i5-1240P of the previous model, but you’re unlikely to notice any speed difference.
Photo: Daniel Thorpe Lancaster
Still, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE’s performance is teeth It’s great. The battery lasted me through a typical 8-hour workday, and when combined with the 8GB of RAM, it gives you plenty of headroom and processing power for multitasking. The laptop performed flawlessly, even as I frequently switched between different apps and over a dozen tabs during my testing, without the dual cooling fans becoming noisy.
As opposed to a Windows gaming laptop, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is designed as a cloud gaming machine, and it fits that role well. I do most of my gaming via Xbox Cloud Gaming and streaming via Nvidia GeForce Now, and ChromeOS handles both well. The laptop has Wi-Fi 6E and a dedicated Ethernet port, which worked smoothly and without any major issues or glitches, even during competitive gaming.
The only area where it’s been hit or miss is gaming, with Steam still in beta on ChromeOS. Vampire Survivor It runs buttery smooth on the Chromebook Plus 516 GE’s hardware, and if you want to game natively instead of streaming, this is the lane to go for. You might have issues with heavier games, but that’s to be expected with integrated graphics and a lightweight (by gaming standards) processor. Dead by DaylightFor example, I can open one of my favorite time-killing games, , via Steam, past the initial loading screen.
Photo: Daniel Thorpe Lancaster
