Acer's no stranger to delivering budget laptops that stick to the bare essentials, selling entry-level hardware with the low-cost ChromeOS to create affordable Chromebooks. Take the Acer Chromebook 315, which has now been refreshed for several generations. The latest revision (starts at $359; $439 as tested in model CB315-4HT-P8PQ) remains firmly in the budget category, with the peak model topping out at $500. This pricing, though, puts it in competition with some impressive machines, like Lenovo's excellent 5i Chromebook, not to mention some Windows-based laptops. We find 2023's Chromebook 315 a less appealing prospect than past efforts, with underwhelming hardware relegating it, at best, to a second-tier Chromebook pick.

Design and Configurations: Keeping It Simple

The 2023 Acer Chromebook 315 keeps up Acer’s design ethos from recent years—for better or worse. It has a plastic shell that looks like it might be metal, not terribly convincing but not flimsy, either. Little is notable about the design language, lending it a generic and forgettable feeling. Hard to ignore, though, is the keyboard, which continues Acer’s use of an almost convex keycap that's far more wiggly and wobbly than a keyboard should be.

Acer's keyboard does pack a number pad to one side, a welcome feature, and Acer shrinks the arrow keys so that they’re all an even size and harder to mix up. It’s not the best layout, but it’s about as usable as it can get without taking up more space or offsetting the arrow keys. Unfortunately, you'll find no keyboard backlighting here.

Asus includes a sizable touchpad on this model that’s coated in what it dubs “OceanGlass,” recycled ocean-bound plastics. It’s actually deliciously smooth and has a soft but distinct click when depressed. It’s a pad I’d be happy to have on any other laptop, but it doesn’t get a chance to shine on this one.

At the center of the Chromebook 315 is an unexceptional display. It’s a 15.6-inch, full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen with an IPS panel. Thanks to the display's anti-glare coating, it’s easy to view under a lot of different conditions, but it’s not terribly sharp for the size, and it's weak on contrast. Acer also uses thick bezels around the display, which has the unfortunate effect of making the rest of the laptop bigger than it needs to be. Much unused space on the laptop base could have been trimmed if Acer went with an updated display and slimmer bezels.

Not only is the Chromebook 315 relatively thick at 0.79 inch, but it feels heavier than it needs to be. You could forgive a powerful gaming laptop its weight because of the extra metal necessary for cooling, but this Chromebook's 6-watt chip doesn’t even have cooling vents. Still, the Acer Chromebook 315 weighs 3.65 pounds—not egregiously heavy, but certainly no lightweight.

The rest of the hardware is rounded out with a middling mix of connections. Acer includes a single USB Type-A and USB Type-C port on each side, providing a way to charge the Chromebook on either side and flexibility for peripherals. The Type-C ports are both capable of 10Gbps speeds, and the Type-A ports are 5Gbps. The left side of the laptop includes a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm audio jack, while the right side includes a Kensington cable locking slot. Wi-Fi 6 defines the wireless connection. Turning to the negative, Acer uses a not-great 720p webcam that completely overexposes even in settings that are not particularly bright. Worse even, when it’s not peaking, the image is noisy and lacking in detail.

Acer situates this Chromebook's speakers on the underside of the laptop, though it has plenty of unused space on the keyboard deck that could have housed them for better audio output.

The Chromebook 315 comes in a few different configurations with only some small variances among them. All models come with the same display, though appear to either have multi-touch or lack it on the touch screen. It’s unclear whether some models include keyboard backlighting, as it appears listed as a default on the product page yet isn’t available on our test unit.

The main differences are in memory and storage. You’ll get either 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM and either 32GB or 64GB of eMMC storage. Processors vary, as well, with the cheapest configuration running on an Intel Pentium N4100 while the rest run either the Pentium N5100 or the N6000. (The latter was included in the unit tested.) A key difference between the N6000 and N5100 is in their turbo speeds (500MHz higher in the N6000, at 3.3GHz), and the Intel UHD Graphics, which has 32 execution units in the N5100 to the N6000’s 24—all running at the same speeds.

Using the Acer Chromebook 315

While the Chromebook 315's keyboard is serviceable, it’s not capable of the best typing experience. In Monkeytype, I was able to hit a typing speed of 98 words per minute with 97% accuracy, but trying to go faster often had me missing full key presses or hitting edges of neighboring keys because the shape of the keycaps doesn’t really help keep my fingers centered. The small Backspace key and unusual position of the Delete key also don’t help much with mid-stream editing. The keyboard feels soulless, an unpleasant dance partner for my fingertips.

The touchpad, on the other hand, makes this a much more pleasant machine for casual web browsing and navigation. As I’d mentioned earlier, it taps and slides with grace, and its large size makes it easy to execute multi-finger gestures like zooming, two-finger scrolling, and three-finger overviews.

Also in everyday use, the display is less delightful, though the touch screen can get the job done for some more macro navigation. Acer's screen is fairly smooth, so scrolling feels decent, and it also supports zooming. With two side-by-side windows, I can use a pinch-zoom gesture on both at the same time, which could come in handy for image work. The anti-glare filter certainly makes the display easier to see in various conditions, but the display isn’t terribly bright, maxing out at about 230 nits. So, even sitting in a dim room next to a bright window proves a bit of strain on visibility.

The Chromebook's audio chops aren’t going to work for music and cinema lovers, lacking much oomph in the low end, but its sound is reasonably pronounced and loud enough for voices to handle calls, podcasts, and educational content.

Testing the Acer Chromebook 315: Ho-Hum Performance

At $439 for our 4HT-P8PQ test model, the Chromebook 315 is far from one of the ultra-cheap Chromebooks you can find for a little more than $200. While you'll find plenty of competition in that space, the $400-$600 mid-range for Chromebooks also has its fair share of challenge. Acer even has plenty of internal competition among its different Chromebook lines, with the MediaTek-based Chromebook 514 and its more premium AMD Ryzen-based version of the Chromebook Spin 514.

Asus and Lenovo also have compelling Chromebooks in this price range. The former's Chromebook Flip CM3 is a close match for price but goes a little more portable. Meanwhile, the 16-inch Lenovo 5i Chromebook comes in at a lower price while packing more powerful internals, a bigger screen, similar dimensions, and only a modest half-pound bump in weight.

Productivity Tests

We run three different Chromebook benchmarks that test the system in three different environments: one ChromeOS, one Android, and one online. The first, CrXPRT 2 by Principled Technologies, measures how quickly a system performs everyday tasks in six workloads, such as applying photo effects, graphing a stock portfolio, analyzing DNA sequences, and generating 3D shapes using WebGL.

Our second test, UL's PCMark for Android Work 3.0, performs assorted productivity operations in a smartphone-style window. Finally, Basemark Web 3.0 runs in a browser tab to combine low-level JavaScript calculations with CSS and WebGL content. All three yield numeric scores; higher numbers are better.

The Chromebook 315 proved itself largely more capable than the two MediaTek-powered systems, which also had half as much memory to work with, though both surprisingly came out ahead in the Basemark benchmark. This was still a decent showing for Acer given the similar pricing.

However, the Acer Chromebook 315 fell well behind the Lenovo 5i Chromebook and Acer Chromebook Spin 514. The latter’s advantage is no surprise given that machine's considerable bump in price, but Acer could not afford to fall so far behind the performance of the Lenovo 5i Chromebook while costing $30 more. Lenovo's Chromebook outpaced Acer's by a wide margin in all three of these tests.

Component and Battery Tests

We also run a pair of Android benchmarks to gauge the performance of the CPU and GPU specifically. Geekbench by Primate Labs uses all available cores and threads to simulate real-world applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning, while GFXBench 5.0 stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering that exercises graphics and compute shaders. Geekbench delivers a numeric score, while GFXBench counts frames per second (fps).

Finally, to test a Chromebook's battery, we loop a 720p video file with screen brightness set at 50%, volume at 100%, and Wi-Fi and any keyboard backlighting disabled until the system quits.

Between its performance and its battery life, the Chromebook 315 sealed its fate as a ho-hum choice. In Geekbench, it couldn't keep up with the CPUs in any of the other machines, not even the two MediaTek chipsets. Graphics performance coming from the integrated graphics kept in line with the CPU performance. It was a toss-up for the Acer Chromebook 315 against the MediaTek chipsets in the Asus Chromebook Flip CM3 and Acer Chromebook 514, but the Lenovo 5i Chromebook and Acer Chromebook Spin 514 topped the field.

It’s a shame to see the Pentium Silver N6000 performing so poorly, but the lack of action in the low-end beyond the dated "Jasper Lake" reflects that. The lacking performance might have been tolerable had the Chromebook 315 made up for it with better battery life, but no. Its runtime beat only the Asus Chromebook Flip CM3—which is considerably smaller and lighter. The rest of the machines here handily exceeded 10 hours, with the Lenovo 5i Chromebook beating the Acer Chromebook 315 by nearly five hours. Given the main advantage the Acer Chromebook 315 has over the 5i Chromebook is that it’s about a half pound lighter, you'd have little reason to consider it instead.

Of course, all this only takes into consideration the Chromebook 315's performance next to other Chromebooks. The last laptop I personally bought—the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2022)—was $500 new with a discount I’ve seen many times since I bought it, and it tops the Acer Chromebook 315 in almost every way and feature. That’s more than enough to merit paying $60 more.

Verdict: Not the Chromebook You’re Looking For

The Acer Chromebook 315 is an affordable and competent machine, but it’s so readily beaten by competitors like the cheaper Lenovo 5i Chromebook, or discounted Windows machines, that we see little reason to recommend it over what's already in our buying guide to the best Chromebooks. While the Chromebook 315 isn't a complete letdown in everyday use, it will likely start to show its age much sooner than rivals. Instead, look to the Lenovo 5i Chromebook for a Chrome laptop that nails the basics and then some for less than $500—or even Acer's own 500 series of Chromebooks for a bit more cash.