Acer E15 Review - N2840 Gaming - Skyrim & Minecraft. This is the $250 Acer Aspire E 15 ES1-512-C323 Laptop, which can be bought at the Microsoft Store. We take a look at the laptop and explore some gaming on the Bay Trail Celeron N2840 CPU, a dual-core CPU which you will also find on the HP Stream 11 , the HP Stream 13, and a whole host of value priced sub- $300 laptops. Specs @ 2:45
The performance demonstrated by the N2840 in the Acer E15 ES1-512 will be near identical with all other low-end laptops with this processor, and in fact will be essentially the same as the Celeron N2830, which is also found in a great number of these laptops.
The Acer E15 ES1-512 , is a full size 15.4" laptop with 4Gb of DDR 1333 RAM and a 500 Gb hard drive. Unlike the pictures shown in the Microsoft Store, the model has a full size keyboard as you can see. The large mouse pad is one of the best pad's I've used on a laptop. It is multi-touch capable, and is fast and responsive when it comes to gestures and zooming and panning in applications which support this feature.
Case design and structure is very stable for a $250 box. There is some flex in the top when pressed - which is to be expected at this price range, but the base is sturdy and the large keyboard is comfortable and does not have any flex when you type on it, as some other cheap laptops will.
The display is washed out somewhat as with other displays. I can't say I see anything different here than the inexpensive HP Dell or an Asus models I've looked at, but at a $250 price point, its to be forgiven.
The Celeron N2840 is a Intel Bay Trail. This is referred to as a System on a Chip (SoC) and comprises of the CPU and the embedded Intel HD GPU. (AMD calls these SoC an "APU").
The N2840 is a 2 Core, 2 thread 2.16GHz chip with a turbo speed of 2.58GHz. The Intel HD GPU has a base frequency of 311MHz, but turbos up to 792MHz when running heavy graphic loads - such as gaming ;)
We can see that gaming is in line with other low-end Intel HD capable SoC, but not nearly as capable as the Intel 4400 GPUs which you will find on more expensive (and higher powered) CPUs such as the Intel i3 series.
Overall though the dual core N2840 (and its slightly lower brother the dual core N2830) , is quite capable given the price of these bargain basement laptops.
If you don't have a lot of money to spend, and you don't care about being able to run the latest games at higher settings or resolutions, then the Acer E15 ES1-512-C323 comes highly recommended at $250. :)