Acer S 13 S5-371

£599 inc VAT • acer.co.uk

The Acer S 13 is an ultrabook for normal people. By this we mean those who still get a shock when they see the price of a MacBook Air. Like the Asus ZenBook UX310UA this is a more affordable alternative. Aside from some cheaper components and a quirky trackpad, there are no elements that make it less of an option than a more expensive alternative.

Price

In the UK, two main versions of the Acer S 13 are available. Our review unit will set you back £599, though you can get it for less if you search online. It has a Core i3 processor and a 128GB SSD. If you are willing to pay more, it’s worth considering the £699 Core i5 version, which comes with a 256GB solid-state drive.

Design

The Acer S 13 does its best not to look like a copy of a MacBook or one of the other popular ultrabook lines. It has an embossed ‘ridged’ plastic lid, offset by a silvery hinge that gives it a two-tone style. Its underside is plastic too, and the use of plastic rather than aluminium or glass is one way that Acer has kept down the price.

The laptop does have some parts that feel much more like a pricier machine, though. Its keyboard surround, for example, is aluminium, with a brushed finish that’s cut around its edges to reveal the shiny aluminium underneath. It’s lovely. During testing we found that it felt like an ultra-premium machine and it was only when we stopped working that we were reminded that it’s a mid-range laptop.

The keyboard has the rigidity that other laptops at this price lack. It’s far stiffer than the Asus ZenBook UX310UA’s, for example. While we tapped away, we felt no compromises had been made when it comes to build quality.

The main reason to want a laptop like this is that it’s so slim and light. It weighs 1.3kg (1326g according to our scales) and is only 15mm thick, the perfect size to use for work trips or if you want a laptop you can carry around all day, every day.

Connectivity

It has decent connectivity, too. Acer has done its best to please just about everyone, packing in a wide array of inputs in a slim laptop. The ones occasionally left out of slimmer systems, but found here, are the full-size HDMI socket and SD card slot. These are important if you want this to be your main computer, particularly if you’re a keen photographer. Other connectors include two USB 3.0 ports and a single USB-C 3.1 port. This is the latest laptop socket, gradually being used in more and more smartphones aside from iPhones, which use Apple’s own Lightning connector.

Keyboard and trackpad

As we’ve already touched upon, part of the reason the S 13 feels like a high-end laptop is down to the rigid aluminium keyboard surround. The keyboard itself is very nice, too. Its key depth is a little shallow, but the action is satisfying, with just the right mix of crispness and resistance. Its layout is similar to that of a MacBook, particularly in the shape and size of its Control and Function keys. There’s also a blue keyboard backlight, one with two intensity settings to make the light less distracting.

The trackpad takes a bit of getting used to, though. It suffers from a common Windows laptop problem in that its button layout feels less intuitive than that of a MacBook’s. Like almost all style laptops, the buttons are built into the pad. The right-mouse button zone takes up half the width and about a third of the pad’s height,

and it’s easy to accidentally press it. You can turn off the right button though, giving the Acer S 13 a MacBook-like pad where you press down two fingers to operate the right button. Using this mode you can leapfrog over the button’s problems, and the pad otherwise feels great. Its friction is perfect thanks to what feels like a frosted glass surface, and the click mechanism is solid: not too deep, not too hard to press.

Display

The Acer S 13’s screen is another strong point. It’s a 13.3in IPS LCD panel with a matt finish, the kind that’s well-suited to use outdoors or in offices where strip lighting might cause lots of screen reflections in a glossy display. Acer calls it ComfyView. Its resolution is 1920x1080 pixels and looks sharp. Asus offers an even sharper display with its ZenBook UX310UA, which looks great even when you look pretty close to the display.

This is a solid all-round performer though, with good colour coverage at the price. It hits 85.7 percent of sRGB, although it has a noticeable blue/green emphasis that you might find less pleasing than a neutral or slightly warm tone. Windows 10 lets you tweak this with its built-in calibration tools, though.

The rival ZenBook UX310UA is better for colour and resolution, but the S 13 is the clear winner for contrast and black level, with 1005:1 contrast. You won’t notice the benefit too much in a well-lit room, but in a dim or dark room movies will look punchier here than on the Asus, whose 409:1 contrast leaves blacks looking a bit grey.

With a maximum brightness of 345cd/m2, the Acer S 13 also has enough backlight power to handle bright sunlight. A glossy display looks fancier, but this screen is almost unbeatable for pure practicality, and solid image quality.

Performance

As we touched upon at the start of this review there are two different versions of the S 13: one with an Intel Core i3 CPU and another with a Core i5. Acer sent us the lower-end model, which uses a Core i3-6100U processor. It has two cores, clocked at 2.3GHz. The main difference between this and the i5-6200U edition is that the Core i3 doesn’t have a turbo boost. This increases the clock speed when more power is needed.

Of course, as the Acer S 13 won’t need to use this a lot of the time, and day-to-day performance feels great here even with what sounds like a low-end CPU. In the Geekbench 4 test, it recorded 5535, which is lower than the score of a Core i5-6200U machine, but not dramatically so. Similarly, the PCMark 8 score is 2040: just a bit lower than a rival Core i5.

This doesn’t hugely affect gaming performance in most titles as the Core i3 uses an Intel HD 520-variant graphics chipset like most of the other Skylake CPUs. With an integrated chipset like this, it will almost always be the performance bottleneck. Like any laptop with integrated graphics this is not a great gaming machine, but it will handle some older titles. Thief at 720p, low graphics settings runs at 20.4fps, for example. That’s just about playable if your standards aren’t too high, although the framerate drops to a dismal 5.1fps when you increase the resolution to 1080p and turn the visuals up.

While gamers will still want a discrete graphics card, you’ll be able to play older console-grade games well enough. Skyrim, for example, runs fine at Low settings (at 1080p), as do Dragon Age: Origins and Dead Space. Stick to older games and you can have a lot of fun.

If you want to use the Acer to edit video, for example, then you’ll benefit from the punchier Core i5 Acer S 13. However, its main benefit for a lot of people will be its chunkier solid-sate drive. The version we’re reviewing has a 128GB SSD, which is very easy to fill as soon as you install a few games or data-hungry apps. A 256GB SSD comes with the Core i5 version, which we find a much better amount of storage for an everyday machine.

Unlike some Core i-series laptops, the S 13 is silent a lot of the time too, as the fan only kicks in when needed. It isn’t loud, but it is a little high-pitch, making its tone a bit more obvious in quiet rooms.

Heat handling is good and the Acer stays cool with normal use, and the underside warmth caused by gaming dissipates pretty quickly given the light touch cooling system, which seems to rely on passive-cooling heatsinks for the most part.

Audio

Over the past year we’ve seen most manufacturers have a crack at making their laptop speakers louder and more powerful. The S 13’s main improvement is volume. Its two drivers, which sit to each side of the laptop’s bottom, can be turned right up, and the preinstalled Dolby Audio app offers a few different modes that tweak the tone and help dramatically increase the perception of ‘loudness’.

At maximum volume some audio can cause distortion and the tone at times takes on a hard edge, but you can combat this by making your own Dolby Audio custom setting if it starts to offend your ears. There are bassier, more refined-sounding laptop speakers out there, but we’re largely happy with the Acer’s units. It’s comparable with that of more expensive machines.

Battery life

We are impressed by how well the S 13 lasted away from mains power. It has a 4030mAh battery locked into the frame that lasts for almost exactly 10 hours of 720p video playback at 120cd/m2 screen brightness. That’s with the display at around 40 percent power.

We’ve used the laptop out and about as our usual work machine a few times and it sailed through a day’s light work, particularly as the matt screen let us keep the brightness very low in most conditions.

Acer’s own claims for the laptop vary between 11- and 13 hours. While you’ll only get those sorts of figures with very limited use at very low screen brightness, we can’t imagine too many complaining when its performance is so solid.

Verdict

Windows is back with a bang this year. Laptops like the S 13 offer a low-cost alternative to Apple’s machines, with comparable stamina and portability at a little over half the price. Typical of Acer, the look is a little quirky, and we imagine some may prefer the all-aluminium style of the Asus ZenBook range. However, the S 13 combines good keyboard quality, excellent battery life, a good screen and Intel’s Core i-series processors, and that quartet is hard to beat. This is one of the best mid-price ultra-portable laptops around.