Acer Concep tD 3
While we wish its excellent screen was brighter, this is a solid entry-level choice for those on a budget
SCORE
PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from acer.co.uk
Compared to Acer’s ConceptD 7, the ConceptD 3 looks prosaic. Boring, even. This is a more traditional, sensible workhorse of a laptop, leaving out the ConceptD 7’s stunning 4K screen and high-end GPU for a more accessible price.
Yet if it lacks the flair of its stablemate opposite, the ConceptD 3 is certainly well balanced. You still get the six-core, 12-thread Core i7-9750H processor, albeit with 16GB rather than 32GB of RAM, and while the GeForce GTX 1650 GPU is no match for our ConceptD 7’s RTX 2080, it’s a sensible compromise: this graphics chip comes with enough power to accelerate lightweight 3D workloads and rendering tasks, while the powerful processor can handle number crunching in video and image editing, plus scientific, financial and engineering applications.
Like many of Acer’s mid-range laptops, the construction is part aluminium (the keyboard surround and the lid) and part plastic, but it feels robust, with little flex in the lid or the keyboard and a good, solid hinge. It’s also well behaved when it comes to noise, staying reasonably quiet until you push the CPU and GPU near maximum.
Yet there are some limitations on the connectivity front. Where the ConceptD 7 packed in Thunderbolt 3 support, the ConceptD 3 goes for standard USB-C 3.1 Gen 1, alongside two USB-A ports of the same spec and a USB 2 port. That will be frustrating for users looking for high-speed external storage when the 512GB SSD starts to fill up.
We’re also not so keen on the ergonomics. With a full numeric pad, the keyboard’s layout feels more cramped, while the touchpad shifts left of centre so that it still sits underneath the spacebar. The keyboard itself isn’t awful, but the action is flat and spongy compared to the best, and we needed to ramp up the trackpad’s sensitivity before it felt really usable. Sometimes it failed to register a tap or click, too. On the plus side, this model includes a fingerprint reader, and it makes sign-in about as quick and painless as it gets. The screen might be a standard 1080p effort, but that doesn’t mean it should be shunned. Like the ConceptD 7’s display, it’s Pantone approved, and we measured an average Delta E of just 0.77, so colour accuracy is pretty much perfect. It covers 99% of the sRGB gamut and 87% of Adobe RGB, not to mention 98.9% of DCI-P3. But before we get too excited, we should mention that brightness tops out at just 257cd/m2, which is underwhelming in bright lighting indoors let alone when there’s a lot of sunlight.
Watch or work on video – or edit photos – and it’s apparent that this screen isn’t as vibrant as the best displays in this month’s tests, even if, in isolation,
HD video still looks good.
Nor does it help that the sound is thin and brash. It’s a laptop where you’ll want to plug in headphones along with a decent mouse. You can use Bluetooth for either, with Bluetooth 5 supported, while it’s good to see
Wi-Fi 6 onboard.
It’s not hard to see how the ConceptD 3’s lower-end graphics chip makes an impact; while it’s close to the ConceptD 7 in CPU-intensive tasks, it falls behind in workloads such as Premiere Pro or the V-Ray and Octane rendering engines, where laptops with more capable GPUs pull ahead. It also fell behind the pack in the SPECworkstation benchmarks, particularly Product Design and GPU Compute. This isn’t a problem if you’re more focused on 2D design than 3D or video, but it means the ConceptD 3 falls awkwardly between the more versatile powerhouse systems and the more slimline, ultraportable machines. Where it wins, though, is on battery life, with its six-and-a-half hour performance in our test moving it comfortably ahead of most of the competition.
Perhaps most crucially, the Acer ConceptD 3 wins for value. If you’re looking for an affordable, entrylevel graphics and design workstation, this one makes its compromises in the right places.