Acer Spin 5

AN ACE IN THE HAND.

THE ACER SPIN 5 doesn’t have a 4K screen, it opts for a smaller and slightly slower 256GB SATA SSD and doesn’t fork out on the excessive 16GB of RAM allocated to some of its competitors. At a glance, this might seem like a disadvantage to someone looking for the perfect convertible, but in many ways, these concessions actually make for a much better value device overall.

The 13.3-inch FullHD screen doesn’t have quite the same vibrancy as some of the 4K convertibles we’ve seen and it is framed by relatively large black bezels, but on a screen this size, the distinction isn’t as great as you might think. The lower resolution screen cuts down on energy consumption considerably, allowing the smaller 52.4Wh battery to last a reasonable 4 hours and 15 minutes during movie playback. Combine this with an excellently optimised quad-core i5-8250U that can operate at between 1.6 and 3.4GHz to maximise performance and minimise idle power consumption, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and you get perhaps the perfect power consumption to performance ratio for a 2-in-1. This chip allows the Acer Spin 5 to perform on par with the 8th-gen i7 CPUs seen in devices like the Lenovo Yoga 920 (see left) on a range of home, work and general CPU compute tasks.

While the trackpad and the keyboard aren’t the nicest we’ve tested in the roundup, they still feel really good and there are a few perks like an SD card slot and a fingerprint sensor thrown in to sweeten the deal.

We’ve seen this high achiever going for as little as $1,300, which probably makes the Spin 5 the best value laptop in the roundup.