PC World - USA (2020-09)

52 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020

REVIEWS ACER SPIN^3

PERFORMANCE

The Acer Spin 3’s moderate performance

reflects its budget roots, and there’s no shame

there. For web surfing, movie watching, Excel

and other office work, as well as some light

gaming, it will do the job. I was also surprised

to discover that the Spin 3 played back my

4K/60 YouTube test video without dropping

a single frame—other, more powerful laptops

I’ve tested recently couldn’t do that!

Below, you’ll see a series of benchmarks

where we compare the Spin 3 to other,

mostly budget-level 14-inch laptops. Keep an

eye on the Walmart Motile M142 (go.

pcworld.com/m142), a surprisingly decent

$500 14-inch laptop, the insanely good $675

Acer Swift 3 SF314-42-R9YN (go.pcworld.

com/r9yn) and the Lenovo Yoga C740-14IML

(go.pcworld.com/14ml), a $790 14-inch

convertible. We’ve compared it to last

holiday’s Acer Aspire 5 (go.pcworld.com/

apr5) (now out of stock), and a couple of

Microsoft devices. By and large, though, Acer

owns a lot of the budget laptop category.

PCMark 8 is an older suite. We use the

Work benchmark to evaluate the laptop on its

ability to open and manipulate spreadsheets,

hold video calls, and edit test documents,

plus indulge in some light gaming. Creative’s

suite stresses the CPU and GPU a bit more

with photo editing, video editing, and more

intensive gaming tests. The Spin 3 did well

here, posting one of the higher scores on

both tests.

Acer SwSF314-42-R9YNift 3

Ryzen 7 4700U 3,8584,514

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

PCMark 8 Creative PCMark 8 Work

PCMark 8 Work 2.0

Native resolution

Lenovo Yoga C940-14Core i7-1065G7 3,806

Acer Spin 3Core i5-1035G1

3,671

3,683

Acer SwCore i7-1065G7ift 5 3,655

Lenovo C740-14IMCore i5-10210U L 3,635

MLaptop 3icrosoft Surface

Core i7-1065G7 3,441

4,033

Acer Sw57-57BN ift 3 SF314-Core i5-1035G1 3,377

Lenovo Yoga C640-13IML Core i3-10110U 3,331

Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ Core i3-8145U 3,224

WMotile Malmart 142

Core i3-10110U 3,031

3,291

MGo 2icrosoft Surface

Core m3-8100Y 2,939

2,506

The Acer Spin 3 performs quite well in both the

Work and Creative tests, as we’d expect.

We use Cinebench to test the CPU

capability, pushing all of its cores to the limit.

We’d expect the Spin 3’s 10th-gen “Ice Lake”

Core chip to post midrange performance,

and it does.

The HandBrake open-source transcoding

tool takes a conventional Hollywood movie

and transcodes it into a lower-resolution