Acer TravelMate X514: A small office laptop that weighs less than a kilogram

The TravelMate X514 is easy to transport thanks to its lightweight and compact design. Acer has kept the device below 1 kg thanks to an alloy that it claims is metal, although it felt more like plastic in our hands. The company has paired the chassis with an Intel Core i5-8265U processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD, all staples of modern ultrabooks released in the last eighteen months. There is a 16 GB of RAM option too, although both run in dual-channel mode. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard though, which is a shame.

While we like that Acer has incorporated a second M.2 2280 drive bay for adding additional storage and a fingerprint scanner for biometric authentication, the ports that it has chosen underwhelmed us. We appreciate that Gigabit LAN may have been hard to fit in such a small chassis, but the lack of a memory card reader in a business laptop is an oversight. Likewise, the dogmatic approach of including a proprietary charger takes up the space of what could have been an additional USB Type-C port. We are fans of seeing two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a full-sized HDMI, though.

Likewise, the display is nothing noteworthy, and neither is its battery life. Additionally, the TravelMate X514 does not get as much performance from its CPU as we would have hoped. Overall, the device strikes a good balance between performance and portability, but perhaps with a touch too much focus on the latter. Please see our Acer TravelMate X514 review for our full thoughts on the device.