You probably think of Acer primarily as a maker of consumer, not business, laptops. But that’s not the whole story—its systems can look good in a suit. The company has refreshed its TravelMate line of business notebooks with the P6 ($ 1,499.99 as tested), a sleek 14-inch traveler designed to compete with the likes of HP’s EliteBook 840 G5 and Lenovo’s ThinkPad T490s and ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7. The TravelMate lives up to its name with perky performance and a lighter weight than some 13.3-inch ultraportables. It’s a worthy contender in a crowded field.
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Technically, the TravelMate P6 line starts at $ 1,199.99 with a 15.6-inch laptop with an antique Core i7-6500U dual-core CPU. The real machines, however, have 14-inch displays like my $ 1,499.99 review unit (model TMP614-51TG-792V), which combines a 1.8GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7-8565U quad-core processor with a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel touch screen, 16GB of memory, a 512GB solid-state drive, 2GB Nvidia GeForce MX250 graphics, and Windows 10 Pro.
Handsome in black magnesium alloy, the Acer measures 0.7 by 12.8 by 9.1 inches and weighs 2.65 pounds, competitive with our business Editors’ Choice ThinkPad X1 Carbon (0.59 by 12.7 by 8.6 inches, 2.4 pounds). Non-touch-screen TravelMates are more competitive still at 2.43 pounds, though neither the P6 nor X1 can claim bragging rights—the VAIO SX14 is just 2.32 pounds, and Acer’s own Swift 7 is a feathery 1.96 pounds. All of these laptops make a more conventional 14-inch design like the Asus ZenBook 14 look positively portly at 3.5 pounds.
Acer boasts that the TravelMate has passed MIL-STD 810G tests against road hazards such as shock, vibration, and temperature and humidity extremes. That’s borne out by the body; I noted just a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. The bezels on either side of the screen are thin; those above and below are less so, partly because the top bezel features a sliding shutter to cover the webcam. The latter is a face-recognition camera, and the power button above the keyboard doubles as a fingerprint reader, giving you two ways to sign in with Windows Hello.
As for ports, the laptop’s left side offers Thunderbolt 3, HDMI, and USB 3.1 Type-A ports, along with an audio jack and the socket for the AC adapter. Another USB 3.1 Type-A port joins a microSD card slot, an Ethernet port, and a security cable locking notch on the right.
No Obvious Flaws
The keyboard has shallow travel but a snappy typing feel, with positive, clicky feedback. The cursor-arrow keys and Page Up and Page Down keys are clustered together—you team the latter two with the Fn key for Home and End. They and the top-row function keys, including Escape and Delete, are small. Fn+F8 toggles a not-very-bright keyboard backlight. The good-size, buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly.
The TravelMate P6’s display opens or tilts back a full 180 degrees. It touches all the bases—brightness, contrast, color, clarity—without being outstanding in any respect. Backgrounds aren’t dazzlingly white, but contrast is good, with IPS technology contributing wide viewing angles. Colors look a little flat to my eyes (Acer says the screen covers a respectable 72 percent of the NTSC gamut), but fine details are as sharp as 1080p resolution can make them, and the matte finish wards off the glare and reflections that often come with touch panels.
Speaking of 1080p resolution, the webcam offers it, instead of the usual 720p image size. Images were a little dim in my home office, even on a sunny day, and showed just a touch of grain or noise. But the cam captured details and colors accurately.
The TravelMate’s speakers can’t fill a conference room, even with the volume turned all the way up, but the audio doesn’t sound tinny or buzzy when cranked. Bass is minimal, but you can distinguish overlapping tracks that disappear on many laptop speakers. A supplied utility offers Acer TrueHarmony presets for music, movies, and games.
Acer backs the P6 with a two-year mail-in or carry-in warranty and preloads links to LinkedIn, Booking.com, and its own website. An Acer Control Center utility helps with maintenance and driver updates, while a GoTrust ID app links your laptop and smartphone.
Testing a Corporate Quintet
For our performance benchmarks, I compared the TravelMate P6 to four other premium 14-inch laptops. The VAIO SX14 and Asus ZenBook 14 have the same Core i7 CPU as my test unit, while the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon has a Core i5 processor. The ultralight Acer Swift 7 has a Core i7, but it’s one of Intel’s 5-watt, dual-core Y-series chips instead of a 15-watt, quad-core U-series like the others. The contenders’ specs appear below.
Even though the P6 is the only entrant with discrete instead of integrated graphics, you shouldn’t mistake the TravelMate for a gaming laptop. Like its competitors, it’s strictly a briefcase productivity partner. Within that category, it performs well.
Productivity, Storage & Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the PC’s boot drive. The result is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
The P6 posted the highest score in PCMark 10, well above the 4,000 points we consider excellent. The others were also good Google Docs or Microsoft Office candidates, with the possible exception of the underpowered Swift 7. All five laptops’ solid-state drives sizzled through PCMark 8’s Storage subtest.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The TravelMate was slightly off the pace here, with the Swift predictably even further behind. But all these systems are fine for spreadsheet jockeys, if not workstation-style CAD or 3D rendering apps.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.
Once again, the Swift 7 was out of its league or in over its head. The VAIO SX14 edged the TravelMate and ZenBook to take the gold medal.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
The Asus and TravelMate tied for the win, with the VAIO and ThinkPad taking an extra second or two per Photoshop operation or effect. Realistically, any of the four leading notebooks will have no trouble with photo touch-ups.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
It looks impressive to see the TravelMate spank the laptops with integrated graphics, but in truth its GeForce MX250 gets spanked even harder by Nvidia’s truly game-worthy GeForce GTX and RTX products. As I said, don’t confuse the P6 with a real gaming rig.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the company’s eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark and a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
Same deal here: While the P6 might be able to play a few games at low resolution and image-quality settings, it’s really best with casual and browser-based games and video streaming, like its rivals.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel movie we use in our Handbrake trial—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
Nearly 12 hours of unplugged life isn’t too shabby, but today’s thin laptops are a tough bunch. The TravelMate isn’t a standout in this group. Still, you’ll have no trouble getting through a busy workday.
Battling for Your Business Dollars
The TravelMate P6 doesn’t unseat the 2019 ThinkPad X1 Carbon as our business-laptop Editors’ Choice—the Lenovo weighs a bit less and lasts a bit longer on battery power, and we prefer its keyboard. But even though Acer isn’t a brand that’s usually on IT managers’ short lists, it comes close with this latest iteration of the TravelMate. We’re happy to welcome it as a competitor, and encourage you to keep an eye on retail outlets for possible discounts.
