Product test
Office hui, films pfui: Lenovo ThinkPad E580 tested
by Martin Jud
Black is beautiful: Acer TravelMate X3
7.1.2019
Translation: machine translated
The TravelMate X3410-M-59HE from Acer's X3 series is simple and functional. An eighth-generation i5 processor is at work inside. What's more, with its 14-inch screen, it is perfect for busy people who don't want to carry too much around with them when travelling.
I'm particularly looking forward to this device because of its sleek design. Apart from the Acer lettering and two silver hinges, everything is in matt black. The only striking thing about the exterior is the particularly large touchpad, which is reminiscent of a MacBook Pro, and the many ports, which a notebook designed for office and mobility should also have.
The technical data:
Design and connections
The matt black case measures 23.8 cm long, 32.8 cm wide and 2 cm high. At 1.59 kg, it is not a particularly light 14-inch notebook, but still handy enough for travelling.
If you look at the underside of the notebook, you will find things that almost no other device comes with. Lots of Phillips screws and two covers or service flaps. The M.2 SSD and the RAM are located under one of these covers - changing or upgrading is therefore done within a few minutes. There is also free space for a 2.5-inch SSD or HDD under the second cover (bottom left in the image above).
In terms of connections, you get a good mix of old and new. On the left-hand side, in addition to a Kensington lock, you'll also find a LAN port, VGA and HDMI ports, one USB 3.0 Type-A and one USB 3.0 Type-C. On the right-hand side, there is an SD slot, a jack connection, two more USB 3.0 Type-A ports and the power connection.
Display: It could be a little brighter
Keyboard and large touchpad
An eye-catcher is the 12.7 x 8.4 cm touchpad. This is made of plastic, over which your fingers glide smoothly. I don't notice any difference in functionality compared to touchpads with a glass surface. If you use the clickpad function, you feel a pleasant, not too soft and rather quiet pressure point. The touchpad also reacts smoothly and precisely to quick swipes.
Mediocre notebook sound
Battery performance
Acer claims a battery life of up to 14 hours for the built-in 48 Wh Li-ion battery. However, manufacturer specifications on battery life are always a vague matter. In order to find out what the battery is really capable of, I perform a streaming and stress test.
Youtube continuous streaming: What does the battery do in reality?
Stress test with HeavyLoad and Furmark
A word about the noise emission:
The notebook is not audible when working. Under full load, I measured around 46 decibels from a sitting position. Directly behind the notebook, it's 53. I measured this with a Huawei smartphone.
CPU and graphics processor
The 64-bit quad-core x86 Intel Core i5-8250U microprocessor was introduced in mid-2017. It is based on an improved version of the Kaby Lake microarchitecture and is manufactured using the extended second generation of the 14 nm+ process. It employees at a clock speed of 1.6 GHz and has a TDP of 15 W. The turbo boost is up to 3.4 GHz.
The chip also features Intel's UHD Graphics 620, which runs at 300 MHz and has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.15 GHz.
Performance
To test the performance, I used Cinebench R15 and Geekbench 4.
Cinebench R15
With Cinebench R15 from Maxon, you can test how your PC performs when rendering Cinema 4D content. The benchmark is focussed on floating point performance. Processors with more cores will always deliver a better result here. If you want to compare processors with Cinebench R15, this is only possible if both processors have the same number of threads.
How the TravelMate X3410-M-59HE performs:
Interesting here is that the Surface Pro 6 from Microsoft with exactly the same processor delivers better performance. The 41.66 fps achieved here compares to 52.11 fps for Microsoft. And the CPU score of 543 achieved here is outperformed by Microsoft with 610 points.
Geekbench 4
Geekbench results of the TravelMate:
If you want to see the benchmark results in detail:
Conclusion
Not perfect is the display, which should be a little brighter and offers too little colour gamut coverage for graphic work. If you watch films or take photos, however, the colours and especially the black level are pleasing. As the benchmarks show, Acer unfortunately doesn't get everything out of the built-in processor, as the same model delivers more performance in other devices (Microsoft Surface Pro 6).
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
Computing
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