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Acer reveals its first Chromebook with AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs

The 14-inch machine arrives in February and it starts at $480.

Daniel Cooper / Engadget

Acer has been plugging AMD chips into its Chromebooks for a couple of years and now it's refreshing the lineup with the latest Ryzen mobile processors. Its first Chromebook to use those CPUs is the Spin 514. Whether you opt for a Ryzen 7 3700C or Ryzen 5 3500C processor, you'll be able to tap into built-in Radeon Vega graphics.

According to Acer, you'll get up to 10 hours of battery life out of the Spin 514 due to the improved power efficiency of the CPUs. The Chromebook weighs 1.55 kg (3.42 lb) and Acer is promising military-grade, MIL-STD 810H-compliant durability thanks to the reinforced aluminum chassis.

The Spin 514 has a 14-inch Full HD touch IPS6 display that's covered with scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass 3. You can have up to 16 GB DDR4 DRAM and 256 GB of storage in the machine. Meanwhile, after some brief hands-on time, we found the new keyboard deeply satisfying.

The Chromebook has two USB Type-C ports (which are DisplayPort compatible and can be used for charging), two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports (one of which supports power-off charging) and a MicroSD card reader. Some variants have an HDMI port too. Other features of the Spin 514 include dual microphones, Google Assistant integration, an HD webcam, dual-band WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 support.

The Spin 514 will be available in North America in February, starting at $480. It'll hit Europe in March and the base model will cost €529.

The enterprise versions of the Spin 514 include the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, in which the baked-in business features of Chrome OS are unlocked. Those models will be available in both regions in March and they’ll start at $750/€799.