Acer Enduro N3 – Review 2020

Best known for its consumer and gaming notebooks, Acer has thrown its hard hat into the ring and joined Panasonic, Getac, and Dell in offering rugged laptops. The Enduro N3 boasts not only corner bumpers and port covers but MIL-STD 810G and IP53 certifications. It’s not as indestructible as behemoths like the Dell Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme and the Panasonic Toughbook 31, but it’s a lot more affordable at $1,099.99. If your work takes you away from a cozy office to a factory floor or the front seat of a pickup, it’s an option worth considering—brawnier than usual while still being relatively light and portable.

A Splash-and-Dash Laptop

Acer says that the 14-inch Enduro N3 (model EN314-51W-53RR) incorporates a honeycomb shell and Gorilla Glass-covered IPS display, as well as something called an Aquafan that keeps water away from its electronics. I can’t find an official drop measurement like the six feet of the Dell 7424, although one promotional video on the Acer site has a caption reading 122cm (four feet). The IP53 rating means it’s dust-protected (not dust tight, so a small amount of dust can get inside) and proof against sprays of water (more than rain, less than pressurized jets, definitely not full immersion).

Technically, the Enduro N3 would probably be classified as a semi-rugged laptop like the Durabook S15AB or the Panasonic Toughbook 55. Acer has also rolled out an Enduro N7, which is a beefier, IP65-rated 14-inch system with a brighter 700-nit screen for use in outdoor sunlight. It’s considerably more expensive at $2,599.99.

At 4.37 pounds, the Enduro N3 is a featherweight among rugged notebooks. The bumpers on its corners are more like plastic strips than rubber blocks, and it has no carrying handle. Measuring 0.98 by 13.8 by 9.7 inches, it’s much thinner than the Dell Latitude 5424 Rugged (1.75 by 13.7 by 9.6 inches), let alone the Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme (2.02 by 14 by 10 inches).

Given the Acer’s positioning, I didn’t get too sadistic in testing it. I knocked the laptop, both closed and open, from my lap to a carpeted floor (a height of a little over two feet) several times and poured a tall glass of water over its keyboard and screen. The screen hinge flopped flat, and one port cover popped open during the drops, but the Enduro kept running without a hitch.

Modest Specs, Modest Screen

The $1,099.99 Enduro N3 carries a quad-core, 1.6GHz (4.2GHz turbo) Intel Core i5-10210U processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive. Intel integrated UHD Graphics back up the 14-inch, full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch screen, though Acer says an Nvidia GeForce MX230 GPU is an option. A fingerprint reader in the palm rest lets you skip passwords with Windows Hello; Windows 10 Pro and the latest Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) wireless are standard.

Dust-blocking hinged covers conceal the ports on the laptop’s left and right sides. The left-edge lineup includes an Ethernet port, HDMI and retro VGA video outputs, two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Type-C port, an audio jack, an SD card slot, and the connector for the AC adapter. On the right, you’ll find a SmartCard slot, an even more retro RS-232 serial port, and a security lock slot.

I’d eyeball the Enduro’s broad-bezeled 1080p screen at about 300 or 400 nits of brightness, not enough for use in direct sunlight but adequate for overcast days or indoor viewing; contrast is decent and white backgrounds are acceptably white instead of gray. Viewing angles are wide and fine details are sharp. Scenes are reasonably vivid but individual colors only fair, a little bland instead of bold enough to pop.

The backlit keyboard features dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys (yay!) and half-height up and down arrow keys sandwiched between full-height left and right arrows (boo!) while the Escape and Delete keys are puny, the latter next to the power button. Typing feel is somewhat shallow and rubbery but fairly responsive; long work sessions aren’t a hardship. The touchpad is a bit undersized, with two plasticky-feeling click buttons suitable for use with wet fingers.

The 720p webcam captures slightly soft but respectably bright and detailed images. Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers is a bit hollow and muted, and not loud at all (unless you activate the Acer TrueHarmony movie preset), but it’s pleasant enough. An Acer ControlCenter utility centralizes tuneup, update, and recovery functions, but the N3 avoids the bloatware that weighs down the company’s consumer laptops.

Enduro Testing: Sturdy PCs Hit the Bench

I compared the N3’s benchmark performance to that of three other semi-rugged laptops—the Panasonic Toughbook 55, the Durabook S15AB, and the Dell Latitude 5424 Rugged—and the fully rugged, 13.3-inch Getac B360. You can see their basic specifications in the table below.

The Acer was the least-expensive contestant at about $500 below the Durabook, while the Dell and Getac were over $3,000 each.

Productivity and 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. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)

The Acer proved a competent productivity partner, though it fell short of the 4,000 points that we consider excellent in PCMark 10. Its SSD, like its rivals’, sped through PCMark 8’s storage subtest.

One of our CPU benchmarks, Maxon’s Cinebench R15, malfunctioned on the Enduro, apparently using only one processor core and managing only one-fifth or one-sixth the score of other Core i5-10210U laptops. (Cinebench’s newer R20 version, which we also tried, was also low but more reasonable.) I skipped it in favor of our Handbrake video editing test, in which we put a stopwatch on multi-core, multi-threaded systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. (Lower times are better.)

The Acer chugged through this test competently. It’s far from a workstation-class rendering and editing system, but it doesn’t pretend to be.

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 add up the total. (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.

Only the Getac distinguished itself here, but the Acer, Dell, and Durabook weren’t too far off the pace. I don’t imagine any rugged laptop will be used for long sessions of intense image editing, but the Enduro could certainly accompany a realtor on her travels around town.

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. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.

All of these integrated-graphics systems posted numbers that would be blown away by gaming laptops with discrete GPUs. You can forget about them for all but casual or browser-based games.

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, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.

Again, these laptops are built to take a licking, not win a shoot-’em-up. These gaming simulations, like real games, are 100 percent not their thing.

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 Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

The Enduro lived up to its name with an honorable second-place finish in our movie marathon. You can take it out for a day in the field without bringing along the AC adapter.

Verdict: Semi-Tough, and a Solid Start

I’m not sure I envision the Acer Enduro N3 at a construction site or climbing Mount Everest, but I can certainly imagine it on a factory floor or the front seat of a mobile worker’s car. (It’s not built to be mounted on a first responder’s dashboard like some rugged systems, such as Panasonic’s ToughBooks.) You can easily find a more invulnerable laptop if you’re really heading into harm’s way, but you can easily spend three times as much (and have to heft more than twice as much).

That makes the N3 an intriguing choice for shoppers who want something sturdy but don’t want to give up light weight and low price. I think it neatly fills a niche between Toughbooks and Getacs on one hand and MIL-STD 810G ThinkPads on the other.

Acer Enduro N3 Specs

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