Acer TravelMate P4 Review | PCMag

In October 2022, we reviewed a 16-inch business laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB solid-state drive, and a 1,920-by-1,200-pixel display. Today, we're reviewing another one. The first was the HP EliteBook 865 G9. The second is the Acer TravelMate P4 (starts at $1,099.99; $1,199.99 as tested). Is it as effective of a laptop as the HP? Nope; it looks and feels, well, cheaper. However, if you're seeking an everyday desktop replacement for your office on a budget, Acer's TravelMate P4 might be just the ticket—as long as you plug in an external monitor at least some of the time.

Configurations: Choose Your CPU 

Acer makes the TravelMate P4 available in 14- or 16-inch forms. The company sells four versions of the larger model—$1,099.99 with your pick of an Intel Core i5-1240P or AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 6650U processor, and $100 more with either a Core i7-1260P or Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U. All four have the same 16:10 aspect ratio and non-touch screen, 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, Windows 11 Pro, and Wi-Fi 6E. Our test unit, model TMP416-41-R4Y0, has the eight-core, 2.7GHz (4.7GHz boost) Ryzen 7 Pro chip.

We can't emphasize enough that these are low, low prices. Not only does the EliteBook 865 cost a full grand more with only one significant hardware bonus—4G LTE mobile broadband—but the 16-inch consumer laptops we've seen are often more expensive than the Acer as well. The Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7 convertible is usually $300 more than the TravelMate to start, with the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus usually starting above even that (albeit with a higher-resolution screen and Nvidia GeForce GPU instead of integrated graphics).

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Built of aluminum and magnesium in a handsome Slate Blue hue, the TravelMate P4 measures 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.9 inches (HWD), virtually identical to the abovementioned HP and Dell but slightly lighter at 3.7 pounds. The EliteBook tips the scale at 3.9 pounds, and the Inspiron is a relatively portly 4.5 pounds. Acer says the P4 has passed MIL-STD 810H tests against road hazards, like shock and vibration, but it doesn't feel as sturdy as some rivals, though the keyboard deck is flex-free. 

This laptop's screen bezels are medium-thin on the sides and thicker on top and bottom. A fingerprint reader and face recognition webcam give you two ways to avoid typing passwords with Windows Hello. Acer includes two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, an audio jack, and a security lock slot on the laptop's right side.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Two 40Gbps USB4 ports join HDMI and Ethernet ports found on the left. Finally, a USB-C power connector, and a microSD card slot on the front edge, are included.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

One Glaring Flaw…or Not Glaring Enough

Acer's IR face recognition webcam records in 1080p instead of the usual fuzzy 720p resolution, which is a welcome addition. It captures reasonably well-lit and colorful images and 30-frame-per-second (fps) videos with just a bit of static.

Unfortunately, “reasonably well-lit” are the last words you'd use for the TravelMate P4's 16-inch screen. Even with the brightness turned all the way up, it's a dim and bland display, with muddy colors. Fine details are crisp enough, without distracting pixelation around the edges of characters, and the contrast isn't too bad. However, this screen's viewing angles are poor, and the weak backlight makes white backgrounds appear grayish. The display is usable in a bright room, but it tires your eyes and makes the Acer appear more like a low-cost Chromebook than a business laptop.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Speakers flanking the keyboard produce a fairly loud but unpleasantly hollow sound. It's bearable if you use the DTS Audio Processing software's music preset, but the audio becomes harsh and tinny if you specify movies or games or play with the equalizer. Unfortunately, Acer's audio setup produces practically no bass to speak of, though you can barely make out overlapping tracks. 

Though not brightly, the keyboard is backlit, and it has a somewhat squashed numeric keypad at the right. In the absence of Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, you must use the keypad's 7, 1, 9, and 3 keys respectively with Num Lock turned off for those functions. Combining the Fn and cursor arrow keys doesn't work, which is just as well because the arrow keys are arranged in a clumsy, HP-style row with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right keys.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Acer's keyboard has a shallow, cardboardy typing feel, though it's not too noisy, making it possible to maintain a fairly brisk pace. The buttonless touchpad is enormous; it glides and taps smoothly enough but takes a bit more pressure than is comfortable to produce a dull click.

As is its custom, Acer preloads the TravelMate with a fair amount of bloatware ranging from Evernote, Dropbox, and Norton Security promos to light versions of CyberLink's PhotoDirector and PowerDirector (image and video editing apps, respectively). A Control Panel utility combines system update and recovery options, while Acer ProShield Plus allows for file encryption and secure deletion (file shredding).

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the TravelMate P4: Desktop Replacements Strut Their Stuff

For our benchmark charts, we're pitting the Acer TravelMate P4 against four other 16-inch laptops led by the enterprise-oriented HP EliteBook 865 G9. The Lenovo ThinkBook 16p Gen 3 targets small businesses, though it's almost as pricey as the HP at $1,802, thanks to a beefy AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics. Finally, we threw in two Intel-powered consumer machines, the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus and the 2-in-1 Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7.

Productivity Tests 

Our main benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

Acer's TravelMate paces a strong field in PCMark 10, with all five laptops easily clearing the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity for everyday apps like the Microsoft 365 suite. The TravelMate lands in the upper middle of the pack in our CPU tests, performing decently in Adobe Photoshop as well despite a last-place finish. You won't mistake the TravelMate for a dataset-crunching or CAD-rendering mobile workstation, but it won't disappoint you in the office or on the road. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more fps, the better.

The Inspiron's and ThinkBook's Nvidia GeForce GPUs simply humiliate the integrated graphics of the TravelMate, EliteBook, and Yoga. The latter systems are suited strictly for solitaire games and streaming video and audio—not fast-paced fragging. However, what's here in this TravelMate is enough for streaming movies and shows as well as handling video calls.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Additionally, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

All these desktop replacements, except the ThinkBook 16p, show exemplary battery life. Four of them also present perfectly fine screen quality for business apps, if not enough for prepress or photo editing jobs, but the TravelMate's display just doesn't cut it—unacceptably dim even at peak brightness, with wretched color coverage. As we said, this is one laptop that cries out for connecting to an external monitor.

Verdict: A Decent Laptop, Through a Glass Darkly 

Its murky screen would normally limit the Acer TravelMate P4 to a two- or two-and-a-half-star rating, though we decided to give it three stars for its bargain price, satisfying ports, and decent performance. Plugged into a monitor via the HDMI port or a DisplayPort adapter in a USB4 port, it's a capable desktop alternative. It's also lighter for travel than many 16-inch rivals, though a candle in a garret would be better than its screen on an airliner with only an overhead lamp for illumination. This review isn't an unequivocal thumbs-down, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed.