Acer C720 chromebook sunspider, peacekeeper benchmark speed test 447ms review

I purchased my chromebook some days ago at digitec.ch (299 CHF, about 250 EUR). Currently the 2GB version is available in Switzerland, the 4GB version might follow later. As I needed a replacement immediatly for my lovely Nokia Booklet 3G (see a review below) which has some hardware issues recently I was happy that the new chromebooks are available now (the HP chromebook 11 was not avialable yet in Switzerland). BTW, my keyboard has a swiss layout.

I wanted to get a fast, affordable, light notebook which can be used for photography edits on the road. Of course a macbook air or mac book pro would be nicer, but I was not willing to spent the money as the Nokia was already my secondary device for traveling and my primary device is a macbook pro (17 inch).

As I am very familiar to the chrome browser (I use it all day at work and privately) the barrier to go for a chromebook was low.  I already used apps from the chrome web store.

The question for me was: Should I wait for a HP chromebook 11 and would be perhaps disappointed on its performance (I do not like to wait for computers) or should I get the ugly duckling as we say in Germany which runs fastest but is not impressive to show. I decided for the fast, ugly duckling. I found some speed judgements  on the internet in some reviews, but no real gripping data as the Acer was rarely available. Therefore I have attached a detailed report created by sunspider.com in the end of this post.

According to PC Pro UK review LaptopMag.com which measured the HP chromebook 11 to be 631ms (and detailed measurement result in the end), the Acer C720 is significantly faster with 447ms and has a longer battery lifetime (according to the supplier specs). The Peacekeeper result of the Acer C720 is skyrocking 2828 points (html 5 capabilities 7/7) and outperforms even fast devices like the ipad4 a lot. I am very satisfied with the speed during my productive work on it. There is a very fast startup, and I never experienced delays in operation.
The boot time is amazing. This machine and ChromeOS is made for quick response. Waking it up from sleep mode you can start immediately working on it. Ipad feeling...

Build quality is not as good as my Nokia booklet 3G was, but robust enough to make me confident to be able to use it over long time during my traveling times.
The forecasted charging time from empty state to full was indicated as 1:50 hours (which I have not yet verified by timing measurements).

Short summary:

+ Very powerful chromebook with good screen, long battery life, keyboard ok, best bang for the buck

- Only minus: SD-card slot is too short. SD card is not completely hidden in the device when used.

Compared to HP chromebook 11: The Acer C720 is made for power users which do not need a top-notch screen and keyboard. If you need to impress other people buy the HP chrome book 11 and live with slower performance and charge it more often. With the active cooling the Acer does not get warm at all at the bottom side.

Layout of the keyboard of my Acer C720 I received from digitec.

Sunspider results in detail

Acer C720 2GB results

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                  446.9ms +/- 3.6%
--------------------------------------------
  3d:                    84.1ms +/- 14.9%
    cube:                43.6ms +/- 26.5%
    morph:               17.7ms +/- 42.0%
    raytrace:            22.8ms +/- 11.2%
  access:                45.3ms +/- 9.3%
    binary-trees:         3.9ms +/- 36.1%
    fannkuch:            20.6ms +/- 13.5%
    nbody:                8.1ms +/- 63.8%
    nsieve:              12.7ms +/- 17.4%
  bitops:                27.7ms +/- 4.6%
    3bit-bits-in-byte:    2.2ms +/- 13.7%
    bits-in-byte:        10.3ms +/- 9.8%
    bitwise-and:          7.8ms +/- 8.4%
    nsieve-bits:          7.4ms +/- 6.8%
  controlflow:            4.4ms +/- 20.5%
    recursive:            4.4ms +/- 20.5%
  crypto:                33.6ms +/- 9.9%
    aes:                 15.3ms +/- 20.4%
    md5:                  8.1ms +/- 7.7%
    sha1:                10.2ms +/- 6.4%
  date:                  56.7ms +/- 17.2%
    format-tofte:        23.1ms +/- 25.6%
    format-xparb:        33.6ms +/- 26.3%
  math:                  37.4ms +/- 22.3%
    cordic:              12.0ms +/- 61.8%
    partial-sums:        19.0ms +/- 27.4%
    spectral-norm:        6.4ms +/- 19.1%
  regexp:                14.4ms +/- 3.5%
    dna:                 14.4ms +/- 3.5%
  string:               143.3ms +/- 4.7%
    base64:              10.1ms +/- 14.7%
    fasta:               27.7ms +/- 15.0%
    tagcloud:            38.5ms +/- 8.5%
    unpack-code:         42.3ms +/- 9.8%
    validate-input:      24.7ms +/- 22.2%

Peacekeeper details:

Suite

Result

Rendering

54.53

renderGrid01

119.05 fps

renderGrid02

106.93 fps

renderGrid03

11.82 fps

renderPhysics

58.77 fps

HTML5 Capabilities

7/7

webglSphere

Yes (58.64 fps)

videoPosterSupport

Yes

videoCodecH264

Yes

videoCodecTheora

Yes

videoCodecWebM

Yes

workerContrast01

Yes (4391.32 ops)

workerContrast02

Yes (4973.63 ops)

gamingSpitfire

Yes (52.49 fps)

HTML5 Canvas

29.70

experimentalRipple01

47.38 fps

experimentalRipple02

18.61 fps

Data

46310.40

arrayCombined

8709.50 ops

arrayWeighted

246243.00 ops

DOM operations

15089.75

domGetElements

1138236.00 ops

domDynamicCreationCreateElement

25997.50 ops

domDynamicCreationInnerHTML

24389.50 ops

domJQueryAttributeFilters

6301.50 ops

domJQueryBasicFilters

1484.00 ops

domJQueryBasics

5916.00 ops

domJQueryContentFilters

2113.50 ops

domJQueryHierarchy

8737.00 ops

domQueryselector

55017.50 ops

Text parsing

159769.70

stringChat

67322.00 ops

stringDetectBrowser

432720.00 ops

stringFilter

30091.00 ops

stringValidateForm

495233.00 ops

stringWeighted

239807.00 ops