So I wanted a convertible tablet to be able to share information with customers for work. Everyone else had fruit pads with keyboards attached. I had been eyeing the i3-n305 for a long time. Finally I had a reason to get it. Acer was the only manufacturer building low end laptops with these chips. I chose the Spin because of the convertibility and the advertised IPS display.

It came with a carry bag in the box which is nice. Standard wall adapter with a barrel plug. I use a 65w GaN USB-C charger and it works great. Charges at a max of 35w.

A couple of things I noticed right out of the box. Build quality is sturdy. Completely plastic build but the display hinges are solid. When folding the display into tablet mode there is a bit of flex but once it’s secured it’s fine. Built in speakers get the job done but they are not for watching movies. The keyboard is actually really nice. The trackpad is not super small but is completely serviceable. The display since it’s IPS has vibrant colors and good blacks. There is extremely minimal backlight bleed and this changes after touching the screen to move the angle. I hardly notice it anymore.

There was quite a bit of bloatware but nothing insidious. After uninstalling all of them and getting the windows updates installed I was ready to go to town. I installed HWINFO and a lot of sensors came up. Under full load it will boost to 35w and then settle into 25 as long as there is thermal headroom. If you change the Power Profile to Energy Saver it will hover at 15w. Idle consumption is about 5-9 watts.

Once I got everything updated I installed Steam and transferred Skyrim from my desktop PC. Using the High Preset with no AA, Godrays, Screen Space Reflections, Lens Flares and setting Shadow Detail to Medium it is completely playable at 1440x900. It struggled at 1920x1200 as there is only 8GB of LPDDR5-4800 with some really crummy timings. It will boost up to 3.79Ghz during loading and settle at 2.9Ghz all cores. Average core load is 50-60% while running Skyrim.

Deep Rock Galactic plays at everything set to Low. Fallout New Vegas plays beautifully at 60FPS but due to 32-bit nature it crashes constantly. Half Life 2 plays at 60FPS. LFD2 at 1200p is flawless.

YouTube plays back 4K without any hiccups. The AX101 WiFi 6 card is fine, I get the full 250mbps from my router/cable modem combo. The NVME drive is a Kingston unit with only 128gb, I am cloning that drive onto a SK Hynix P31 Gold 1TB drive on Sunday.

Battery life. It’s decent but not what was advertised. 10 hours is simply not realistic. In order to view the screen in sunlight it has to be maxed out. Indoors by a window as well. At night you can drop it down to 20-50%. Realistic use browsing YouTube and web I am getting 4 hours on the low end and 6 on the high end. What is really cool is since it has a dual mode USB-C port I use a 65W Romoss 40k milliamp battery I carry in a backpack and run a cable from the bag to the laptop. Keeps it topped off and allows me to max out the brightness all the time.

Overall for the $400 price tag this is a great entry level convertible. The N305 makes Windows 11 run great and the NVME drive keeps everything humming. I did have to manually set the minimum page file to 6GB and the maximum to 8GB as the algorithm wasn’t responding correctly to certain workloads. It now runs flawlessly especially when booting up Skyrim.