Acer ENDURO Urban N3 review: ready for the challenge. Do you need a notebook for every adventure? There he is! Let’s find out if Urban N3 is for you
Today we bring you the review of a Particular notebook, the Taiwanese manufacturer Acer he calls him “ENDURO” but to understand each other better we can substitute the English term for this word “rugged”, widely spread and known above all as an adjective, used to indicate smartphones belonging to this category. Literally it means robust, and any device belonging to this category generally boasts particular military certifications of high resistance.
In short, protection ensured, both for particular atmospheric agents, and for water, dust, and falls. They are therefore not products that must be trivially beautiful, they are not products that make those who see them exclaim “Wow” for the first time, they are not products that aim to have a typical design of the consumer sector, they are products that look to the point, aiming at an armor that protects the notebook from particular uses.
Notebooks belonging to this category, but also smartphones and tablets, have always been used in military camp (even if this is not the case), or by those who carry out certain jobs that could jeopardize the functionality of the device, or ironically by those who do not take particular care of their laptop. therefore they are aimed at a particular user. But why not, too, could be included in this audience lovers of camping and similar activities, but now, let’s get to the heart of the review of this Acer ENDURO Urban N3.
Touch and Feel | Review Acer ENDURO Urban N3
Particular design but not so much. The Notebook weighs 1.85 kg and has one 21.95 mm thick, it is quite heavy when compared to the dimensions, but it does not touch the 2 kg only for the display which has a size of 14 inches. His weight affects the weight “armor”. In the package we only have the 45 W charger and owns one battery with a nominal capacity of 3440 mAh. We have the model: Enduro Urban N3 EUN314-51W.
The Notebook, although it goes without saying, is a lot robust overall, and we would have worried otherwise. Although it is anyway made entirely of plastic, and rubber for the edge protectors. It is certainly resistant, it does not emit creaks, it does not even flex in the central area of the keyboard where many have this problem, but in the overall there are some “moles”. Which are actually in my opinion a consequence of the chosen materials, The hinges are not very strong, they do not have a strong fixing of the monitor, with a sudden movement it folds easilyWhile as far as the display is concerned it has a lot of gaming at the higher level, it flexes quite a bit. In addition, always speaking of the materials used, the impression is that, especially when exposed to environmental conditions certainly not of the office, they tend to wear out soon, with consequences on the aesthetic factor, especially for the rubber parts.
Acer has seen fit to make the entire structure ready for everything. In fact we find in addition to the protections at the 4 corners, and of interlocking protection plates for the side I / O ports. The only flaw found in this part of the structure is that they are really very precarious, they are in practice supported by a very thin layer of plastic, a tab so to speak, and I believe they do not boast a high number of open and close, above all it is not very resistant as a system in general (as you can see from the photo).
The monitor is also incredibly thick. We find as a distinctive element for the latter a design with a hollow striped texture in the back, and only the ENDURO writing, that is enough to identify that it is an Acer model, of which instead, we find the logo only internally. The air expulsion grille is placed in the rear area, on the frame of the frame, we have only one fan in this model. In short, we are faced with a classic rugged / military design, without particular elements. In relation to this, this notebook boasts the MIL-STD 810H1 military standard certification. Specifically, it is guaranteed to work in all the following conditions (reported by the certification portal);
- Extreme temperatures: Tested to guarantee performance at all temperatures, from a minimum of -32 ° C for over 48 hours to a maximum of 65 ° C for over 4 hours.
- Rain: Devices are exposed to rain, splashed with water from a certain height and inspected for damage.
- Humidity: The devices are subjected to humidity cycles of between 58% and 88% over a 24 hour period.
- Vibration resistance test: After simulating a 1600 km (1000 mile) off-road ride, with jumps and vibrations of various levels, the devices are tested to verify that the performance is adequate.
- Drop resistance test: An event is simulated in which the device is accidentally dropped, such as being removed from a shelf or falling onto a hard surface during handling.
- Sand and dust: The devices and their components are tested for resistance to exposure to dry sand and wind. Their operation is tested in dust-laden atmospheres.
- Low pressure resistance test (altitude): The devices are tested in low pressure environments for an extended period of time to simulate both transportation and operation on an aircraft.
- Saline fog: The salt spray resistance test allows to evaluate the tightness of the protective coating and paint of a device, as well as to verify the corrosive effect on internal electrical components.
- Thermal shock: Devices are tested to determine resilience to rapid temperature changes between -21 ° C and 60 ° C.
Furthermore, Acer has equipped this product with Corning Gorilla Antimicrobial certification. This means that the Corning glass should keep the device screen sterile even in typical travel situations, while the The device’s silver ion coating provides antimicrobial protection for chassis, touchpad and buttons, while always with a view to protection, we also have a waterproof design of the IO ports, speakers and keys and buttons. This allows you to take the notebook anywhere, even the fan itself is tested to be waterproof and has a drainage design that allows the expulsion of absorbed water. In fact, we find the IP53 certification which guarantees resistance to dust and water.
In short, Acer has used this slogan: “Designed for Adventure”, and certainly not wrong.
Versatile performance ready for anything | Acer ENDURO Urban N3 review
So, in terms of performance, I don’t think that potential buyers of this notebook want to know how many megahertz the RAM goes to, and how many gigahertz the processor reaches under stress, or how good the machine is connected to the current in relation to the performance / consumption ratio. If you were our regular readers, you will know that more or less in-depth and technical analyzes on the architecture of the CPU and the like we have always done in many reviews, of countless notebooks, in this case however, I rather believe that people interested in buying want to know if the display is actually visible in direct sunlight, if it has important reflections or not, and how much the battery ensures durability, and if the performance ensures good usability of the machine.
For the sake of completeness, however, we report some typical benchmarks to evaluate the processor and SSD power. Before that, however, let’s see the technical sheet;
- CPU: Intel Core i5-1135G7. Quad-core 2,40 GHz
- GPU: Intel Iris Xe Graphics with shared memory
- Display LCD: 35,6 cm (14″) Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9, IPS
- RAM: 8 GB, DDR4 SDRAM
- SSD: 256 GB
- Wireless LAN: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax
- Bluetooth: 5.0
- Wi-Fi 6
- Audio: Stereo
- Dimensions: (A) 21,95 mm, (L) 351 mm, (P) 245 mm
Then we find an HDMI port, 3 USB 3.2 Gen 1 type A ports, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 type C port (Thunderbolt 4). It is a pity not to find an SD card reader always useful, especially on such a notebook.
SSD e CPU
These are some tests carried out on SSD and Processor. We are faced with a Performance and efficient M.2 SSD, is available in different memory sizes, for this family up to 512GB. Solid performance, both writing and reading, we ran latency tests and it held up quite well, you will definitely not encounter lag and performance drops from this SSD, it is not at the top of the category, but for this range it is more than enough for typical daily use, and medium intense. Always excellent writing and reading speeds detected and analyzed in various operational contexts.
The processor ensures excellent performance, we are still talking about a recent processor of the family 11th generation Tiger Lake produced at 10 nanometers, in this case the processor Intel Core i5-1135G7 da 4 Core 8 Thread ensures a good performance sector. Excellent performance connected to the current, consistent when powered by battery.
It is a processor that in terms of maximum turbo frequency it can reach 4.20 GHz, Acer at least in this model, has configured it for touch maximum 3.5 GHz peak e manages to remain stable without ever falling even on 3.3, 3.4, never falls below 2.6 GHz. It can be configured with a maximum of 28 W, he is always stable on 27W, and with a TDP-down of 12W, in Idle it is about 8/10 W effective. The consumption of the whole machine instead it never exceeded 35/36 Watts.
Speaking of degrees instead, the Laptop reached the maximum ceiling of 80/84 degrees under synthetic test programs, in daily use a user will never be faced with such use. In real use it never goes into Thermal Throttling. What is interesting to know is that it never heats up in an important way, it just becomes lukewarm, and is not at all annoying to the touch, keyboard and touchpad always remain at regular temperatures. In daily use, during heavy use of Office suite applications, Web browsing and Mail management it never exceeded 50/53 degrees, instead during photo and video editing has maintained a behavior that it ranged from 70/74 to 77 degrees peak, always remaining stable without performance drops. The processor enjoys all its power, Acer has not limited or neutered it in any way.
For daily multimedia usability it is perfect and presents no problems of any kind. While reviewing the Acer ENDURO Urban N3 running several tests done with Adobe Premiere 2020, we worked on a 4K clip, which was handled perfectly, with several tracks and a nice rich project to work with. In the background also Photoshop and the Chrome browser to search for music and images, despite this the machine has always behaved very well. With Wi-Fi and bluetooth turned on.
Moving on to the display, how does it look outdoors? Acer claims 450 nits. Which are enough to ensure good visibility. Of course…