Gaming is nothing You’d normally associate it with Chromebooks, but Google and its hardware partners have made big strides to shake that up in recent years with a handful of cloud gaming laptops. One of the more popular options is the Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, which was just updated for 2024 with a new processor while retaining everything good about the previous model. It’s a modest upgrade, but it’s still one of the best Chromebooks you can buy.

First, let’s get this clear: If you already own the previous Chromebook 516 GE, there’s little reason to upgrade to the 2024 Chromebook Plus model. Aside from a few minor cosmetic updates, it’s largely the same machine. The processor is now an Intel Core 5 120U instead of the older model’s Core i5-1240P, and you probably won’t notice much of a speed difference.

Photo: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster

Nevertheless, the performance of the Chromebook Plus 516 GE Is fantastic, and the battery got me through a normal eight-hour workday. Combined with 8GB of RAM, you have plenty of room and power for multitasking. The laptop easily handled frequent quick switches between different apps and more than a dozen tabs during my testing, and the two fans keeping everything cool never got loud enough to be annoying.

Unlike Windows gaming laptops, the Chromebook Plus 516 GE is designed to be a cloud gaming machine, and it fills that role well. You’ll play most of your games via Xbox Cloud Gaming and stream via Nvidia GeForce Now, and ChromeOS handles both just fine. The laptop has Wi-Fi 6E and a dedicated Ethernet port on board to keep things running smoothly, and I didn’t experience any major issues or crashes even with demanding games.

The only gaming area that worked well and badly was Steam, which is still in beta on ChromeOS. Lightweight indie games like Vampire Survivors run like butter on the Chromebook Plus 516 GE’s hardware, and that’s the track I’d stay on if I wanted to run games natively rather than stream them. More demanding games can have some issues, which is to be expected with integrated graphics and a lightweight (by gaming standards) processor. I couldn’t get Dead by daylightone of my favorite pastimes, for example, is to open Steam beyond the initial loading screen.

Photo: Daniel Thorp-Lancaster