Acer E11 ES1-111M-P2YU Laptop Review by HTWingNut

Acer E11 ES1-111M-P2YU 11.6" Laptop Review


Many 11-12" budget laptops come with basically a mobile phone setup with a 2W CPU and limited to 2GB RAM and 32GB flash storage. It's hard to find anything with decent CPU power and expansion options. Well, enter the Acer E11. The E11 is a basic no frills 11.6" laptop but offers something that most others don't... inexpensive and traditional expansion options. Granted it can take a little work to access it, but the option is there. More on that later.

The Acer E11 can be found for about $250, it's been as low as $200 on Amazon.com even. The stock system comes with an 11.6" matte 1366x768 TN LCD, a quad core Pentium N3540 7.5W TDP CPU, 2GB DDR3L 1333 RAM, and a 250GB 5400 RPM hard drive. The version I have includes a WD Blue, so it's decent quality. It's an entirely matte black plastic construction with a concentric pattern of dots on the lid of the laptop and the wrist rest. The remainder of the surfaces are just a plain matte finish.

It's clear that the design intent here is function over form so it won't get any awards for best looking laptop or thinnest or lightest laptop, but it does have a solid hinge, and is about 3/4" thick at the rear tapering to about 1/2" at the front, and weighs only 2.4 lbs. There is nothing loud about its design and would be perfeclty fine for a professional environment.





The island style keyboard is actually not bad, although it does have a tinny plastic sound when typing, but it's fairly solid, and there's no backlight, but forgivable for the price range of this laptop. A generous sized black glossy touchpad about 4" x 2.5" rests centered on the laptop palm rest, and offers mulit-touch options. There are no independent mouse buttons, but the surface of the touchpad depresses and clicks with a fairly audible sound, for left and right mouse buttons. The power button sits on the upper left corner above the keyboard with two status lights to its right; one for power on and one for charging.

A 720p webcam sits above the 3/4-inch wide LCD bezel, and microphone is on the base of the laptop just above the keyboard. The LCD is a 1366x768 11.6" TN panel with the device ID of AUO235C, which is an AU Optronics B116XTN02.3 running a 30-pin eDP connector. It's an average display at best, with washed out colors and poor viewing angles but is actually reasonably bright with decent contrast and serves running basic office apps and browsing just fine. It is comfortable using at 20% brightness in a dimly lit room and still easily be able to see the LCD.

Spoiler: laptop viewing angles

Ports around the laptop are scarce with a card reader and microphone jack on the left side and a kensington lock on the right. The rear of the laptop hosts the power jack, a gigabit ethernet jack (nice feature actually), a single USB 3.0 port, and a single USB 2.0 port, and a full size HDMI port.



System components include a 7.5W TDP Bay Trail Pentium N3540 which is a full quad core CPU that runs up to 2.66MHz. The low TDP also allows for the system to be cooled passively. There is a heatsink covering the CPU with a copper heatpipe but no fan, which means this system it totally quiet.





A single RAM slot can accommodate up to an 8GB DDR3L So-DIMM RAM module at 1333MHz, although the stock system comes with a 2GB RAM module. The Pentium N3540 can also accommodate dual channel RAM, but with a single slot in the E11, it will run in single channel and will limit performance a little bit.



In laptops of this price range and performance class, it is rare to see them come with 2.5" SATA drives, but this one does, and it is filled with a 250GB WD Blue hard drive. The wireless card is a Qualcomm 802.11N 2.4GHz card, but it has two antennas attached which means that signals should be strong, although speeds are limited to only about 6MB/sec.

There are stereo speakers that provide respectable audio, although the speakers are at the bottom rear outboard edges of the laptop. Top placed speakers likely would have improved the audio quality and volume a bit, but as it stands they are respectable and provide good enough quality for general purpose YouTube viewing and general audio while surfing the web or running Windows apps.

The OS is actually Windows 8.1 64-bit, albeit it's "Windows 8.1 with Bing" which basically is a cheap or free version of the OS for OEM's to put in laptops and requires the OEM to use Internet Explorer as the default web browser and Bing as the default search engine. Thankfully this can easily be changed by the user, so there's no restrictions there. The only caveat is if you want to do a clean install, the ISO is not readily available, you have to find it through web forums, one of which is here.



There is also a lot of crapware like McAfee anti-virus as well as several other third party crapware apps installed along with a multitude of Acer apps, none of which are very value added. This alone deserves a clean installation. I didn't spend much time with the stock install, but I have to say the 2GB RAM was a bit restrictive, and the 5400RPM hard drive didn't help matters much either. So other than making the recovery media on a flash drive, I spent the time updating the machine to a respectable level.


UPGRADING THE LAPTOP

What interested me most about this laptop is the fact that it has a reasonably strong CPU, but low power enough to be fanless, but more importantly, that it is fairly easy to upgrade, well that it can be upgraded at all. With the plethora of Chromebooks and mobile platform CPU's acting as laptops out there, it's refreshing to see one actually be a laptop.

Accessing the innards of the E11 is not too difficult, although there are a lot of screws on the bottom panel that need to be removed, 13 in fact. Then once you get those removed, it's simple to pop off the bottom panel and expose the laptop motherboard and components. The 2.5" 7mm drive can easily be removed, as it's not even screwed in place, just held by some simple soft springs. Even the wireless card can be removed and replaced with a traditional half-height PCIe card.





Accessing the RAM slot is a bit more involved however. It requires removing the motherboard, but it's not as dangerous or complicated as one might think, just due care is needed. There's only three screws, but a half dozen cables that need to be disconneted, and they just need to be handled with care because the connectors are a bit delicate, but taking your time and proper handling will get you there. I personally disconnected the battery first and foremost to avoid shorting anything. And I disconnected all the cables except the LCD because you can simply flip the LCD over with all the other cables removed and leave the LCD cable alone.

Once you do this, you can easily access the RAM. And if you get this far, if you're so inclined, you might as well consider replacing the stock thermal paste on the CPU heatsink. I was running in the upper 70's to mid 80C's when the CPU was loaded. But after a repaste with IC Diamond, it rarely exceeds 70C now.

Here is the mainboard flipped over exposing the heatpipe and RAM.




See this video on an overview and upgrading the laptop:






PERFORMANCE:

In the end what I added was:
- 8GB DDR3L 1600MHz Kingston RAM
- 256GB Sandisk X110 SSD
- Intel 7260 AC Wireless adapter
- Removed existing thermal paste and replaced with IC Diamond

The benchmarks that were completed and shown below are with this modded configuration, so keep this in mind, although general system performance shouldn't be affected much by the stock 2GB RAM and 250GB hard drive other than 2GB RAM will restrict the amount of multi-tasking you can do before it starts hitting virtual memory and swapping data with the hard drive. And the hard drive obviously will be much slower overall performance than the SSD can offer.

Once it is upgraded to this level there is little to no compromise for general desktop and web browsing. It boots quickly and can load dozens of web pages simultaneously while also watching YouTube videos. It can even manage playing Minecraft and other older and lightweight games like Source based ones (Half-Life, Portal, etc), Freelancer, KOTOR, Dead Space, even Tomb Raider and Dishonored are reasonable.

Some benchmark results:

3DMark Vantage - CPU 68C, Power 16.7W
P781 / Graphics: 613 / CPU: 4472
http://www.3dmark.com/3dmv/5314363




3DMark11 - CPU 67C, Power 15.2W
P266 / Graphics: 232 / Physics: 1935 / Combined: 229
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10110290



PCMark 8 - CPU 60C




Cinebench R15 - CPU 66C, Power 13.5W
CPU - 153 cb
Single - 42 cb




wPrime 2.10 - CPU 66C, Power 13.2W
32M - 24.453 sec
1024M - 748.128 sec




BATTERY LIFE:

Power consumption of this laptop is quite low, about 5W on average with regular web surfing and office stuff so the 28WHr battery will run you about 5.5 hours before it gets tapped out with about 10% remaining. The battery is internal, so not quickly swappable, but it's still possible to replace it by opening the botom panel. It seems there's more avilable space for a larger battery as well. Would be nice to see one offered.

Two battery tests were run from 100% to 5% to get actual results. The two tests run were:

1. Light web browsing; 30% LCD brightness; balanced mode == 5:47
2. Movie Viewing 1080p VLC; 50% LCD brightness; headphones 30% volume; balanced mode; Wireless Off == 5:18

While not stellar, these results are respectable and should get you through a day of use with periodic sleep or hibernate down time. And enough to get you through two full length movies with time to do some web browsing or work.

It does seem that it's possible to swap out the battery from the V11 which after some initial testing proves to offer a solid 8-9 hours of regular use. See videos here of the upgrade:






CONCLUSION:

Finding a sub $500 let alone sub $300 laptop under 3lbs these days can lead to a frustrating result with meager CPU's and very limited RAM and storage resulting in less than stellar performance. Sure for basic web browsing and simple Office type tasks, they can suffice, but just barely. The Acer E11 is a bit thicker and heavier than any sub $300 notebooks, but it also packs a lot more performance features with the 7.5W quad core CPU, and offers two USB ports, a card reader, and full size HDMI port.

It's too bad that the stock config has to come cluttered with unusable garbage apps that make the laptop seem more sluggish than it should considering the stock 2GB RAM and 5400RPM 250GB hard drive. Clean installs can be problematic too considering it's "Windows 8.1 with Bing" and not readily available for download for a clean install, although forgivable considering the low price tag and that it's 64-bit, and the ISO is available with some web searching (and link included earlier in this review). The LCD is also OK, but it could be much better.

Upgradeability is one of the biggest strong suits of the E11. That being said, it would be nice if Acer offered a version with 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 802.11AC, and even a decent quality IPS LCD with an out the door price of about $500 for those less saavy or hesitant to upgrade their own laptop. Adding two RAM slots would be a bonus too because dual-channel RAM should improve GPU performance by a solid 30-40%. But it's nice that we can even upgrade this laptop ourselves since most laptops of this price range are limited to embedded components that have zero upgradeability.

 

Nice review although PCMark score would be more relevant than a 3DMark scores. But I guess there is little point in adding it now with HDD replaced with SSD.

And by the way - SSD probably improved battery life a fair bit as opposed to what would have happened is you left it standard.
Still a nice capable device for a small price.

 

Yeah I was planning on running some additional tests. I was thinking of putting in the stock hard drive and 2GB RAM and doing some tests, but I'm too impatient when it's as slow and loaded with OEM crudware. At a minimum though anyone buying this laptop should invest in an inexpensive SSD and clone the HDD to the SSD at the very least. You can get a Crucial BX100 256GB for $85.

You can buy this laptop at BHphotovideo.com right now for $229.

I only wish that I could find a suitable IPS LCD replacement, but haven't been able to find anything. It's a 30-pin eDP panel so you'd think there'd be something out there. I guess I'll have to look deeper.

 

I have recently acquired the ES1-131, this model's successor.

It looks identical on the outside (except that mine is red instead of black which helps to mask fingerprints). The differences are internal.

First up, it's 32GB eMMC instead of SATA. This is the disappointing part as it's soldered, has a restrictive capacity and is slower than the majority of modern SATA SSDs. This isn't unique to the ES1-131 though; here in the UK, the ES1-111 came with eMMC too. There's no SATA header inside, which is a great shame.

The RAM is upgraded to 1600MHz, though still 2GB. Again, it can be upgraded to 8GB in the exact same way as HTWingnut has shown. I wasted no time in doing this!

The two biggest upgrades however are the battery capacity, which is now 3500mAh (a 31% increase over the 2670mAh in the ES1-111!) and the SOC, which is now Intel's latest Braswell 14nm design - specifically, the Celeron N3050. Combined, this should really help to boost battery life.

I plan to create my own review of the laptop, once I've had sufficient time to play with it some more. It'll take a while to establish just how much the battery has improved but I'll try and replicate HTWingnut's testing methodology to get as accurate a comparison as possible.

One last thing to note: it is crucial that you perform a system Reset in Windows to get rid of the majority of the Acer bloatware. It really bogs the system down. It is much more responsive once running on a clean install. Acer drivers are available on the support website as well as the only useful software you should care about; Acer Quick Access, Acer Power Management and Acer Care Center (this last one's installer package is annoyingly incompatible with Windows 10, though the actual software can run fine if carried over via a Windows 8.1 upgrade). Also, Windows 10 should be regarded as a mandatory update; I had merely 8GB free with a 'clean' (read: full of Acer bloat) though with Windows 10 upgrade and subsequent Reset I now have 16GB free.

I'll report back in the Acer forums with my full review soon

P.S. great review Mr Wingnut! Thanks for the video walkthrough for upgrading the RAM, really helped me when I successfully upgraded mine!

 

is there another thread started on this one somewhere?
fyi the acer outlet store on ebay has these el cheapo right now. not sure how many units.

I'm config'ing one now and pretty impressed so far.
There are many, MANY worse notebooks than this on the market... LOTS.

 

Great Review HTWingnut. I went out and got myself one of these and was looking to upgrade the screen as well. Didn't make much headway. Did you happen to find any leads on the possibility of an IPS screen upgrade?

 

I found one LCD that had same connector eDP 2-lane, but 1080p, and side brackets. I went out on a limb and bought it but it doesn't work. The backlight comes on but nothing on the LCD. I am OK with 1366x768 IPS but so far no luck. Nice laptop just needs a better screen. Hard to believe there isn't another option out there.