Home » Porsche Design Acerbook RS Review

Porsche Design Acerbook RS Review

Written By Josh de Leon
Published • March 13th, 2021
Gadget ReviewsLaptop
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I’m sure someway, somehow, you’ve heard of Porsche Design at least once in your life. But if you haven’t, it’s a luxury brand known for making a lot of different stylish, and well, obviously expensive lifestyle accessories. They’ve got apparel, luggage, watches, and even phones. I think they even had one with Blackberry a few years back. But what we have here today is the Porsche Design Acerbook RS. It comes packed with Intel’s latest 11th generation EVO chipsets, an MX350 or Intel Iris Graphics GPU, 8GB-16GB of RAM, and a storage capacity of up to 1TB. Let’s see how this fares in our review.

The Porsche Design Acerbook RS comes in two fairly sizable boxes should you decide to get the premium package bundle. One for the laptop itself, and the other containing a bunch of travel accessories, which can also be purchased separately. These include an ECCO Palermo XA Leather Carrying Pouch, the Porsche Design Acer Mouse RS, a Travel Sleeve, and a leather mouse pad that also doubles as a magnetic cover–all embedded with the Porsche Design logo of course.

Both boxes include a Porsche Design owners identification card, which is a nice touch to the overall premium package. After setting the laptop aside once the box was opened, we were surprised to see two 65W charging bricks included; One barrel charger, and one with a Type-C Connector. I’m not sure why there are two, but we’re thankful anyway to have the option.

Table of Contents

Design and Construction

Moving on, being a Porsche Design product, there’s a lot to admire about the overall aesthetic; Probably the most striking part being the carbon-fiber top cover. And yes, it’s real carbon-fiber.

You’ll see a faint Acer logo at the bottom, while on the opposite end features the Porsche Design logo, indicating this is no normal laptop, at least by design. The beveled edges give it a shiny eye-catching appeal and wrap all around the lid to make it stand out even more. The chassis is constructed out of a Magnesium and Aluminum-alloy, is very solid, yet, weighs only 1.2kg with a height of 15.99mm, making it easy to carry around with you. Most of that weight can be charged to the 56Wh battery, which is touted to last for up to 15-17 hours of continuous use.

Over at the left, you’ll find the barrel charging port, a full-size HDMI slot, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, and the USB-C charging port with support for Thunderbolt 4.0. If you look over to the right you’ll see a 3.5mm combo jack, another USB-A port, two LED indicators for power and charging, and finally a Kensington lock to top it off.

Lifting the lid also reveals your chiclet-style keyboard, which does have a little bit of flex. The keys are a little smaller than we’d have hoped, but it does have a good amount of travel and feels good to type on especially once you get used to the size. The white backlit keys are also well illuminated in the dark.

The touchpad is responsive and has a subtle but nice clicky feel. There’s a fingerprint scanner on the top left side to log-in faster, and while it still is convenient, we just wish it were located somewhere else.

Display and Multimedia

The Porsche Design Acerbook RS features a 14-inch FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS touchscreen display with an aspect ratio of 16:9. While it isn’t the greatest screen out there especially for its price point, the wider screen estate is still fully capable of getting the job done.

For something that doesn’t have HDR capabilities, colors are still bright and vivid, have slim bezels on the side for a more immersive viewing experience, and the viewing angles are also quite decent on this one. The touchscreen is also a great addition to have for quick taps and scrolling.

Despite the thin borders, Acer still manages to fit in a 720p webcam as well, while the built-in speakers are loud enough for small rooms, but nothing special.

OS and Features

The Porsche Design Acerbook RS runs on Windows 10 Home and comes with some pre-installed applications such as the Acer Care Center for warranty access and system tune-up tools, Acer Product Registration which gives you access to deals and warranty promotions, and Acer Jumpstart that includes 100GB of Dropbox space free for 1 year. As for security and protection, it comes with Norton Security Ultra anti-virus.

Other features also include Windows Wake On Voice (WoV) to activate Windows 10 from stand-by using Cortana. As for security and protection, it comes with Norton Security Ultra anti-virus. You can also fine-tune the speakers here using DTS, letting you choose different audio configurations for Music, Movies, and Games. Although we had a hard time telling the difference off the bat.

Performance and Benchmarks

The Porsche Design Acerbook RS is also packed with Intel’s latest 11th generation EVO chipsets, which are mainly focused on setting the perfect balance between performance and battery life. For the Acerbook RS, we’re getting two variants. An Intel Core i7-1165G7 with an NVIDIA GeForce MX350 GPU, paired with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. And the unit that we have now, which is an Intel Core Core i5-1135G7 with Iris XE Graphics.

Down to the specifics, it sports 4 cores and 8 threads. It has a base speed of 2.40GHz and maxes out at 4.20 GHz for single-core, and 3.8GHz with all the cores combined. This one is paired with 8GB of RAM coupled with 512GB of SSD storage, and although this is more or less becoming less of a standard, it still works perfectly well on a day-to-day basis. For heat dissipation, the Acerbook RS sits at an elevated angle when opened. Inside we also get dual copper heat pipes to keep things cool throughout.

Check out the benchmark scores below:

• PCMark 10 – 4,626
• 3DMark – 1,529 (Time Spy)
• Geekbench 5 – 1,370 (Single-Core) 5,290 (Multi-Core)
• Cinebench R20 – 2084 (CPU), 500 (CPU – Single-Core)
• CrystalDiskMark 7 – 2,285.98 (Seq. Read), 1,076.07 (Seq. Write)

Connectivity and Battery Life

It comes with the latest Wifi 6 (GIG+) paired with Bluetooth 5.1 support. Thanks to the ample amount of I/O interfaces (and two charging ports, of course) you can easily bring this laptop around with you without having to bring an extra dongle– a common problem in a lot of modern, minimalistic laptops.

Powering the Acerbook RS is a Lithium-Ion 56Wh battery that can last for up to 17 hours of continuous use depending on how you use it. Although we don’t recommend it, you can leave your charger at home and still accomplish basic tasks such as browsing the web, writing documents, and video streaming and still have enough juice when you get home.

In our video loop test (Airplane mode, 50% screen brightness, Battery Saver ON) we were able to get just a little over 16 hours, which makes it an excellent choice for getting work done on the go.

Conclusion

But of course, at the end of the day, this does carry the Porsche name, and that in itself is not going to be cheap. The Porsche Design Acerbook RS is priced at a whopping PHP 113,000 for the i5 variant, while the i7 model will run you PHP 165,500 along with the Travelpack RS bundle. And while it certainly does not perform like a 911, if you’re looking for a stylish designer laptop that has solid build quality, great battery life, and boasts Intel’s latest 11th-gen chips, then this guy still might be worth something to consider.

Porsche Design Acerbook RS specs:
14-inch IPS 1920 x 1080 Touchscreen display
Intel Core Core i5-1135G7/i7-1165G7 CPU
Intel Iris XE Graphics/Nvidia MX350
8GB/16GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
512GB/1TB PCIe NVMe SSD
WiFi 6 (802.11ax)
Bluetooth 5.1
USB Type-A
USB Type-C
HDMI
USB 3.2 Gen 2
3.5mm Audio Jack combo
Built-in webcam
Backlit keyboard
Windows Hello Fingerprint reader
Windows 10 Home
56Wh battery w/ 65W charger
1.2 kg
Silver and Carbon