Acer beefs up the C720 Chromebook with Intel Core i3 Haswell CPU

Acer C720
The C720 goes high(er) end

Acer aimed to balance specs and price when its C720 Chromebook landed back in December, and now the company has announced two beefed-up models for those seeking a step up in the power department.

Both are available with Intel Core-i3 processors, which should provide a healthy performance boost over the original version's Celeron-flavoured chip.

The lower-priced C720-3871, which sports 2GB RAM, enters the fray at $350 (around £204/AU$372) - around $150 more than the original C720, which still stands as one of the most affordable Chromebooks on the market.

i3 of the tiger

The more powerful C720-3404, which packs an Intel Core i3-40005U processor (1.7GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) and 4GB of memory, will set you back $380 (around £222 / AU$404).

That processor brings the C720 closer to the power of the Chromebook Pixel, which remains the most powerful Chromebook on the market thanks to an Intel Core-i5 processor, and a wallet-thumping price tag to match (£1259 - around $2,184 or AU$2,327).

Both of the new variants come with an 11.6-inch HD display toting a 1366x768 resolution and tote HD4400 integrated graphics. Connectivity options include 802.11 a/g/b/n Wi-Fi, HDMI and USB (2.0 and 3.0) ports, and they also get 32GB SSDs that allow the devices to wake up in an instant.

Of the two, only the C720-3871 is currently listed on Amazon's US website. No word yet on global availability and pricing.

Kane Fulton
Kane has been fascinated by the endless possibilities of computers since first getting his hands on an Amiga 500+ back in 1991. These days he mostly lives in realm of VR, where he's working his way into the world Paddleball rankings in Rec Room.