Design and Keyboard

• Sturdy silver chassis
• Solid port selection
• Tactile keyboard and trackpad

The TravelMate X4 14 AI gets the job done in terms of its fit and finish, with a darker silver colourway and a solid metal chassis that feels decent in hand. There’s little flex in the chassis, and I quite like the small Acer logo in the corner of the lid as a subtle accent.

This laptop tips the scales at 1.27kg, which puts it in the middle for a more modest 14-inch choice. It’s not as light as the TravelMate P6 14 AI, for instance, but it is still lighter than other models at this size I’ve tested, and remains portable for when you’re out and about.

A major plus for this laptop is the vast port selection, with the left side home to a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports alongside a USB-A and an HDMI port. The right adds another, albeit slower, USB-A, a headphone jack and an Ethernet port for wired networking, which is a rarity.

Open up the TravelMate X4 14 AI’s lid, and you’ll be greeted by a well-spaced, smaller-form-factor keyboard with arrow keys and a function row. It’s decently tactile under finger and has a pleasant white backlight for after-dark work.

The trackpad is also of a decent size, providing good real estate for your fingers, although with a more plasticky finish under finger, it isn’t as slick and smooth as others I’ve tested.

Display and Sound

• Middling IPS screen
• Okay contrast and black levels
• Reasonable speakers

Acer hasn’t bestowed the TravelMate X4 14 AI with a dazzling OLED screen, which is a shame given the price, but has instead opted for a more serviceable IPS choice for productivity tasks. It’s a 14-inch 1920×1200 120Hz display that delivers reasonable detail and smooth motion for a smoother feel.

This panel performs as you’d expect an IPS choice to, with reasonably decent depth and solid contrast, with my colorimeter measuring a 0.10 black level at 50% brightness, rising to 0.32 at peak alongside a 1310:1 contrast ratio. It also has a near-perfect 6600K colour temperature, while 356.5 nits of peak brightness is fine, if unremarkable.

Colour accuracy here is perfectly cromulent for mainstream workloads, with 98% coverage of the mainstream sRGB gamut, alongside 80% DCI-P3 and 76% Adobe RGB results. This means this panel is okay for general productivity tasks, although it isn’t the best for more creative, colour-sensitive tasks.

The TravelMate X4 14 AI’s speakers are okay, but nothing really to write home about. There’s decent mids and some bass, but you’ll want to be using the headphone jack or Bluetooth connectivity for much better audio.

Performance

• Solid performance from Core Ultra 5 chip
• Beefier integrated graphics than the competition
• Decent RAM and storage combo

My sample of the TravelMate X4 14 AI features a more modest Intel power station with the Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chip inside. This is an eight-core (split between 4 Performance and 4 Low Power Efficiency cores) and eight-thread processor that can boost up to 4.5GHz for some reasonably potent performance.

It may technically be a last-gen chip, but outside of the shiny top-end X7 and X9 Panther Lake Intel chips, the needle hasn’t moved much when it comes to overall performance against the 2025 options, so the Core Ultra 5 226V is still a potent chip for most folks.

This is exhibited with its strong single-core performance in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23, which sit well with the more powerful chips in the lineup, and therefore against laptops that cost a fair bit more than this does. 

With fewer cores and threads than some of the beefier chips in Intel’s lineup of Lunar Lake laptop chips, though, it’s only natural that its potency is reduced in multi-threaded tasks. Make no mistake, it’s still solid for its class, though with some good benchmark scores.

Both the PCMark 10 and 3DMark Time Spy scores were solid, too, proving the suitability of the TravelMate X4 14 AI for productivity tasks and its ability to handle some more intensive 3D tasks. The Arc 130V iGPU isn’t as feature-rich in terms of Xe cores against the higher-end choices in Intel’s lineup, but it still posted a result several times that of the Adreno iGPU inside the first-gen Snapdragon X-powered laptops. It’s also on par with the new Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC’s integrated graphics found in the likes of the Asus Zenbook A14 (2026).

The 16GB of RAM supplied with my sample is enough for some multitasking and more intensive tasks, while the 512GB SSD feels a little stingy when a lot of the competition is moving up to 1TB for even more space. Nonetheless, it’s a reasonably fast SSD, with measured reads and writes of 6764.78MB/s and 3655.89MB/s respectively.

Software

• Full-fat Windows 11 installed
• Some Acer-specific apps present
• Copilot+ PC functionality is here

The TravelMate X4 14 AI runs proper Windows 11, though it includes some unnecessary apps or shortcuts, such as a taskbar shortcut for Booking.com, oddly. 

There are more enterprise-centric apps, as you’d expect on a business laptop, such as Acer’s catch-all TravelMateSense app. This provides access to elements such as a file shredder, USB device filter, built-in file encryption and even AI-generated wallpaper in a separate tab.

Elsewhere, this is also a Copilot+ PC and has enough AI power to warrant the inclusion of Microsoft’s tools. Chief among these is the addition of the Copilot assistant, which you can ask questions and to undertake tasks, if you so wish.

In addition, there is also generative AI functionality baked into the Photos and Paint apps, if you want it. The most useful set of AI tools is the Windows Studio effects for the webcam, which provide a convenient means of auto-framing, background blur, and even ensuring you maintain eye contact.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 13 hours 30 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one to two working days

Acer bundles a decent 65Whr battery in the TravelMate X4 14 AI, which, combined with an efficient Lunar Lake processor and an IPS screen, should theoretically deliver solid endurance. The brand rates it to last for up to 12 hours on a charge, which would allow you to comfortably get through a working day.

In running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery benchmark test with the screen’s brightness at the requisite 150 nits, this Acer laptop managed to last for 13 hours and 30 minutes. That’s longer than Acer’s original claims, and means this laptop can go for one to two working days away from the mains with a bit of hypermiling.

The TravelMate X4 14 AI also comes with a more modest 65W power brick that’s a little sluggish to put charge back into the battery in some respects. Getting back to 50% took 38 minutes, although a full charge took 105 minutes.

Should you buy it?