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The Swift 3 managed to last for around 11 hours or so in our battery test. This sits around an hour-and-a-half short of what Acer say it’ll go for, but rest assured that an eleven-hour battery will serve you well for a couple of days. Under the hood, you’ll find it features a 5th-gen AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor with six cores and twelve threads. This helps it to achieve some pretty high-flying scores in our benchmark tests on Geekbench 5 and PC Mark 10, with the Swift 3 noticeably beating off the competition thanks to two extra cores of power. Let’s take a moment of silence for the tragic color coverage of the Swift 3’s display. According to our colorimeter, the ultrabook’s screen reproduces just 62% of the sRGB color gamut, which is four percentage points less than the Intel variant (66%). The category average crushed the Swift 3’s color coverage (91%). The HP Envy 13 is the most colorful competitor with a decent 99% sRGB gamut coverage. READ NEXT: Our favourite laptops for every budget Acer Swift 3 review: Performance and battery life The Acer Swift 3 has long been one of the best mid-range laptops money can buy, and this 2021 edition brings with it some noteworthy upgrades.
While it may not be the most luxurious Windows 10 ultraportable on the market, it’s certainly one of the most keenly priced. The question is, can you spend less and do even better? Unfortunately, the 512GB SSD inside the Acer Swift 3 isn’t quite as good. In the AS SSD test, it recorded a sequential file read speed of 1,567MB/sec and a write speed of 1,382MB/sec. The write speed is fine, but the read speed is way behind that of competitors like the XPS 13 and MagicBook 14. The Acer Swift 3 speakers, which are located on the bottom sides of the laptop, provides sound that is simply mediocre. While listening to “Hate Me” by Blue October, I noticed that guitars sounded clear and bold, including the bass that came through accurately. However, the vocals sounded so low, almost like someone was covering their mouth while trying to sing to me. Even with the volume at 100%, the speakers didn’t play any music very loud, which can be chalked up to the Swift 3 being designed with bottom-firing speakers. The Acer Swift 3’s score on our Geekbench 4.3 overall -performance test blew our minds with a whopping 19,163. Not only did this number crush the Swift 3 Intel model (14,641), the HP Envy 13 (15,738) and the category average (14,197), but the Swift 3’s Ryzen 4700U CPU also ate the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 10th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM (18,221) and the Dell XPS 13’s 10th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU with 16GB of RAM (19,053). Ah, the taste of sweet victory.
The Acer Swift 3 offers amazing performance and battery life for a cheap price
The quoted brightness of the Swift 3 is 300 nits, meaning it hits our usual target and therefore offers a sharp display overall. The panel works well in pretty much all light levels but may not be as good as other laptops with higher brightness figures if you’re outside in brighter environments. Performance This Acer Swift 3, running on the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U processor with 8GB of RAM, provided serious speed for multitasking. At one point, I had five YouTube videos going simultaneously while juggling well over 50 Google Chrome tabs, without showing signs of slow down. Like all Intel’s H-series 13th Gen processors it has some legs on it and is capable of giving modern laptops a level of performance that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. We can brush the worries aside, though, as our own use of the Acer Swift 3 has put the battery to test in real life, and it holds up quite well. Thanks to the anti-glare display, it’s easy to keep running the Acer Swift 3 without needing to crank the brightness to 100% at all times, helping conserve battery some. And, even spending a whole day writing, editing, reviewing, and YouTubing on Chrome with way too many tabs open, the laptop doesn’t leave us looking for a power outlet at midday. Software and features The two downward-firing speakers pushed enough sound to get me grooving to Drake’s new “Certified Lover Boy” album. When “Champagne Poetry,” starts, and the bass strings come into play, the Acer Swift 3 reproduced the smooth jazz feel loud and clear with enough depth for it to be enjoyable.
The Swift 3’s IPS display was pretty good for working and unwinding with some content on Prime Video and Disney+. Colours are decent and the viewing angles are marvellous. An aspect ratio of 16:9 is also rather standard, and some may argue it’s a little behind the curve as modern ultrabooks are using a squarer 16:10 ratio for newer-style apps and browsing. According to Acer’s internal lab data, when comparing 2021 Swift 3 (SF314-511) and 2022 Swift 3 (SF314-511) under performance mode and using Cinebench R20 to test. CPU performance (11 th Gen Intel ® Core™ i7-1165G7 vs latest 12 th Gen Intel ® Core™ i7-1260P) improved by up to 1.98x. Actual score may vary considerably by specifications, depending on product model, configuration, applications, power management settings, operating conditions, and features utilized. Performance variation also arises based on components in use, which includes but is not limited to the processor, RAM capacity, storage, display and resolution, etc. A little light gaming isn’t out of the question either. The Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark scored nearly 49fps at 1080p, which is really rather good for a Core i5 laptop using Intel’s integrated Xe graphics processor. Even the 2016 Doom reboot ran pretty smoothly at around 50fps although I did have to reduce the resolution to 1,280 x 720 and video detail settings to medium. Both laptops have a 14in IPS non-touch Full HDdisplay.You can also get the Acer Swift 3 (2020) with an Intel Core i5-1035G1, but it’s harder to find online. Acer Swift 3 SF314-57 (2020) review: Price and competitionA weight of 1.14kg also means this is one of the lighter mid-range laptops out there, resulting in a super-convenient design for the likes of students who need to move from lecture to lecture. Getting the bottom off the Swift 3 is easy enough but pretty pointless. All you can do is switch out the Intel AX201 wireless card and the Micron 2280 SSD. While I’m on the subject, the AX201 gives you full Wi-Fi 6 connectivity as well as Bluetooth 5.0, while the Gen 4 512GB SSD recorded perfectly decent (for the price) sequential read and write speeds of 2,026MB/sec and 1,085MB/sec respectively. While watching a trailer for The Broken Heart Gallery, I noted that the picture was very crisp and clear, and it would have been enjoyable to watch, but the dullness of the color really took away from the whole experience. In a scene showing off an urban landscape, the faded appearance of the light and color distracted me from what I was seeing. Considering that the whole movie is supposed to be about art, it’s hard to enjoy when the color is so bland.
Acer does go a bit beyond the brief with its software, but not in a good way. We get some officious software, Acer Jumpstart, popping up notifications here and there. If they were notifications for ways it can improve the system performance, maybe we shrug it off. But, when it’s a large promo for Forge of Empires, we’re inclined to uninstall the software on the spot. The Ryzen 5 5500U also features Radeon Vega 7 integrated graphics which aren’t too bad for light gaming purposes, but just note, it won’t be able to run AAA titles at max settings. Color accuracy on the Swift 3, though, isn’t half bad. The display has a Delta-E color accuracy score of 0.2 (0 is ideal). This beats the category average (0.3), the Swift 3’s Intel model (0.29) and the HP Envy 13 (0.29). Acer Swift 3 audio The Acer Swift 3 is the sensible choice. Unlike the latest Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface Laptop, it won’t inspire the awe and jealousy of your colleagues. It’s the laptop you buy if you want a competent, well-made machine that gets the job done, without breaking the bank. The Aspire does an excellent job of dissipating heat. I popped open 30 tabs in Google Chrome, all playing various Full HD YouTube videos while working on a document and there was no discernible rise in temperature.
Affordable, compact, well made and with an excellent display, the latest Acer Swift 3 has no real weaknesses
The Swift 3 took 11 minutes to transcode a 4K video to 1080p on our HandBrake test. Though that sounds like a long while, it outperformed the mainstream laptop average of 20 minutes and 33 seconds. The Intel Swift 3 took 21 minutes and 26 seconds, while the HP Envy 13 took 23 minutes and 38 seconds.
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