Acer Swift 3 Review

The Acer Swift line is the company'due south family of ultraportables that offer improved battery life. The series has the Swift vii at the top of the lineup, followed by the Swift 5, and and so the Swift three. That doesn't mean the Swift 3 is a slouch though. This is Acer's first laptop with Intel's Engineered for Mobility Certification, a.thou.a. Project Athena.

To accomplish this, laptops must meet a listing of requirements including instant wake upwardly, powerful internal hardware, long battery life, fast network connectivity, and a pocket-sized form factor. The goal is to assure consumers that the laptop they are ownership will meet their expectations.

Let's run across how that translates in the existent world with the Swift iii.

The Basics

The Acer Swift 3 starts at $579 with base specs, but the review sample nosotros received is the Swift 3 SF313-52-78W6 which retails at Costco for $1,099, and comes with a number of noteworthy upgrades. Inside we find a Core i7-1065G7, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 13.v inch 2256x1504 IPS display.

Today's focus won't be on performance and benchmarks since we've already tested this CPU's performance too equally the born graphics. Our unit is at the top end of the 11 models you can cull from, most of which can be purchased for between $600 and $800. This also includes several variants with AMD Ryzen 5 and seven processors.

The main differences between the Swift 3 and 5 lines are that all the Swift 5 models have a touchscreen while none of the Swift iii configurations do. Moving upwardly to the Swift seven will roughly double the toll and become y'all a substantially thinner and lighter laptop. The specs of the Swift 7 are two to three generations former though, so unless your simply concern is with portability, we'd ignore those models until a refresh.

Build quality on the Swift iii impressed u.s. with the aluminum chassis, which gives squeamish rigidity without too much extra weight. Depending on how heavy you type, you may still observe a scrap of keyboard flex. The touchpad experience was meliorate than expected. Gesture recognition was very accurate in detecting double, triple, and iv finger swipes. I typically residue my pollex on the left click button so proper rejection is important to me. I found it to piece of work well with only a few instances of unwanted motility. It's not as wide equally some other laptops, only I didn't mind. Yous can hands travel the whole width of the screen in one motion.

The Swift 3 is light at 2.62 lbs (1.19kg), making information technology slightly lighter than a competing Dell XPS 13. The keys are more on the rubbery side than I prefer, just with thin laptops like this, that'southward to be expected. The built-in backlight is a fleck of a mixed handbag. Near of the low-cal escapes around the keys rather than up through the graphic symbol symbol. This means some of the lettering don't get properly illuminated at all.

Bombardment Life and Charging

The Swift three we tested came with a 56 Wh bombardment. Unfortunately it charges using a DC barrel jack rather than USB-C. This might help cut downward on the cost, only we call back the extra few dollars for the additional circuitry would exist well worth it, let alone on a laptop that can toll more than than $1,000.

In terms of charging, you tin expect virtually 4 hours worth of runtime off of a 30-infinitesimal charge. Acer claims upward to xvi hours of battery life for this model and ten-11 hours for well-nigh of the lower-end configurations. In our testing, we were able to achieve slightly over fifteen hours while idle at the desktop, slightly over x hours doing normal work and spider web browsing, and near 2.5 hours on performance-heavy tasks at full load.

Display

Most Swift 3 models come with a xiv-inch 1920 10 1080 display, but our more than expensive configuration sports a xiii.5-inch display and a resolution of 2256 10 1504. This three:2 attribute ratio gives extra vertical real manor without noticeably increasing the size of the laptop. I found this a bit strange at first since I'yard more used to 16:9 displays, but it'south easy to become used to and Microsoft Surface owners usually praise their machines for having this ratio. The bezels are ok, but could be thinner when compared to other machines in this toll range.

The image is well-baked and brilliant plenty for balmy outdoor use, but don't expect to get much use of it in bright sunlight. It's enough for typical inside utilize though. We tested color accuracy using Calman as usual. The laptop uses an IPS console so colors are decent, but with an average deltaE of 3.ix, it's far from slap-up. Fifty-fifty with calibration, we were unable to become much better results. If you're ownership a laptop like this though, colour operation won't be i of your acme priorities.

Display Colour Accuracy - Courtesy of Calman

Connectivity

With video conferencing becoming increasingly necessary, sound and webcam functioning is something that needs to be considered more than ever earlier. The built-in speakers burn downwards which ways if yous utilise your laptop in your lap, it will audio muffled. It's designed to be placed on a difficult surface to meliorate reverberate the sound to your ears. Nosotros found that it got plenty loud, but sound quality was merely average, defective depression finish. The webcam on top is passable, but not the highest quality. We'd have expected something with a bit more than particular and color reproduction. Nosotros constitute that you could fit three people comfortably in the shot, but a iv-person video conversation got tight. I would take preferred a slightly wider lens for this scenario, but information technology's far from the end of the world.

Taking a tour around the outside of the laptop, let'due south talk almost connectivity.

On the left we take the charging port, an HDMI port, a USB iii.1 Gen 1 port with ability-off charging, and a USB 3.ane Gen 2 / Thunderbolt three port. On the right we find a Kensington lock, a USB 2.0 port, and a headset combo port. An additional USB port would have been nice along with moving the charging interface over to USB-C, only what we take is acceptable for this price range. AMD Ryzen-based systems maintain the USB-C port, but drop Thunderbolt 3.

The Swift 3 comes with a Wi-Fi 6 adapter for improved network performance. Cheque out our explainer for more details on what new features Wi-Fi 6 brings to the table. At close range, I was able to achieve wireless file transfers around 700-800 Mbps. This is impressive, merely of grade it does driblet off significantly as you movement away from your router/access point. I would say 300-400 Mbps is doable in most living spaces.

One issue I noticed was the network interface would sometimes switch dorsum to legacy Wi-Fi v even though it was on a Wi-Fi 6 network. Disconnecting and reconnecting to the network fixed this, so it'south likely a driver event that will be stock-still soon.

The concluding thing to talk about is general usability. Cooling in the laptop is decent without becoming too hot on the bottom. In our testing, we noticed the fan go noticeable later v-10 minutes of sustained use. It kept the system under fourscore C at full load and allowed the CPU to turbo up to 1.5GHz.

We were impressed by the Project Athena instant wake upwardly feature. It'due south prissy opening your laptop and having it upwardly and running in less than 3 seconds despite being airtight overnight.

The Windows x installation that comes preloaded is considerably more bloated than we'd have liked. There are nine "Acer" branded apps besides every bit Norton and ExpressVPN. The commencement thing we'd do afterwards getting this laptop would exist to uninstall that.

Wrap Up

While nosotros did have the fully upgraded configuration of the Swift 3, almost of the design elements should conduct through to lower-end models, which are potentially more attractive for budget all the same svelte laptops (more than almost that in a 2d).

At $ane,100, we had reasonably high expectations for this laptop. Performance was fine, the display was fine, and overall usability was skilful. Hopefully you're sensing a theme.

Acer's Swift iii is a mid-marketplace laptop that doesn't try to do everything, only packs but enough features to make it a solid choice for the average consumer. We can run into this type of laptop doing smashing for a educatee or someone that travels a lot, but still wants decent performance. Yous can become smaller laptops that lack functioning, or faster laptops that are too big. We found the Swift 3 to be somewhere right in the center.

In regards to the item configuration nosotros tested, nosotros'd tend to recommend something else.

Starting with the choice of CPU, dropping down to a Core i5 and viii GB of RAM, y'all will see the laptop sell for half the cost at $700. If you lot still want the larger 3:2 screen, that's an extra $100.

Now, for the most compelling of all the Swift 3 configurations, we'd strongly recommend the Ryzen seven 4700U configuration, which puts the i7-1065G7 to shame. We think that model makes for a not bad accommodating budget laptop. Y'all drop downward to eight GB of RAM and a standard 16:9 display, but information technology's one-half the cost at $655, and will perform better than the tested configuration in nigh scenarios.