Acer Swift 3 (2020) – Review 2020

Available in 13-, 14-, and 15-inch screen sizes, the Swift 3 is one of Acer’s affordable rather than flagship offerings. But the latest Swift 3 ultraportable ($1,099.99 at Costco) is a surprisingly premium piece: Priced $350 below a comparable Dell XPS 13, it joins that Editors’ Choice in shunning the standard 16:9 screen aspect ratio—in the 13.5-inch Acer’s case, for a squarer 3:2 ratio that the company says gives you 18 percent more vertical height for web and text scrolling. It’s well equipped with 16GB of RAM, a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive, and Thunderbolt 3 and HDMI ports, and lighter than the Dell at 2.62 pounds. Only a Core i7 processor that performed more like a Core i5 in some of our benchmarks keeps it from being an Editors’ Choice itself.

All Modern Conveniences

Our Swift 3 test unit (model SF313-52-78W6) is Acer’s first entry in Intel’s “Engineered for Mobile Performance” (nee Project Athena) sweepstakes for laptops with extra-long battery life, instant wake including “Hey Cortana” wake via voice, and Modern Standby receipt of emails while asleep with the lid closed. (Its non-touch screen contradicts one of the posted Project Athena requirements, however.)

Crafted from aluminum and aluminum-magnesium alloy with a plastic screen bezel, the Swift measures 0.63 by 11.9 by 9.2 inches, compared to 0.58 by 11.6 by 7.8 inches for the XPS 13 and 0.61 by 12 by 8.4 inches for the half-pound-heavier Apple MacBook Pro 13. A chrome Acer logo interrupts its silver lid.

The $1,099.99 Costco configuration features a 1.3GHz (3.9GHz turbo) Core i7-1065G7 quad-core processor with Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics. A $799.99 model steps down to a Core i5-1035G4 and 8GB of memory.

On the laptop’s left flank, next to the connector for the compact AC adapter, are a Thunderbolt 3 port, a USB 3.1 Type-A port, and an HDMI video output (not found on the Thunderbolt-only XPS 13). The right edge holds an audio jack, a security lock slot, and a retro USB 2.0 port. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth handle wireless communications.

A Likable Productivity Partner

The 720p webcam centered in the top bezel captures colorful, slightly soft-focus and noisy shots. It’s not a face recognition camera, but you can use Windows Hello to skip passwords thanks to the fingerprint reader on the right side of the palm rest. Bottom-mounted speakers produce enough sound to fill a small room; there isn’t much bass but you can distinguish overlapping tracks.

The backlit keyboard has a firm, rather hollow typing feel. There’s not much fault to find with its layout—the cursor arrow keys are in the proper inverted T rather than a row, though they’re small and crowded together with Page Up and Page Down, and the Control and Delete keys are in the correct lower left and top right corners, though the latter shares its corner with the power button. The Escape and Delete keys are puny. The large touchpad taps and glides smoothly and clicks quietly.

Surrounded by thin bezels (Acer claims an 84 percent screen-to-body ratio), the IPS display features 2,256-by-1,504-pixel resolution; your collection of wallpaper images won’t fit, but your eyes adjust quickly to the taller panorama. Between the extra height and 100 percent coverage of the sRGB color gamut, Web pages look spiffy. The panel is admirably bright (400 nits) with wide viewing angles and good contrast; colors don’t exactly pop but are rich and well saturated. Fine details are clear—in fact, I dialed down Windows’ zoom because icons and text were unnecessarily large.

Acer backs the Windows 10 Home system with a one-year warranty and preloads it with the company’s usual array of bloatware, including ExpressVPN and Norton Security Ultra trials; Dropbox, Amazon, and Booking.com promotions; and several game ads in the notifications panel.

Good if not Great Performance

Besides the Dell XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Pro 13, I compared the Swift 3’s performance to that of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, which not only has the same CPU but the same 13.5-inch screen resolution and 3:2 aspect ratio, and the Asus ZenBook 13, the only ultraportable here with an Nvidia discrete GPU instead of integrated graphics. You can see the competitors’ basic specs below.

The Swift aced our most important test, the PCMark 10 productivity benchmark. Its integrated graphics are unsuited for serious gaming, although Intel’s Iris Plus graphics are better for casual gameplay than the chipmaker’s older UHD graphics. As I hinted above, the unit’s Core i7 chip fell short in one or two number-crunching synthetic tests, but that’s not a deal-breaker—you won’t mistake it for a professional workstation, but it’s fine for everyday spreadsheets.

Productivity and Media Tests

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

The Swift hurdled the 4,000-point mark that we consider excellent in PCMark 10, though the Dell and Asus were a few points ahead. The laptops’ speedy SSDs breezed through PCMark 8’s storage test.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.

The Acer turned in leisurely results in these two tests (as did the Surface Laptop 3 in Handbrake), but rendering and video editing are rarely on ultraportable laptops’ to-do list.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.

When it comes to managing a photo collection, the Swift’s lack of an SD card slot is more of a disqualification than its middle-of-the-road Photoshop performance.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.

We’ve seen worse, but not much worse. Integrated-graphics machines will never excel at gaming simulations.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.

The ZenBook’s GeForce MX250 is at the bottom of Nvidia’s product ladder, but still edged the systems with integrated graphics. The Acer is acceptable for casual or browser-based games.

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

All five laptops showed great stamina, but the Acer and Dell tied for the win. They’ll easily get you through a full day’s work plus an evening’s video streaming.

Standing Squarely in the Top Rank

The Acer Swift 3 isn’t the fastest ultraportable, and it weighs a few ounces more than the lightest. But it’s far from the most expensive, and its screen makes it one of the most attractive. If you’re looking for a briefcase filler that’s a bit out of the ordinary, it’s a handsome candidate.

Acer Swift 3 (2020) Specs

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