At 3.31 pounds, the Acer Swift X (starts at $849.99; $1,099.99 as tested) is five ounces too heavy to be an ultraportable, and it’s not a gaming notebook despite having a fairly game-worthy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Instead, it’s a 14-inch laptop that delivers one of the best price/performance ratios you can find—assuming you can find it, since Acer has already announced a higher-resolution heir with a 16:10 rather than 16:9 screen aspect ratio. But the Swift X seen here is worth searching out if you want ample power in a near-ultraportable.
Ryzen Up! Four, Six, or Eight Cores
The $849.99 base model of the Swift X sports a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor and GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, along with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch IPS screen. Our $1,099.99 test model (SFX14-41G-R1S6) steps up to AMD’s eight-core, 1.9GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Ryzen 7 5800U chip and the 4GB GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, plus 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. Buyers who insist on Intel inside can choose from several quad-core units, ranging from $999.99 for a Core i5-11320H to $1,279.99 for a Core i7-11390H.
Clad in aluminum (in a hue dubbed “Safari Gold”) with a chrome Acer logo on the lid, the laptop measures 0.7 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches, about the same as other 14-inch slimlines like the VAIO SX14 and HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8, though they’re lighter (about 2.5 pounds each). There’s a slight amount of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck, which tilts slightly for a comfortable typing angle as you open the lid.
The top and side screen bezels are attractively thin; the webcam in the top bezel has no security shutter, though one of the top-row function keys mutes the system’s microphone. A small, rectangular (rather than square) fingerprint reader below the keyboard lets you skip passwords with Windows Hello. An Amazon Alexa sticker joins the usual AMD and Nvidia labels on the palm rest.
The laptop’s left edge holds two USB 3.2 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C, along with an HDMI video output and the power connector. A second USB-A port, an audio jack, and a security-cable locking notch are on the right. Acer forgot an SD or microSD card slot.
Little Bitty Keys
The backlit keyboard is a mixed bag. Some keys like Enter and Right Shift are almost huge, but the cursor arrow keys are jammed together with Page Up and Page Down—the latter two serve double duty as Home and End with the Fn key—and quite small. The top-row keys including Escape, Delete, and the brightness and volume controls are petite, too.
The keyboard has a shallow, wooden typing feel that isn’t actually uncomfortable but isn’t snappy or responsive, either. The buttonless touchpad feels slick; it glides and taps smoothly, and its bottom half clicks easily, but its upper half is stiff and balky.
The 14-inch, non-touch screen is sufficiently if not dazzlingly bright, with good contrast. Viewing angles are relatively broad, and white backgrounds are nicely clean instead of grayish or dingy. But, alas, colors don’t pop—they’re reasonably well saturated but not rich or vivid. Fine details are adequately sharp for a 1080p panel.
The webcam has the usual cheap, blurry 720p resolution of a modern mainstream laptop; it captures pale, fairly colorful images with plenty of noise or static. Speakers on the Swift’s bottom produce relatively soft, tolerably clear sound; there’s no bass, and you can barely make out overlapping tracks. DTS Audio software offers music, movie, and game presets and an equalizer with treble, vocal, and alleged bass boost.
A Quick Access utility provides an anti-blue-light screen setting and normal, silent, and performance cooling modes. (We used the last for our benchmark tests, but didn’t notice noisy fans.) Acer Care Center offers software updates, as well as tuneup and recovery options.
Acer is one of the worst offenders when it comes to preloading systems with commercial apps and bloatware, and the Swift X has a truckload. Windows 10 Home and Norton Security Ultra are fine, but you also get Amazon, Booking.com, Disney+, Dropbox, Evernote, ExpressVPN, Figleaf, GoTrust ID, Planet9 Link, PhotoDirector, PowerDirector, and a handful of Random Salad card games. For a semi-premium unit like the Swift X, that’s just too much mopping up required.
Testing the Swift X: 14 Inches Times Five
For our benchmark charts, we compared the Acer Swift X to four other 14-inch laptops. Two, the VAIO SX14 and Acer’s own Swift 3X, are mostly consumer-oriented. The other two, the Dell Latitude 7420 and the HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8, are more expensive business portables. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage.
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
All five laptops easily cleared the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, but the Swift X’s eight-core Ryzen chip dominated our CPU tests. It also edged the VAIO in Photoshop.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
No surprise here: The only entry with a discrete GPU, the GeForce-powered Swift X ran away from the other lightweights’ integrated graphics. The RTX 3050 Ti isn’t near the top of Nvidia’s offerings, but it’s by far the most game-ready silicon in this group.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Swift X had the second shortest battery life in the group, but will easily get you through a full day’s work or school plus an evening of Netflix. None of these laptops’ screens can match the quality of a mobile workstation’s or digital content creation PC’s, but all are more than adequate for everyday apps.
Should You Wait for the New Edition?
As mentioned, the 2022 Acer Swift X (with model numbers starting SFX14-51G instead of this unit’s SFX14-41G) is a different design with a sharper 2,240-by-1,440-pixel display; it’s also slightly lighter at 3.09 pounds. That makes it tempting, but it’s likely to cost more than the AMD-based Swift X here.
The latter fills a kind of neither-fish-nor-fowl niche—it’s a bit heavier than an ultraportable and falls short of a full-fledged gaming rig or workstation—but it’s a speedy compromise at a fair price. The Swift X doesn’t earn Editors’ Choice honors, but it definitely has its attractions, if you need a little bit more power (CPU and GPU alike) for the money in a mainstream machine.
