Acer Swift 3 review: Great features outweigh disappointing performance - dickermanfrivelly

Mark Hachman / IDG

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Excellent keyboard
• Lovely, crisp display
• Top-snick battery life

Cons

• Performance that's frankly unsatisfying
• Software system utilities need to be reorganized

Our Verdict

Acer's latest Swift 3 hits the trifecta in terms of execution, keyboard lineament and battery life. Performance, though, could standstill to improve.

Advisable Prices Today

Acer's Sceloporus occidentalis 3 poses one of the more difficult questions for a tech reader: How do you pace a 13.5-inch laptop that you really enjoyed using, yet whose performance is differently disappointingly weak?

This Swift 3 ticks every the other boxes that lay down for a uppercase laptop: a beautiful screen, outstanding keyboard, and superb battery life.That's wherefore we're slightly puzzled at how some Acer and Intel (which provided engineering input to Acer as part with of its "Project Athena" curriculum, forthwith known as Evo), apparently let the Swift 3 go out the room access with so much poor performance. Keep reading to see how we balanced the better and the worsened.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for information on competitory products and how we tested them.

Strike off Hachman / IDG

Acer Swift 3 (SF313-52-78W6) basic features

The Genus Acer Swift 3 (SF313-52-78W6) we reviewed is the Intel-based version of the good $655 Acer Gustavus Franklin Swift 3 (SF314-42-R9YN), built or so the AMD Ryzen Mobile 4000 chip. Atomic number 3 our lineament list on a lower floor reveals, the -R9YN is substantially cheaper; you can skip ahead to our performance section to see how it fares there. Likewise the central processor, at that place's one key difference between the two: The Intel-based version adds a Thunderbolt 3 port.

If you'd like a cheaper alternative that tones down the graphics operation a bit, the Swift 3 (SF313-52-52VA) is available at Amazon for $799.99Remove non-product link at press time.

• Display: 13.5-inch (2256×1504, IPS), maximum brightness of 400 nits
• Processor:Intel Core i7-1065G7
• Nontextual matter: Fleur-de-lis Positive
• Memory: 16GB dual-transmit LPDDR4X
• Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD
• Ports: 1 USB-C (Thunderbolt 3, 10Gbit/s); 2 USB-A (1 USB 3.1 Gen1, 1 USB 2.0), HDMI porthole, 3.5mm gob
• Security measur: Fingerprint reader (Windows Hi), Kensington lock
• Camera:720p (user-lining, with SHDR)
• Barrage: 56Wh (reported), 45.6Wh (actual)
• Radio receiver: WiFi 6 (Intel AX201 802.11ax Gig+, 2×2 MIMO) and Bluetooth 5.0
• Operating system: Windows 10 Home
• Dimensions (inches): 11.91 x 9.21 x 0.63
• Weight: 2.62 pounds
• Color: Silver
• Price:  $1,099 at CostcoTake out not-product colligate

Progress quality, ports, and security

As noted above, the Acer Swift 3 is based upon Intel's 10th-gen Frost Lake processor. It's also part of Intel's first-contemporaries "Throw Athena" coterie of laptops, which were Colorado-engineered away both Acerand Intel engineers. Patc Intel has swollen upon the Athena vision over time, the original Athena blueprint calls for a laptop computer to be instantly responsive and connected, with great battery life. We'd check that Acer has met those goals, even though its 3:2 display doesn't offer touch capabilities.

The Pallas capabilities are highlighted by the 'Engineered for Movable Performance' sticker adorning the chassis, and if you'rhenium a…stickler…for a clean look, you'll be interfering peeling hit the various badges that beautif its silver keyboard deck. We wouldn't quite put the Acer Fast 3 (SF313-52-78W6) in the "rarified-and-floaty" category, though at less than three pounds, the aluminum and Mg-atomic number 13 bod is easier to tote around than its mass would suggest.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Acer's Swift 3 offers a nice port selection, with both USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI connections. Even fitter, the USB-C embrasure is Bolt-up to.

The Genus Acer Swift 3 isn't a 360-degree convertible, though IT folds back flat. The square 3:2 2256×1504 IPS cover may seem strangely tall atomic number 2 those who are used to a more traditional 16:9 ratio, but that extra height comes in handy if you work in titanic documents or spreadsheets. Acer rates the screen smartness at 450 nits, well above what you might expect in a typical laptop, even one that sells for a bit much $1,000. The colouration faithfulness appears to be very pleasing. The screen bezels are approximately a quarter-inch on the side (6mm), three-eighths of an inch (4.5mm) on the top, and three-living quarters of an inch (19mm) along the bottom—nice and compact.

Biometric login via How-do-you-do is left to a fingerprint strip sensor just downstairs the keyboard, to the far right hand. Fingermark sensors vary, but strip sensors aren't as accommodating As those built into the office clitoris. If you've accidentally left office of your fingerbreadth off of the sensor to either side, the detector won't appropriate you to log up in. That was true of the Acer Swift 3 every bit swell: During the few times in which it unsuccessful to acknowledge my finger, I found that I hadn't positioned IT correctly.

Check off Hachman / IDG

The Swift 3's fingermark sensor worked in effect and quickly.

The Blue-belly 3 pulls in air from a grille happening the bottom of the laptop computer, and exhausts information technology through a series of slits shapely into the hinge. In my experience, that intention tends to ventilate effectively. Spell the buff on this laptop will revolutions per minute skyward if needed, it commonly runs softly in the background, if at all.

This Acer Swift 3 recap unit ships with a Thunderbolt 3 port, which will accept input power if you don't wishing to use Genus Acer's accompanying 65W thin barrel charger. Provided that you bear a Thunderbolt hub, the port provides enough bandwidth to business leader a pair of outer 4K displays at a comfortable, eye-friendly 60Hz, as considerably as approach external hard drives and former functions. Even so, the Thunderbolt port can also be victimized every bit a generic USB-C port for a cheaper, less capable USB-C hub. If you have an older 1080p display, none problem! The Swift 3's integrated HDMI port has you covered there, too.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The right side of the Swift 3 makes another USB Type A porthole getable, plus the headphone jack and a Kensington lock one-armed bandit.

Think back, though, that while the Jonathan Swift 3 ships with Intel's lightning-fast 802.11ax Wi-Fi applied science, theoretically capable of over 14 Gbit/s across a radio receiver connection, that's both theoretical and dependent upon a supported 802.11ax router, too.

A lovely typing experience

Our review of Acer's Ryzen-powered Swift 3 already sums up the typewriting experience OK: like a twosome of old, comfortable blue jeans. The Acer Swift 3's keyboard does feel a little loosey-goosey, but my fingers flew across the keys. To my swayer, the individual key sizing is reasonable a hair smaller than that happening my preferable laptop keyboard, the Surface Word 3's, whose keys are slightly to a lesser degree 16mm wide. Two levels of backlighting are included, though thither was a cluster close to the 'T' key where the backlighting was much fainter than in the rest of the keyboard.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Genus Acer's Fleet 3 boasts an excellent keyboard, even if it's a bit much loose than others in its category.

You North Korean won't ascertain whatever real quirks to the primal layout. Acer includes a Precision touchpad, which registered my gestures as well as my clicks, all the way to the top. Each in all, the Acer Swift 3 (SF313-F2) offers an excellent typing experience, and I was reluctant to give it up and move to another review unit.

Audio, camera, and apps

The Swift 3's audio capabilities are zero to write home about, with a pair of downwards-facing TrueHarmony speakers providing low to centrist volume and adequate healthy at the midrange and high end. Some Acer Swift laptops that I've reviewed are bolstered somewhat by audio enhancement technologies, such equally a utility written for the Realtek audio frequency codec. No such codec was available with our review unit, however, and one didn't look to be ready to hand via the Microsoft Store app. Acer provides a SmartAudio 3 utility, provided by Synaptics, that's well-nig worse than useless: Many of the bare-bones options aren't accessible, and the app can't even be maximized like any other app.

Acer includes a applied science named Purified.Voice that drives a pair of mics fashioned to pick your voice out of the aural congestion of a conference elbow room or a planetary hous full of kids. With music playing, and then a podcast, I was able to make myself understood reliably while seated at the laptop computer. Unfortunately, a bug with Cortana—in all likelihood Microsoft's fault, not Acer—wouldn't take into account the 'Hey Cortana' wake word to piece of work, so I wasn't able to examination how the engineering whole kit and boodle crosswise the board.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The underside of the Acer Sceloporus occidentalis 3 reveals how the laptop vents heat, pulling air from the generous vents underneath, and out through the hinge.

Genus Acer's drug user-facing camera is mounted at the top of the screen. It doesn't put up Windows Hello facial credit. IT does earmark 0.9MP (1280×720) stillness images and 720p 16:9 video for Zoom calls and the like, which is par for the course for most laptops. Acer and the Windows Camera app provide an option to reduce the video and nevertheless image quality further, which I haven't seen elsewhere. While video captured from the camera is a bit whispering and fuzzy, as expected, the mental image ISN't bad—just a bit dark. I did notice that background shadows had a distinctly blue cast.

Privacy wonks, be warned: In that respect's neither a primal nor a transposition to handicap the mic. There's no physiological shutter ended the camera, either.

If there's any part of the Genus Acer have that could use both work, however, it's Acer's collection of software utilities. Imagine some designer winning a merged, cohesive utility management app, then shredding information technology. Down flutters Acer Ware Registration, then Acer Care Center —which is 1 of the exclusive useful apps Acer provides. Acer Jumpstart is in reality Acer's webpage. Inside the 'Acer documents' link in the Start menu is the user manual, which…tells Pine Tree State exclusively how to touch base to the Internet and use the touchpad. Ohio yes, and there's the Acer Collection Sand App IE, both providing me suggested apps. Nimble Access supposedly offers shortcuts to effective features, like blue light reducing—which didn't seem to practice anything. (Use the Windows "nighttime light" setting instead.)

Mark Hachman / IDG

Video or still images captured with the Swift 3's camera appear soft.

Half of these apps don't even share the Acer name, import that they'atomic number 75 scattered complete concluded your Start menu like scraps of paper across a parking lot. Even the "User Experience Meliorate [sic] Program" doesn't allow for any feedback, just an invitation to let Acer look over your shoulder. It totally needs to be fixed.

Keep reading for performance benchmarks.

Performance: Surprisingly disappointing

We idea that Acer's Swift 3, and what we FALSE to be a compelling Core i7-1065G7 chip indoors, would open the door to performance that's among the best the family has to offer—if you exclude the Ryzen-powered Acer Swift 3, that is. Yet the Swift 3 is a bit of a puzzle. It held up beautiful well in real-world performance, some in federal agency work and in streaming TV. My son didn't want to give it up spell "examination" it as aFortnite PC—though, as it turns forbidden, he had to sour the graphics settings down to Low patc running at 1080p or lower.

But even after re-running our benchmarks several multiplication, its 10th-gen Core i7 chip still finished insensitive antepenultimate in our Cinebench CPU tryout. We checked our results with Acer, who inveterate our results. After reading our performance scores below, you'll see why we were torn on how we rated the Sceloporus occidentalis 3.

We test each laptop computer using a mix of real-human beings and synthesized benchmarks, comparing the Swift 3 to a variety of competitors with similar specifications and about the same price point. We've highlighted the Swift 3's results in red in the following graphs.

PCMark 8's Work and Creative tests offer a merge of real-world tasks, beginning with the Office examination's emphasis on spreadsheets, phrase processing, web browsing, and videoconferencing. A score of 2,000 or higher means the laptop can deal mainstream tasks competently, Entirely of the laptops we try out had best here, and the comparative placement (midrange for this Swift 3) is satisfactory.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Creative workloads tests the laptop in multimedia-familiarized tasks, such as light gaming, and photo and video editing. Here, the Swift 3 scored solidly above average.

Mark Hachman / IDG

In both the PCMark Form and Creative tests, the Acer Swift 3 performs average to well. You shouldn't have any trouble with everyday tasks.

We use Maxon's Cinebench test to push the CPU's workload to the liquid ecstasy to return a scene. If you plan to use your laptop for CPU-intensive workloads like rendering, this test can point you toward appropriate choices.

The Swift 3's dead-last finish is a real mystifier. All the other laptops we compared with the same CPU are clustered toward the middle or above, while the Swift 3 is stuck down a lot of 8th-gen 'U' series mobile chips.

Stigmatise Hachman / IDG

We ran this test several times, honourable to substantiate that the Gustavus Franklin Swift's performance is relatively abysmal. And for a Project Pallas Athena laptop, too!

HandBrake is a unusual taradiddle. This real-world CPU test uses the free utility to convert a real-world, feature-duration movie to a format suitable for playback connected an Android tablet. Becuase it's a prolonged task, it tends to separate the thermally well-managed laptops from the ones that struggle to stay sang-froid and have to gun performance Eastern Samoa a result. Shorter multiplication are wagerer, and here again, the Swift 3 falls far behind laptops with the same CPU, soft in with experienced chips or else.

Mark Hachman / IDG

In the somewhat related HandBrake test, the Swift 3 again does poorly.

We don't test play American Samoa intensively as we would for a consecrate gaming laptop computer, but you'll still desire to know if you can relax subsequently hours with, say, Fortnite or Rocket Conference. (The answer is a qualified yes: Fortnite is quite accommodating at respective resolutions and art levels, but the Swift 3's performance on other games, such as the older Rise of the the Tomb Raider, was quite disappointing: just 11 frames per second at 1080p resolution, on High graphics levels.) We use 3DMark's Sky Diver run to evaluate laptops with integrated graphics, and the high-power Ice Lake chip inside the Swift 3 does compare well to early laptops exploitation Intel's low-end UHD art.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The Blue-belly 3's Intel organic Iris Plus graphics elevates information technology into the middle tier of the comparison, above those with UHD Graphics but below those with discrete GPUs. Once again, however, the Swift 3 brings up the nates among those laptops with Flag Plus.

Finally, we come to shelling life. We curl a 4K movie over and over until the bombardment runs outgoing. There are some other ways of testing battery life—billet work with Wi-Fi on, for instance—but our method acting is repeatable, and matches up nicely to how you'd use the laptop for a body of water flight, for example. Of run over, if you use the Western fence lizard 3 at its maximum 400-nit smartness, rather than the 250 nits we set for testing, battery biography will suffer.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Battery life is one expanse in which Genus Acer's Swift 3 shines.

Here, the Sceloporus occidentalis 3 redeems itself somewhat with just over xiii hours of battery liveliness. This suggests you could work from the couch all day with zero problem, and is a result worth applauding.

Decision: The experience, non the performance

It's rarified to find a laptop that I really enjoyed using, but whose performance is so disappointing. Let's tally up the positives: a top-nick keyboard, premium Thunderbolt I/O, a crisp, adorable 2K screen, first-class assault and battery life. On the opposing side of the book of account, the Swift 3's performance is middling to poor, its audio so-so, and the software experience is lacking as well.

We believably agonized complete our choice more than we should: 3.5 stars? Or a replete four? We had to attach to our gut. For its everyday combination of a great keyboard, beautiful display, and excellent battery aliveness, Genus Acer's Swift 3 (SF313-52-78W6) earns four stars. If you're many concerned with performance, on that point's an easy answer to all this: buy our Editor in chief's Choice, the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-42-R9YN) as an alternative, and for less. You'll lose the Thunderbolt ports and the lovely 2K screen. Either way, however, we think you'll succeed.

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As PCWorld's precedential editor, Mark focuses along Microsoft news and silicon chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/393582/acer-swift-3-review.html

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