The Swift 5 is intended to provide excellent multitasking capabilities as well as to meet all of your productivity requirements. Acer Swift 5 is also a good choice for a travel laptop due to its lightweight design and long battery life. Here’s all you need to know about the Acer Swift 5 review. The Acer Swift 5 is a sturdy laptop that can handle a wide range of common computer tasks. It’s a wonderful laptop for school or work because of its efficiency, short start-up time, and excellent performance that handles many processor-heavy tasks without stuttering. It looks as good as it works, and one of the most notable features of the Acer Swift 5 is the antibacterial Gorilla Glass touchscreen.
Acer Swift 5 review: Design
Without a doubt, the updated Swift 5 is the most appealing notebook I’ve seen this year. Acer claims to have a “exquisite design,” and while many OEMs exaggerate with eye-catching keywords and appealing wording, the Taiwan-based business is spot on. The aerospace-grade aluminium chassis is finished in a deep, opulent Mist Green. But it’s the gorgeous gold accents on the sides that house the ports and the protuberant hinge that carries the word “SWIFT” in a subtle grey script that really caught my eye. According to Acer, the anodized cover is resistant to wear and corrosion and has the Acer emblem stamped in gold, glossy lettering. When you open the lid, you’ll find additional Misty Green sweetness throughout the deck. However, I’m not a fan of the low contrast between the keys and the letters. Touch typists are unaffected, but hunt-and-peck typists may be turned off, especially if they have any vision issues. The OceanGlass touchpad, an eco-friendly element of the deck made of ocean-bound plastic garbage, will appeal to environmentalists. The chassis’s bottom is composed of magnesium-aluminum and has four feet to keep it off flat surfaces; there’s also a huge vent and two speakers.
keyboard and touchpad
The Swift 5 SF514 keys have a distinct pressure point that may nearly be described as “sharp.” Typing chores can be completed quickly after becoming accustomed to the keyboard. A single-step keyboard illumination is also available. In the Swift 5 SF514, Acer employs a ClickPad as a mouse replacement. The surface is well adapted for mouse pointer navigation, and clicks are successfully registered via mechanical pressure as well as touch input. Furthermore, there is a 14-inch touchscreen that is particularly responsive to touch inputs and reliably implements commands in the system.
Acer Swift 5 review: Display
The Swift 5 employs an IPS touchscreen with a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 19201080 resolution. Thinner bezels, particularly on the sides, result in a screen-to-body ratio of 90 percent for the 14-inch model. The display is billed as “Acer CineCrystal,” which is simply a fancy name for a glossy screen. The screen also boasts 340 nits, which felt quite bright, especially with so much white on the screen. However, the shiny screen is highly reflective. Working outside, everything was still legible, but we could see a slight reflection of myself on the screen. And while I was indoors and trying to examine the screen from a perpendicular angle, we saw a lot of reflections on the lower half and farther half of the display. Other computers can be squeezed for a few more nits. Lenovo’s IdeaPad, for example, boasts 400 nits, and the E13 Flip Evo claims 500 nits. The Acer screen claims to cover the entire sRGB colour space. Colors appeared as expected in movies. The exhibit captured the soft pinks of a dusk sky, the warmth of people’s skin tones, and the intricacy in darkened landscapes.
Acer Swift 5 review: Audio
Do you want to play music from your laptop? The Acer Swift 5 comes with dual speakers that have been upgraded with DTS processing. The bottom-firing speakers are located on the right and left edges parallel to the touchpad, and while sound can still be muffled when using this notebook in your lap, it’s not as bad as with the Acer Aspire 5. Having saying that, this isn’t the best laptop speaker system I’ve heard. It gets rather loud, and the playback is well defined, however the output has limited dynamic range. The audio lacked oomph, whether listening to electronic beats or catchy rock. When compared to the M1 MacBook Pro, Apple’s laptop had more thud and more clearly defined sonic characteristics.
Acer Swift 5 review: Graphics
Graphics card performance was also satisfactory. We achieved an OpenGL score of 48.3fps in synthetic testing such as Cinebench R15. However, the included Intel UHD Graphics 620 GPU is simply not powerful enough to handle 3D games smoothly. We attempted Far Cry 4, which is quite scalable, but even with the resolution reduced to 1366×768 and the graphics preset set to ‘Low,’ we only managed to average 12fps on the Swift 5. To be fair, the Swift 5 isn’t supposed to be a gaming laptop, so we won’t hold that against it too harshly. The Swift 5 review model we received is a ‘SF514-55T,’ with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. This model lacks a discrete graphics processor. With all video and graphics rendering handled by the integrated Intel Xe Graphics unit of the 11th-generation Intel CPU. Models include up to 1TB of internal storage, 16GB of RAM, and the option of Nvidia MX350 dedicated graphics, all jammed into a chassis that seems weightless.
Performance
The dual fan system is silent while still keeping the laptop well ventilated. There were no overheating issues during our daily testing; at most, it felt warm after extended use, but nothing like concerning. Its benchmark ratings are higher than those of other laptops with comparable specs, indicating that it is more than capable of playing low to moderately demanding games. While high-end titles will undoubtedly struggle on this system, the fact that it can play a variety of the greatest laptop games like Disco Elysium and Cuphead on top of school and productivity duties makes its price tag appear lot more affordable. The 1080p display is absolutely clear and colourful, with no confused by the touchscreen. A 4K or OLED display would have been preferable, but the drain on battery life would have been too high to justify, especially for a pick-up-and-go laptop. The 1080p webcam captures clear, well-lit images and video, and the sound quality is excellent. Even in the most elaborate musical works we could discover, each instrument was audible. The loudness is also perfectly adjusted, neither too loud nor too soft. Overall performance is comparable to other laptops in the same price and specification range, but the touchscreen and ability to run games pretty well give it the edge. However, while the price is justified, it is still slightly more than other less expensive options that provide the same level of efficiency. You can read the Acer Swift 5 review.
Acer Swift 5 review: Battery life and heat
The Acer Swift 5 comes with a 56Wh battery. It’s a respectable amount, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, even with mid-size batteries and the latest AMD and Intel CPUs, we observe some impressive results. When playing streamed video at the type of display brightness you could use inside, this laptop lasts 10 hours and 20 minutes on power saver mode. When used for light work – only a word processor and a couple of browser windows it lost only 14% after two hours, implying it can last up to 14 hours. It’s unusual for light usage numbers to outperform those of a basic video stream test. Assume you’ll reach closer to 10 hours if you keep the screen intensity low and do little to make the CPU twitch. This is impressive real-world endurance, especially for a laptop weighing around 1kg. However, it falls short of some of the results we’ve heard recently from AMD Ryzen notebooks, which frequently outlast Intel ones.
Configuration options
Acer stated that variants with larger 1TB SSDs and Nvidia MX350 dedicated GPUs would be available for purchase when the Swift 5 update was unveiled in September 2020. At the time of writing, the sole mention to the model tested 512GB with no dedicated graphics was on Acer’s UK website. In the United States, the Acer Swift 5 with a more powerful Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor, 16GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD is available for $1299 from Newegg. If you require a greater level of performance, machines with a Core i7-1065G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and the aforementioned are available. If you need extra local storage, you can obtain variants with a larger 1TB SSD.
Final words
The Acer Swift 5 is one of the few laptops in India with a 14-inch display that weighs less than 1kg, making it quite unique. Other Ultrabooks in this price range include the Dell XPS 13 9360, Lenovo Ideapad 720 Slim, and the Asus ZenBook UX430UA, all of which have similar specifications but weigh somewhat more than 1kg. If weight is a significant component in your purchasing decision, the Swift 5 will be difficult to beat. Keep in mind that the battery life isn’t fantastic, so unless you use this laptop extremely sparingly, it won’t be easy to get through a whole workday on a single charge.
