you guys, my regular audience may know acer from they're actually pretty
impressive both value on high-end gaming laptops monitors and desktops but Acer
also have a line of more lifestyle type products which includes this the Swift
five a 14-inch thin and light laptop the Swift five packs an I7-8550U which
is a quad-core with hyper-threading and can boost all the way up to four
gigahertz although it doesn't normally do this unless it's plugged in so do
bear that in mind it also has eight gigabytes of non
upgradable soldered RAM as well as a 250 gig SSD it's actually a SATA drive but in an M.2
configuration with a second M.2 slot being available inside if you did
want to add some storage later on. The battery in here is a 36 watt hour unit
which equates to about three hours of battery life when it comes to the PCMark
battery life test - now you can extend that by turning the screen brightness
down to 0% to get about five hours but even then it still doesn't really keep up
with the likes of the LG Gram which has eight to ten hours. Speaking of the
display it's a 1080p IPS touchscreen which is actually really quite nice now
it's a gift and the curse the gift being that it's a beautiful display to look at
and the touch screen functionality is excellent it's full multi-touch
supported with gestures and web browsers for back and forward and all that sort of stuff
which is great to see and makes the device a lot more usable but the curse
is that it's a glossy panel because of the touch screen digitizer and means
that in any sort of lights as you can see here it is just impossible to see
stuff on screen sometimes and that's a real big downside the other downside is
that the panel isn't flush with the bezel which means that you have a real
tough time actually pressing anything in the corners really anything near the
edge so if you wanted to say press the windows button down the bottom or even
just to close a window that is fully maximized you're gonna have a bit of a
pain doing that it kind of makes up for it though by being just a beautiful
display to look at as long as there's no glare on the screen you're gonna have a
great viewing experience viewing angles are fantastic from all around so no
problem sharing a film with your partner in the bed or
whatever else you're all good there, but the main downside
actually colour accuracy if you did want to do colour sensitive work on this you
will need to very least calibrate it because it's actually no better than a
TN panel for colour accuracy it was sitting about 93% of the srgb spectrum
in terms of coverage and then I think about 65 or 64 percent of the Adobe RGB
spectrum and about 68 69 percent of the DCI p3 spectrum so again while it's not
you know horrific and you can certainly do some you know photo editing or
whatever else on it it's not the best one that I've seen. Now just above the
display is the built-in webcam and microphone let's take a quick look.
The built in web cam is kinda naff, it's 720p at best and I'm in full studio lighting I know
it's still incredibly soft and when you're not in full studio lighting
it's let's just say not fantastic it also has a lot of screen wobble so the
the webcam especially being up at the top which is where I'd like it to be
gets incredibly shaky the microphone though isn't too bad nor are the
built-in speakers so that's a plus and just below the screen is where you're
gonna find that your keyboard and your trackpad now let's go with the good
first and that being the trackpad it tracks incredibly well has multi-touch
gesture support including two finger scrolling if you don't fancy using the
touchscreen and while I did have a few can have missed right clicks where it
thought it was a left click instead of a right click generally speaking I was
plenty happy with the trackpad what I wasn't plenty happy with was the
keyboard it's really just kind of a mess it's an incredibly loud and clicky
experience but also feeling incredibly mushy and loose the spacebar is probably
the worst offender here with just flopping around quite a lot and it's
really just not the best typing experience I've had actually even double
check that it wasn't just me being a mechanical keyboard elitist and passed
the laptop to my partner who has a I think like 10 year old relatively budget
Asus laptop actually does have a touchscreen though with a flush bezel
funnily enough and she after about five keystrokes recoiled in fear with a face
of disgust and while my you know my reaction isn't
quite as severe it does make it pretty hard to recommend
performance-wise is a bit her miss as well on battery worse designed to be the
majority of the time I saw it it's basically throttling the CPU down to
less than one gigahertz far a lot of the time and that means that I've actually
had situations where I've tried to open the windows search you know built-in
down at the Start menu and it took literally five to ten seconds to
register keystrokes let alone actually search through the Machine now this is
not necessarily commonplace you know even on stuff like a video playback for
example that was perfectly smooth on battery but I have had that occur more
than once and so I expect that because of the severe throttling and obviously
the time than it takes to ramp up the CPU it can be a bit of a downside but
when it's plugged in it's more than happy to boost all the way up to four
gears and be a plenty smooth and enjoyable experience and the notes on
thermals and temperatures the laptop seems to do a sort of silent mode and
stay as quiet as a physically can while letting the CPU get as hot as it
physically can apparently and then we'll turn on the fan at full booster and go
incredibly loud and I've actually had this happen multiple times while I was
filming this video right now literally just sat on the desktop it hit 95
degrees Celsius at its maximum so keep that in mind it does look like a fairly
small heat pipe there's only one heat pipe as well so just keep that in mind
and that's a final note the IO much like many of these thin and light laptops is
fairly limited you have two USB 3 ports one type C port which isn't Thunderbolt
3 you have a headphone 4 pole headphone jack and then an HDMI port and a
standard DC in now my main gripe here is actually that DC in I would much rather
have seen this be a type C port because the power brick that's included only
draws about 50 watts or provides 50 watts to the laptop and that's more than
capable for a type C port even they've felt fairly restricted type C port as
well so what's the verdict then well if you forget the the keyboard and the few
other gripes that I have it's actually not too bad of a laptop especially as I
said when it's plugged in it's perfectly capable and while I would expect that
this is only really going to be used for can a web browsing word processing video
watching that kind of stuff it's certainly not a bad laptop it's
obviously very thin and light which is great but when you do factor in the
keyboard and especially all the other gripes as well it does make it pretty
hard to recommend especially when you consider that as I mentioned my partner
is 10 year old 600 pound laptop is a significantly better typing experience
than this brand new 800 pound one so it's kind of hard to recommend with that
said I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below
is this a laptop you're interested in if so what for was so use case are you planning on
using it for and it has this video change your mind in anyway do let me
know in the comments down below if you want to pick up the laptop or you want
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