This is Acer Swift 5, a thin and light notebook that I have been using for over a month now.
This laptop is a part of Intel's Evo platform which promises a thin and light form factor,
long battery life and a kickass performance. So in today's video, I will give my detailed
review of this laptop, Techno Panda style! BTW you can find more details about the pricing
and availability of this laptop, by clicking the country specific links that I have put
in the video description below. So without further ado, let's get started
Acer swift 5 is a premium laptop sporting an all metal construction. The chassis is
made from a high-grade magnesium-lithium and magnesium-aluminum alloy which keeps its weight
down while still providing good structural rigidity. Swift 5 weighs only 2.2 pounds or
1KG which makes it featherlight when holding in hands. In a sea of silver, grey and black
colored laptops that have flooded the market in recent years, the Mist Green colored Acer
Swift 5 stands out from the crowd. Its Acer logo on the top lid carries a signature metallic
copper/bronze vibe that nicely complements its metallic hinge. Open the laptop, and you
are greeted with the same copper/bronze metallic color scheme. The keyboard is using bronze
lettering on mist green keycaps, a truly unique color combo that gives this laptop a premium
flair. I think Acer swift 5 will surely turn heads whether you are using it in a coffee
shop or a classroom.
Moving on to the display, you are getting a 14" Full-HD touchscreen display. It's an
LED backlit IPS panel pumping out 340 nits of peak brightness. This is a really bright
screen and I had no trouble using it in my home in various lighting environments. The
screen delivers 100% sRGB color gamut making it a great laptop choice for digital artwork,
photo editing and color grading. I love its narrow bezels which deliver an impressive
90% screen-to-body ratio. This is a glossy screen with excellent contrast ratio and impressive
color reproduction making it a perfect screen for watching multimedia content. You can tilt
the screen to about 150 degrees providing more than enough room to comfortably use this
laptop on a desk, couch or bed. But note that this is not a 2-in-1 laptop, so you cannot
flip the screen all the way back 360 degrees, which is kind of a bummer. Overall Acer has
put a really high quality display on Swift 5 making it a pleasure to use this laptop
Swift 5 comes with a backlit enabled chiclet style keyboard that offers decent key travel
and springy feedback. The backlighting can be completely turned off if you want to preserve
the battery. I like the thoughtful refinements that Acer has added to this keyboard. For
e.g. when you open the laptop screen, its hinge lifts the laptop base by few millimeters
creating a more ergonomic typing position. Also the most commonly used keys like cntrl,
alt and shift are bigger in size helping with touch typing. The bronze lettering on mist
green keycaps provide a nice contrast for easy typing in both brightly lit and dark
rooms. Now let's talk about the trackpad which measures 4 and a quarter by 2 and a half inches.
This is a high quality trackpad with glass like surface that feels incredibly smooth
when scrolling, swiping and executing various windows gestures. There are no annoying rattling
or wobbling sounds and it generates satisfying left and right clicks. Swift 5 also comes
with a fingerprint sensor below the arrow keys for passwordless login.
My review unit is powered by an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor and it comes with 16GB
LPDDR4 RAM and 1TB PCIe NVME SSD Storage. There is a cheaper core-i5 configuration that
comes with 8GB RAM and 512GB storage. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard and cannot
be upgraded. But the PCIe NVME SSD stick can be easily upgraded by opening the back of
the laptop. As I mentioned before, Acer Swift 5 is a part of Intel's EVO branding which
promise thin and light body, great CPU and GPU performance, and at least 9 hours of battery
life. And my review unit has consistently exceeded these claims. In fact I get around
12 hours of battery life on a normal day's use, which is insane. The Core i7-1165G7 processor
is a beast and delivers absolutely blazing performance. Here is the Cinebench single
core benchmark and you can see that this chip towers above its competition. The integrated
Intel Iris Xe graphics is also pretty good for casual gaming and watching 4k streaming
videos. I stress tested this laptop by running a prime number extraction algorithm which
maxed out all the 4 cores and 8 threads. The CPU ran at a turbo boost clock frequency of
3.8 GHz in the beginning before settling to 3.5GHz which is much higher than its base
clock frequency of 2.8 GHz. The CPU never throttled or slowed down, thanks to Swift
5's excellent thermal design that incorporates dual copper pipes for adequate cooling. So
in summary, this laptop can easily handle day today tasks like internet surfing, creating
documents and excel sheets as well as complex tasks like software development, video editing
and running apps like Adobe Photoshop.
Acer Swift 5 shows how it's possible to create a stylish looking thin and light laptop without
compromising on ports. You are getting a USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port that supports up
to 10 Gbps data transfer speed as well as 65W power delivery for rapid battery charging
and ability to drive a 4K monitor at 60Hz refresh rate. In addition, there is an old
school HDMI port that can also drive an external 4K monitor. So that means you can connect
up to 2 external 4K monitors to this laptop and create a kickass home-office workstation.
You also get a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port along with support for the latest WiFi-6 and Bluetooth
standard. Swift 5 comes with a large 56 Whr battery that can easily power this laptop
for 12 hours. The included battery charger supports fast charging. You can easily add
4 extra hours of battery life in under 30 minutes of charging. Let's quickly talk about
thermals. In my last 1 month of using this laptop, I did not experience any overheating.
The fans remained quiet and the only time I heard them was while running the CPU benchmark
test. During my normal use, the keyboard and the trackpad never got uncomfortably warm,
even while running demanding tasks like video editing and gaming.
Let's quickly talk about the webcam because odds are high that you will use this laptop
to make zoom conference calls. Unfortunately the webcam is a mediocre 720p resolution which
is a shame. Honestly I expected better from 1000 dollar laptops in 2021. If you want to
step up the video quality, I would recommend picking an external 1080p USB webcam. These
are really cheap and dramatically increase the quality of your
video calls. I have linked some of my favorite ones in the video description below
I think Acer Swift 5 is a fantastic thin and light laptop offering kickass performance,
battery life and port connectivity. It has a solid all metal build construction, stylish
design, a really bright full-HD IPS screen, and a good quality keyboard and trackpad.
But I think the elephant in the room is Apple's M1 MacBook which costs about the same, and
carries the Apple cache and arguably delivers better battery life
and performance. But MacBook Air lack touchscreen display which may be a non-starter for many
windows folks who love touch capability on their laptop screen. BTW I plan to get an
M1 MacBook Air very soon, and you can bet that I will put these two laptops against
each other for a Techno Panda showdown. So please subscribe to this channel if you don't
want to miss out on the action. I hope you guys found this video useful. Please smash
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reviews focusing on laptops and gaming PCs. Thanks for watching this video and I will
see you guys in the next one. Bye!