Acer’s Swift 5 is a thin and light 14 inch laptop that’s been updated
with Intel’s new 11th gen tiger lake processors.
Build quality feels ok, it’s a bit hollow and light weight feeling with a plastic exterior,
and no sharp corners or edges.
Mine weighed just over a kilo, or under 2.3lb.
With the small 65w power brick for charging it’s 1.35kg or 3lb total.
As a 14” machine it’s on the smaller side and under 1.5cm thick, so fairly portable.
The 14” 1080p 60Hz touchscreen has a glass glossy finish, so reflections and fingerprints show up.
It has an antimicrobial coating, which I suppose sounds good in human malware times and makes sense
with a touchscreen, but at the same time I’ve got no way of testing how effective that is.
I’ve tested the screen with the Spyder 5, and got 94% of sRGB,
72% of AdobeRGB, and 72% of DCI-P3. At 100% brightness we’re looking at over 360 nits,
so above average, and with a decent 1110:1 contrast ratio.
Backlight bleed was fine in my unit, but this will vary between laptops.
The 720p camera is above the display in the center, no Windows Hello support though.
This is what the camera and microphone look
and sound like and this is what it sounds like to type on the keyboard.
The keyboard has white backlighting which illuminates all keys and secondary key functions.
The power button is in the top right, but pressing it by accident doesn’t trigger a shut down.
There’s only one level of key brightness, and this is controlled with the F8 key.
Typing felt fine, the keys sound a little clicky,
I’ll let you have a listen to give you an idea of what to expect.
The precision touchpad clicks down anywhere and worked well without problems.
There’s a fingerprint scanner to the right just under the keyboard,
which I found to work fast and accurately.
Fingerprints don’t easily show up on the matte finish, and as it’s smooth
it’s easy to clean with a microfiber cloth. On the left there’s the power input at the back,
HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port and USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support,
DisplayPort output, and it can also be used to charge the laptop.
The right has a 3.5mm audio combo jack,
another USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, and Kensington lock slot up the back.
The back has some subtle swift branding in the center and rubber feet towards the corners,
more on that shortly, while the front has an indentation for getting your finger in to open
the lid. Due to the lighter weight of the laptop, it wasn’t able to be opened with one finger.
When the lid opens, the bottom of the screen raises the back of
the laptop up which helps with cooling, improves the keyboard angle for typing,
and means the bottom speakers aren’t pressed up against the table.
There wasn’t much screen flex, perhaps due to the glass screen,
but by trying to flex it you can see that it slides around quite easily on my table,
another side effect of being this light, and this was occasionally noticeable when just using
it normally. It’s also in part due to there being less points of contact with the desk,
as the back is now just held up by the small rubber feet near the corners.
This in combination with the hollow feeling chassis gives it some flex when pushing down,
but it felt sturdy enough during regular use.
Underneath there’s just some air intake vents towards the back as well as some rubber feet,
the back feet are only used when the lid is closed. Getting inside was fairly easy
and involved taking out 11 TR5 screws. Once inside, we’ve got the battery down the front,
M.2 SSD to the right of it, and WiFi 6 card above the battery.
Memory is soldered to the motherboard which is pretty typical for laptops at this size,
and there’s no discrete graphics here, so not too much for cooling.
The speakers are towards the front on the left and right sides. I don’t think they sound great,
but better than the MSI Prestige 14 that I tested at the same time. They’re just not
too clear at higher volumes and there’s no bass, but the latencymon results were good.
The Swift 5 is powered by a 4-Cell 54.5Wh battery, and although it was lasting for more than 5 and a
half hours in the YouTube playback test, it wasn’t quite as good as some others with similar specs,
like the MSI Prestige 14 with smaller battery which almost went for 10 hours.
Let’s check out thermals next.
There’s no software for controlling performance. Inside we’ve just got a
couple of heatpipes for the processor, and air is exhausted below the screen.
When under CPU stress test, it wasn’t running that hot, around 64 degrees Celsius
in my 21 degree room. This was a result of the processor running with a 17 watt power limit,
so not quite the max 28 watts specified by Intel, but the Intel spec does also list
lower power limits, which would be for thinner and lighter machines like this.
Here’s how CPU only performance looks in Cinebench R20. Like the other 11th gen laptops
tested so far, the single core score is better than all other laptops I’ve previously tested,
impressive stuff, especially when we consider it’s beating
the higher wattage H series quad core parts in multicore score too.
At idle the keyboard was under 30 degrees Celsius, so a little cooler than most others tested. With
the CPU stress test running it’s only getting to 40 degrees on the left side, as the processor is
under there, so just a little warm to the touch. Let’s have a listen to fan noise.
I couldn’t hear it at all at idle, and it didn’t get that loud even with the
CPU stress test running, so basically it seems that Acer are prioritizing
a cooler and quieter machine at the expense of higher performance levels,
which I think is generally fine as an option for lighter machines like this.
Although not a gaming laptop by any means, the Intel Xe graphics are definitely capable of
running games. AAA titles at 720p is possible as long as you’re not going to max settings,
while esports titles are fine even at 1080p.
I’ve also tested some content creator workloads. Adobe Premiere video exporting doesn’t do as well
when compared to other laptops that have discrete AMD or Nvidia graphics though.
When we look at the Puget Systems Premiere test, where higher scores are better now, it’s a little
more ahead as this tests for more things than just raw export times such as live playback.
Adobe Photoshop is heavily dependent on processor performance,
and as we’ve seen before the i7-1165G7 has excellent single core performance in Cinebench,
so not too surprising that the photoshop result is nice despite the lack of discrete GPU.
DaVinci Resolve on the other hand is heavily dependent on the GPU,
and the Intel Xe graphics just can’t keep up compared to laptops with discrete GPUs.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the 1tb NVMe M.2 SSD was doing alright,
though as an 11th gen laptop it should be possible to use a faster PCIe Gen 4 SSD.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, the configuration I’ve tested here goes for $1300 USD,
so a couple hundred more than the MSI Prestige 14 I recently tested with similar specs,
though that doesn’t have a touch screen and mine had half the storage space.
The Swift was a little lighter though, so could be a better option for portability,
though this means less cooling capacity, so less performance when under heavy load.
Overall, I thought the Acer Swift 5 was fine, it’s a nice little laptop that I had no trouble using,
it’s just that nothing in particular stood out to me as being amazing,
or bad for that matter, it just seems a little pricey to me,
but that’s typically the case with smaller and lighter weight machines like this.
Let me know what you thought about Acer’s 11th Gen Swift 5 laptop down in the comments,
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