So, here is the best laptop deal that you can find in the US market right now. I am talking
about Acer Swift 3, a thin and light laptop that typically goes for 750 dollars. But at
the time of making this video, it is selling on Amazon for only $599. If you have been looking
for a thin and light laptop, should you pull the trigger on Acer Swift 3? Let's find out!
A typical $599 laptop will come with middle of the road specs. But not Acer Swift 3. It's rocking an
8-core 16-thread Ryzen 7 5700U processor. Until we start seeing the 12th generation Intel Alderlake
U-series CPUs in mid-tier laptops, Ryzen 7 5700U will remain the best CPU for thin and
light laptops in this price range. It has a base clock speed of 1.8 GHz and max boost clock speed
of 4.3 GHz. Here is a chart showing the single and multi-core performance of this chip compared to
Apple’s M1 silicon. Ryzen 7 5700U beats Apple’s M1 chip by 23% in multi-core benchmark but loses by
18% in single core benchmark. So that means you should have no trouble running any application
on this laptop. Whether it's casual internet surfing or gaming, running productivity apps
for word processing, emailing, spreadsheets or running intense applications like video editing
& photoshop, Acer Swift 3 will breeze through all these tasks without any hiccups. When I ran the
popular video editing software Davinci Resolve 17.2 on this laptop, it handled my 4K footage
from Sony A6400 camera with breeze. Now, the onboard 8 GB LPDDR4 RAM is unfortunately soldered
to the motherboard and cannot be upgraded. But at least the 512 GB NVMe SSD storage is
user upgradeable. Overall for the price, I am very impressed with the hardware specs on Acer Swift 3
Let's talk about the display. You are getting a 14 inch 1080p screen. It's an LED backlit IPS display
with 100% sRGB color gamut. I love the thin bezels on this laptop giving it a screen-to-body ratio of
around 85%. The peak brightness is an impressive 300 nits which trumps most other windows laptops
in its price range. Moving on to the build quality, Acer Swift 3’s top and bottom half
are made from aluminum, while the palm rest and keyboard deck are made from magnesium-aluminum
alloy. The chassis feels very solid compared to the typical polycarbonate and ABS plastic laptops
in this price range. Its keyboard has silver keys with white backlighting that looks cool but
is barely visible during day-time. I would have preferred a darker keyboard with white lettering
for better contrast. Since this is a thin and light laptop, the keyboard offers a shallow travel
distance but at least the individual keys don't feel mushy and provide decent actuation force.
Overall the typing experience is above average, nothing spectacular but gets the job done. You
get a fingerprint reader under the arrow keys for passwordless login. Its touchpad
is made from plastic and measures 4.2 by 2.6 inches. It does support all windows gestures,
and BTW you can upgrade the operating system to windows 11 for free because it comes with a TPM
chip. But the best thing about this laptop is how light it feels when holding it in your hands.
Acer has packed so much horse power in such a thin and light design, it's pretty impressive.
Acer Swift 3 comes with a 3-cell 48 Wh battery. In the past, Ryzen based laptops used to trail
behind their Intel counterparts in battery life. But not anymore. This laptop has consistently
delivered me around 9 hours of battery life during typical day to day use. The included
65-Watt barrel port A/C adapter supports fast charging, and I can juice up this laptop from
0 to 40% in under 30 mins. BTW you can also charge this laptop via the USB Type-C port.
Regarding thermal heat dissipation, Acer Swift 3 is using a unified copper heat-pipe and
fan assembly to keep both the CPU, and integrated GPU cool. It does a pretty good job,
I have never experienced my Swift 3 laptop get hot even under extreme load. The fans
are quiet and even when they are spinning at full throttle, they are barely audible.
For a thin and light laptop, Swift 3 offers a good selection of ports. There is a USB 3.2 Gen-2
Type-C port which supports data, power delivery and displayport. But this is not a thunderbolt
port, so that sucks. Although you can hook up 2 external monitors to this laptop using USB
Type-C to HDMI dongle and the 2nd HDMI port. In addition you get 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and
a headphone jack. There is also full supports the latest WiFi 6 and bluetooth 5.2 wireless
standard. Moving on to the speakers, you are getting a typical laptop speaker. Nothing fancy,
even though Acer touts Dolby DTS Audio support. Let's talk about the webcam. Swift 3 comes with
a 720p webcam mounted at the center of the top bezel. The quality of these webcams are
mediocre at best. They are fine for making zoom video calls, but it's 2022. It's time to
put a damn 1080p webcam that doesn't look like a potato. In the meantime, I would recommend
getting a 1080p external USB webcam if you want to step up the video quality of your zooms calls.
I have linked some of my favorite 1080p USB webcams in the video description below.
So here is the bottomline. Considering that Acer Swift 3 costs only $599, comes with 8 GB system
RAM, 512 GB of PCIe NVMe SSD, and has a 8-core 16-thread processor that goes toe to toe with
Apple’s M1 silicon, in my opinion this is one of the best mid-tier thin and light laptops you can
get in the market right now. You are getting a solid build quality, wide port selection,
built-in fingerprint sensor, kickass performance and a long battery life. But if you are looking
for a thin and light 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop that supports an active stylus pen,
then checkout this video over here. In this video, I list my top-5 favorite 2-in-1 laptops. You will
find it very useful. So go ahead and watch that video, and I will see you guys over there. Bye!