Acer Swift 14 AI: a compact and productive ultrabook on the ARM platform

The Swift line of Acer notebooks is positioned as compact and productive ultrabooks for work that are easy to take on the go. Today, we’re going to take a look at a somewhat unusual model: Acer Swift 14 AI, a Copilot+ PC based on the ARM platform with the Snapdragon X Plus chipset.

Acer Swift 14 AI specifications

Package contents

Along with the laptop, you can find a charger, a power cable, a user manual, and an HDMI to USB Type C adapter in the box. Given that the laptop doesn’t have its own HDMI connector, this accessory can come in handy. By the way, you can use a part of the box as a stand if you wish: there are step-by-step instructions on how to do this.

Design and layout

Traditionally for models in this line, the Acer Swift 14 AI is a thin and light ultrabook. Despite its all-aluminum body (including the inner surface around the keyboard), it weighs only 1.36 kg and is just under 2 cm thick.

The color of the case is gray (Vapor Silver), there are no other color options for this model. The bezels around the screen are quite small – 5 mm on the sides and 9 mm on the top; in the center of the top bezel there is a small thickening that houses a video camera with a hardware shutter and an infrared camera for face recognition.

The lid can be opened with one hand, with a maximum opening angle of 180°. The hinges are tight enough to hold the screen well in any position. The case feels sturdy, it does not bend or creak.

All interface connectors are located on the side panels: on the left you can find two USB4 Type-C with Thunderbolt 4 and charging support and a full-size USB 3.2, on the right there is a mini-headset jack, another USB 3.2, and activity and charging indicators. Ventilation holes are located below and above the keyboard, so hot air does not cause discomfort when using the mouse.

Keyboard, touchpad

Acer Swift 14 AI is equipped with an island-type keyboard with a typical laptop key travel. The keyboard has no additional number pad and is almost the same width as a regular desktop model, so you won’t have to get used to the reduced key size or spacing for blind typing. The keyboard does not bend during operation; it can be slightly bent only if you press on it with a fairly noticeable force.

The layout is almost standard ANSI, with a long left Shift and single-line Enter. The arrow control block is traditionally for compact ultrabooks embedded in the main block, under the right Shift – for this we had to reduce the space and shift the right Alt to the left. As you can see in the photo, there is no right Ctrl on the keyboard: instead, there is a launcher for the Copilot chatbot.

The power button with the built-in fingerprint scanner is located in the upper right corner, in line with the top keys, just above the Backspace. It is not recessed into the body, so it can be pressed accidentally; a different shape of the cap, which can be felt by touch, should reduce the likelihood of this happening.

In addition to launching Copilot, another “non-standard” button of this keyboard is located in the top row – launching the proprietary AcerSense utility, which can be found one button from the power button, marked “a”.

The keys have white backlighting, with two intensity levels and the ability to turn it off completely. The backlighting is not very strong even at maximum brightness; when viewed from the side, the light leakage from under the caps is moderate and almost does not interfere – in general, in a not very well-lit room, such backlighting is perceived quite comfortably.

The touchpad is quite large, especially for a compact 14-inch ultrabook – 12.5×7.5 cm. In its upper right corner is an activity indicator that lights up white when the laptop is turned on and when Copilot is activated. The touchpad is easy to use, the surface is slippery, and the mouse buttons are pressed with moderate effort and a very noticeable “click.”

Screen

The copy that came to us for review was equipped with a 14.5-inch IPS panel (MB145LS01-2, manufactured by HKC) with a resolution of 2560×1600 dots, an aspect ratio of 16:10, and a refresh rate of 120 Hz. There are also touchscreen versions with the same characteristics.

Acer Swift 14 AI color gamut is standard: 98% sRGB (74% Adobe RGB, 74% DCI-P3). The gamma value is slightly higher than the standard 2.3, which makes the image saturated, with slightly emphasized shadows.

The brightness is adjustable from 23 to 480 cd/m², which is enough to work in complete darkness and in strong office lighting – and even for outdoor use, provided there is no direct sunlight on the screen.

The maximum static contrast reaches 1360:1, which is a very good result for a notebook IPS panel. The color temperature throughout the entire brightness range is almost unchanged and amounts to 7000-7100K; this is slightly higher than the standard (6500K) and makes the image cooler.

The color temperature uniformity is average: the maximum deviation from the standard is ΔE=4.1. It can be noted that the bottom right corner is the “problematic”, where the deviation is the largest: the rest of the screen is much better with this indicator.

But the brightness uniformity of Acer Swift 14 AI is very good: the difference between the center (the brightest area) and the bottom of the screen (the darkest) does not exceed 13%, which is very good even for desktop monitors.

The color reproduction accuracy is simply excellent – the average ΔE value is less than one, the maximum is 2.15 (the only color that “stands out” from the overall picture is due to the nuances of the test colorimeter). It is believed that the average user is unable to notice the difference between the reference color and the one displayed by the monitor if this indicator does not exceed two, and manufacturers usually focus on such values when factory calibrating screens.

Hardware platform

As noted at the beginning, Acer Swift 14 AI is based on ARM architecture and is equipped with Snapdragon X series chipsets: depending on the configuration, it can be the more productive Snapdragon X Elite or the more affordable Snapdragon X Plus; the model we reviewed has the second variant, namely Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100.

The CPU contains 10 Oryon cores operating at frequencies of up to 3.4 GHz, the Adreno X1-85 GPU is responsible for video processing, and there is also a separate chip for performing Hexagon artificial intelligence tasks. The laptop is equipped with 16 GB LPDDR5X RAM and a 1 TB PCIe NVMe 4.0 SSD (WD PC SN5000S).

The Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 system is responsible for wireless communication : Wi-Fi 7 Dual Band + Bluetooth 5.4.

Copilot+ PC

Microsoft made a new attempt to make Windows and ARM friends this spring when it announced a new generation of Copilot+ computers for artificial intelligence. In addition to the company’s own devices, such as the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, presented at the same time, a number of partners promised to release their Copilot+ computers, and Acer Swift 14 AI is one of them.

Fortunately, this time Microsoft has managed to solve the main problem of Windows on ARM, namely software compatibility. In office use, which is exactly how Acer Swift 14 AI is positioned, the average user will most likely not notice any difference from a traditional Windows laptop: all common work programs have either already been ported to ARM or run without any problems through an emulator (the manufacturer claims 175+ programs with native ARM support).

Yes, almost all of the test utilities worked for us (for some of them we had to download separate ARM versions), including, for example, the Spyder X Elite colorimeter software, the latest update of which was released long before the Copilot+ platform was announced. But of course, it’s quite possible to encounter incompatible software: in our case, it turned out to be two games – Gears 5 reported that it didn’t support ARM64, and Far Cry 6 simply gave an error when trying to launch. In addition, some tests in the PCMark10 package were also marked as incompatible with ARM devices.

As with other Copilot+ PC devices, Acer Swift 14 AI emphasizes AI: the keyboard has a dedicated key to launch the Copilot chatbot, and a number of system programs have AI tools. Here we can mention the Cocreator assistant in the Paint graphic editor or the Live Captions function, which creates subtitles from dialogues in movies or video calls – and can also translate them into English from 44 languages. As for the most touted AI tool in Copilot+ PC, the Recall function, Microsoft still hasn’t released it yet.

The capabilities of the built-in NPU are also used in Acer’s proprietary PurifiedView and PurifiedVoice utilities for processing video and audio recordings, both to “offload” the CPU and optimize power consumption, and for some AI tools, such as noise reduction.

Productivity

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100 demonstrates quite high performance in synthetic processor benchmarks: if you compare the performance of Acer Swift 14 AI with a similar model from the same manufacturer, last year’s Swift X 14, which was based on a 14-core Intel Core i7-13700H processor, you can see that the Snapdragon X Plus is at least as good in synthetic performance – and in some tests even more powerful.

But the performance in gaming benchmarks without discrete video is not impressive: in all benchmarks that include 3D graphics, such as 3DMark Time Spy, the performance of Swift 14 AI with the Adreno X1-85 GPU is significantly lower than Swift X 14 (equipped with the GeForce RTX 4050 GPU).

In addition, as we have already noted, games are the most “risky” software in terms of running smoothly on the Windows on ARM platform, at least for now. Out of five games, two refused to run, while the other three (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, DiRT 5, Chernobylite) performed at 25-30 frames per second at Full HD resolution and medium graphics settings.

The AcerSense utility is used to configure system settings. It is not overloaded with functionality and offers only basic features.

Among other things, AcerSense allows you to choose between three laptop modes: Silent, Normal, and Performance. The performance differs only in Silent mode – Normal and Performance modes showed very close results in the Cinebench R23 benchmark. The noise level is also about the same in all three modes and is very moderate – street noise easily covers it, even with the windows slightly ajar. In normal operation, the cooling system is very rarely heard.

Unfortunately, the HWiNFO ARM64 utility monitors a relatively small number of parameters, so it is currently impossible to get a detailed picture of the system behavior (in particular, TDP values in different modes). System performance parameters during the Cinebench R23 multi-core test:

Another limitation of the platform that we encountered during the tests is that the AIDA64 utility was not able to perform a stress test of the Snapdragon X Plus processor, so it was not possible to check the stability of the laptop and system parameters during a long load. The 3DMark Steel Nomad Light stress test showed stability at 98%, which is a very good result.

The most interesting question was comparing the system performance when running on mains and battery power. And here, Acer Swift 14 AI did not disappoint: unlike the typical behavior of Windows laptops on the x86 architecture, in this case, there was almost no performance drop in most benchmarks, and in some cases, on the contrary, performance even increased slightly.

Acer Swift 14 AI battery life

In addition to relatively high performance, Snapdragon X chipsets are also characterized by very good energy efficiency. Thanks to this, as well as a very decent 75 Wh battery for a thin ultrabook, the Acer Swift 14 AI demonstrates excellent battery life: at 100 cd/m² brightness in the PCMark 10 battery test, it lasted more than 20 hours of video playback and 30 and a half hours of standby time!