Acer Swift X (SFX14-51G) laptop review

Acer Swift X are compact and light laptops with a powerful hardware platform, and this year’s update of the line does not betray its traditions. This year, the manufacturer “transferred” the Acer Swift X to the Intel platform (last year, AMD Ryzen processors were installed in the laptops of the line). Let’s see what the updated system is capable of.

Specifications

Design and layout

Acer Swift X (SFX14-51G), as a 14-inch model, is very small in size (313x214x17.9 mm) and light. It weighs only 1.4 kg with an all-aluminum body, including the inner surface of the “base” around the keyboard. The model is offered in two color solutions – “green” (Alga Green) and “red” (Tigerlily Red), we have the first option for review.

The frames around the screen are very small – a little less than 5 mm on the sides and 8.6 mm on top; in general, the screen occupies as much as 92.22% of the cover area. The case feels strong, it does not bend and does not creak. It is impossible to open the lid with one hand. The base must be held so that it does not come off the table; for relief on the lower side near the touchpad made a special cut. The maximum opening angle is approximately 135 °, while the base rises slightly, which adds ergonomics to the keyboard. The hinges are quite tight, they fix the screen well in any position.

All interface connectors are located on the side panels: on the left you can find two USB-C with Thunderbolt 4 support and charging (100 W), HDMI 2.1 output and full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1, which supports charging devices in the off state. On the right there is a minijack for a headset, another USB 3.2 Gen 1 and a Kensington lock. The vents are located at the bottom and above the keyboard, so hot air does not cause discomfort when using the mouse (although it slightly heats the screen above the grille). Also, the Acer Swift X uses … gaps between the keys of the keyboard for air intake. This, according to the manufacturer, improves heat dissipation by 10%.

Keyboard, touchpad

Acer Swift X is equipped with an island-type keyboard with a typical laptop keystroke. Keyboard without an additional numeric keypad, almost as wide as a normal desktop model (the difference does not exceed 3-4 mm), so you do not have to blindly get used to the reduced size of the keys or the distance between them. Thanks to the metal case the keyboard does not bend not only during work, but also when you specifically press in the center.

The layout is almost standard ANSI, with a long left Shift and a single-line Enter. The arrow control unit is embedded in the main block, under the right Shift – for this we had to reduce the space and move the right Alt and Ctrl to the left. The power button (with a built-in fingerprint scanner) is located in the upper right corner, in a row with the top keys, just above the backspace. It is not sunk into the case, so there is a non-zero chance to miss and accidentally press it.

The keys have a white backlight, with two levels of intensity and the ability to turn off completely. The backlight is quite moderate, but on the dark keys it is clearly visible.

Medium-sized touchpad – 10.5×6.5 cm, very easy to use. The manufacturer calls it OceanGlass – the surface of the touchpad is very slippery and really feels more like a glass screen of a smartphone than the plastic from which it is actually made. And not from any plastic , but from plastic waste collected in the ocean, so Acer calls it an “environmentally friendly” touchpad.

Screen

The Acer Swift X 2022 uses a 14-inch IPS panel made by AU Optronics (B140QAN05.5). Resolution – 2240×1400 pixels, aspect ratio 16:10, pixel density – 189 PPI, refresh rate standard, 60 Hz. As you can see, the characteristics are not a game, but a typical “working” panel, with practical proportions of the screen and a dense image, on which individual pixels can be seen only if you specifically look for them up close.

Standard color screen coverage – 99% sRB (80% Adobe RGB, 80% DCI-P3). The gamma is slightly understated, up to ~ 2 . This reduces the saturation of the image, but better processes details in shadows and bright areas. The brightness is adjustable in the range from 20 to 350 cd / m2, which will be enough for work in complete darkness and in strong office lighting.

The maximum static contrast reaches 1100: 1, which is a very good figure for a laptop IPS panel. The color temperature over the entire brightness range is almost constant and very close to the standard value of 6500K. The uniformity of color temperature and brightness over the entire screen area, as on the display in such a thin case, is also very decent. Accuracy of color reproduction, as on the screen which is not intended for professional work with graphics, is quite sufficient . The average value of ΔE is a little below 2,5 (we will remind, it is considered that the average user, most likely, will not notice deviations in color display if this parameter is lower than 3).

When viewed from the side, the brightness is noticeably reduced, and the image becomes a little warmer, but in general the quality remains at a very decent level.

Hardware platfrom

The Acer Swift X (SFX14-51G) model line of 2022 uses 12th generation Intel processors – Intel Core i5-1240P and i7-1260P; in the model that came to us for review, the first option is installed.

Intel Core i5-1240P is a 12-core mid-range processor of the Alder Lake-P family, designed specifically for ultra-thin laptops and introduced in early 2022. It uses big.LITTLE technology: the i5-1240P includes four productive Golden Cove architecture cores and 8 energy-efficient Gracemont architecture cores. Productive cores support Hyper-Threading, so the processor can process 16 threads simultaneously. i5-1240P is made by 10-nm process technology, the typical TDP of the processor is 28 watts. Productive cores can operate at frequencies of 1.7-4.4 GHz, while efficient – 1.2-3.3 GHz. The processor has built-in graphics Iris Xe with 80 computing units, which operates at 1300 MHz.

In addition, depending on the configuration, the Acer Swift X (SFX14-51G) can be equipped with a discrete graphics card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop or 3050 Ti Laptop with 4 GB of video memory (our model had a second option). The RAM is soldered on the board, so there is no way to add more capacity. In the current configuration, the laptop is equipped with 16 GB of LPDDR5, which works in dual-channel mode (also available with 8 GB). The characteristics of the drive may differ depending on the model . The manufacturer offers options PCIe NVMe SSD Gen3 (8 Gbps) or Gen4 (16 Gbps) with a capacity of 512 GB or 1 TB. The Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 (802.11ax) + Bluetooth 5.2 module is responsible for wireless communication.

Acer Swift X Performance

Intel Core i5-1240P demonstrates high performance in various tasks, and in complex synthetic benchmarks is significantly ahead of Intel i5 and i7 11th generation processors with a thermal package of 35 watts. NVMe SSD Samsung MZVL21T0HCLR-00B07 (1000 GB, PCIe 4.0) has a very high performance: read speed 7000 MB/s, write – more than 5200 MB/s.

Acer Quick Access allows you to choose from three cooling modes that directly affect system performance: Silent, Normal, and Performance (you can also switch them with the Fn + F hotkeys).

We compared the performance of the system in them using the Cinebench R23 utility during loading on all cores. In Silent mode, the allocated thermal package of the processor was 28 W, its temperature rose to 70 degrees, productive cores worked at an average frequency of 2-2.1 GHz, the noise level was quite low (~ 41 dB at a distance of 1 m from the laptop). In Normal, the heat packet increased to 35 watts, the CPU temperature rose to 80 degrees, the frequency of all cores – up to 2.3 GHz, the noise level rose to 46 dB. Surprisingly, the Performance mode in our case did not differ much from Normal in the direction of slightly lower performance in multi-core tests (thermal package 32 W, core frequency and noise level are about the same).

A similar situation with the results in multi-core tests was in the benchmark 3DMark CPU Test (from left to right – Silent, Normal, Performance):

Most likely, these are the nuances of the first sample of the laptop, which will be eliminated before its commercial version goes on sale. Note also that during the stress test of system stability in AIDA64 throttling was not fixed by the utility.

Acer Swift X gaming performance is typical for laptops with discrete video GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop 4 GB and not bad for a model that is not positioned as a purely gaming: system speed is quite enough to be comfortable enough to play modern games in separate Full HD capabilities at medium graphics quality settings.

Gaming performance, Full HD, average graphics quality:

Battery life

The notebook is equipped with a battery of 59 watts. Not much, but the Acer Swift X shows very good autonomy, quite possibly thanks to the processor with energy-efficient cores. At a brightness of 120 cd/m² in the battery test of the PCMark 10 benchmark, it worked for 8.5 hours in Office and Video modes – and more than 14 hours in no activity mode. As for the gaming application of the laptop, there are no surprises – in the presence of a discrete graphics card Acer Swift X was able to hold out in the appropriate test for a little over an hour.