When we last saw the Acer Swift 3 in July 2020, it was an ultraportable laptop packing a 13.5-inch display with a boxy 3:2 aspect ratio that made us declare it was hip to be square. The 2021 edition of the Swift 3 (starts at $749.99; $999.99 as tested) reverses course with a 14-inch screen that features the more common and rectangular 16:9 ratio, and it has us pining for last year's taller view and reduced scrolling. If you don't mind the wider display (or expressly want it because you watch a lot of movies on your laptop), there's a lot to like about the new Swift 3, from its all-metal chassis and Thunderbolt 4 support to its luxuriously long battery life and reasonable price. However, it doesn't bump the Dell XPS 13 and its stellar 16:10 display from our ultraportable Editors' Choice honors list.
Sleek, Sturdy, and Silver
The 14-inch Swift 3 starts at $699.99 with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive. Our $999.99 test system bumps up the processor to a Core i7 and doubles the memory. While getting a 512GB SSD in the base model is appreciated (256GB is starting to feel cramped these days), it makes the $300 upgrade less appealing because it doesn't net you any additional storage. All models feature a non-touch display with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution and the 16:9 aspect ratio.
The Swift 3 is a study in silver. The all-aluminum chassis features a silver lid, a silver keyboard deck with silver keys, and a silver bottom panel. The only parts of the laptop that aren't silver are the matte black plastic bezels framing the display. It adds up to an understated, if one-note, aesthetic that looks equally at home in a boardroom or a coffee shop.
The metal chassis feels solid. The lid is rigid, lending good protection for the display, and the keyboard deck feels firm. There's little flex to the chassis, and the display hinge is free of the dreaded screen wobble. This Swift 3 measures 0.63 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches and weighs 2.71 pounds, wider and shallower than the Swift 3 model we tested last year because of the difference in screen aspect ratio. This year's model is also slightly heavier than last year's 2.62-pound machine, but it is still very portable (and lighter than the 2.8-pound Dell XPS 13).
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The keyboard is comfortable, with shallow travel that makes the keys feel quick and responsive but isn't as unyielding as an older MacBook "butterfly" keyboard. The biggest drawback is the diminutive cursor arrow keys: The up and down arrows share the space of a single key, and the left and right arrow keys are half-height because Acer squeezed in Page Up and Page Down keys above them. It'll take some getting used to before you stop hitting the wrong keys.
The keyboard is backlit, but there's only one brightness level. At this price, it's reasonable to expect two- or three-level backlighting that lets you adjust for ambient light. The silver keys with gray lettering don't create the best contrast, making it difficult to see which key is which under certain lighting conditions.
A fingerprint reader sits below the cursor arrows. Without an IR webcam for face recognition, the fingerprint reader is your only option for logging in with Windows Hello instead of typing passwords.
In contrast to the keys, the touchpad offers a hair too much travel, making clicks feel a step slow. That's a minor gripe, however, and on the whole the touchpad is more than acceptable, with smooth gliding and accurate recording of mousing gestures.
A Wide, But Still Cramped, Display
As mentioned, the biggest departure from last year's Swift 3 is the return to a 16:9 display. On a 14-inch screen, I felt the pinch of this wide aspect ratio. It's a natural fit for watching videos, but the limited amount of vertical space results in more scrolling through web pages and documents. A 16:9 screen is a better fit for 15.6- and 17.3-inch laptops which not only offer more display real estate but are more often used for entertainment purposes. With a 14-inch or smaller panel, a 16:10 or 3:2 aspect ratio lends more versatility and makes the display seem larger than it is.
The aspect ratio is only one of three changes to the display that makes us like this year's Swift 3 less. For another, the resolution has dropped from 2,256 by 1,504 pixels to the familiar 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. To be honest, full HD is sufficient on a 14-inch screen, however, as text and images look sharp. Colors look accurate, as well; Acer claims the screen covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut. (More on the quantitative screen testing near the end of this review.)
While the lower resolution is tolerable at this size, our third complaint is that the screen's rated brightness has fallen from 400 to 300 nits with this year's model. When it comes to display brightness, you'll find 250-nit panels on budget laptops and should be able to expect 350 to 400 nits on a $1,000 notebook. I had the Swift 3's screen set to maximum brightness for the whole time I used the system, mostly in a moderately lit room. The display looked dim in my sunny breakfast nook, and I wouldn't recommend using it outdoors for any length of time.
The 720p webcam above the screen captured reasonably sharp video, but its videos looked grainy unless lighting conditions were ideal. Regardless of lighting, the camera's colors appeared oversaturated with skin tones tending toward red.
The speakers fire downward—never the best position, because their output is directed away from your ears—but produce surprisingly rich sound for a laptop. There's a modest bass response to give music playback a bit of a punch, and the speakers reach a fairly loud level at maximum volume without losing much clarity.
You won't need to carry any dongles with the Swift 3. The laptop features both Type-A and Type-C USB ports; there's one USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support on the left edge, along with a USB 3.2 Type-A port and an HDMI video output.
Another USB-A 3.2 port and a combination headphone/microphone jack join a security lock slot on the right side.
Testing the Acer Swift 3: 'Tiger Lake' Sedate
Our Swift 3 test system features a quad-core Intel Core i7-1165G7 "Tiger Lake" CPU that runs at 2.8GHz and features Iris Xe integrated graphics, along with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. For our benchmark charts, I compared the system to other ultraportables including Acer's own Swift 3X, which features the same 11th Generation CPU but makes use of Intel's rarely seen Iris Xe Max discrete graphics. The Microsoft Surface Pro 8 features a slightly faster Core i7, while the HP Pavilion Aero flaunts AMD's eight-core Ryzen 7 5800U. The Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 relies on an 11th Gen Core i5 chip. All systems feature 16GB of memory and (except for the Swift 3X) integrated graphics.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our last productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Swift 3 and the other quad-core Intel laptops were left looking up at the eight-core, AMD-powered Pavilion Aero in most of our CPU-focused tests. The Swift 3 did well among the Intel systems, except for trailing in PCMark 10's storage test; in fact, it eked out wins in the Geekbench and Photoshop benchmarks.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
None of these ultraportables set our graphics tests on fire, including the Swift 3X with its Iris Xe Max graphics. That Intel GPU shines in some scenarios such as AI-assisted photo editing, but offers little or no benefit for gaming and 3D graphics. The Swift 3 did reasonably well, but neither it nor any other system here has the pixel-pushing muscle to play more than casual or browser-based games. See our examination of laptop integrated graphics performance.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The Swift 3 excelled in our battery rundown, lasting nearly 17 hours. That's an impressive result even among efficient ultraportables. Its screen brightness score of 330 nits surpassed its 300-nit rating, but as I said I don't consider the Swift 3's screen to be more than average at best. It was also a tick away from full coverage of sRGB along with creditable coverage of the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB space, giving creative pros something to work with (if they're content with a 1080p rather than 4K display).
Verdict: Wider Isn't Always Better
The Acer Swift 3 has several good points—it's an ultraportable that provides a wealth of features, a pinch of style, and competitive performance (especially its great battery life) for the reasonable price of $999.99. Like its competitors, it's no gaming laptop, but it checks the boxes you'd want for a traveling productivity partner.
What prevents a stronger recommendation is Acer's move from last year's squarer 3:2 aspect ratio screen to the slightly retro 16:9 panel of this year's edition. For a 14-inch laptop that's meant to take you through your work or school day, a 16:10 or ideally 3:2 display provides a roomier workspace than a 16:9 screen that's good for watching movies but less useful for navigating web pages, email inboxes, and Microsoft Office docs.
An unwelcome return to a wider display tempers our enthusiasm for the refreshed Acer Swift 3, an otherwise admirable ultraportable.
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