Pretty light, pretty fast, pretty thrifty
At 3.31 pounds, the Acer Swift X (starts at $849.99; $1,099.99 as tested) is five ounces too heavy to be an ultraportable, and it’s not a gaming notebook despite having a fairly game-worthy Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Instead, it’s a 14-inch laptop that delivers one of the best price/performance ratios you can find—assuming you can find it, since Acer has already announced a higher-resolution heir with a 16:10 rather than 16:9 screen aspect ratio. But the Swift X seen here is worth searching out if you want ample power in a near-ultraportable. Ryzen Up! Four, Six, or Eight Cores The $849.99 base model of the Swift X sports a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 5500U processor and GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, along with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) non-touch IPS screen. Our $1,099.99 test model (SFX14-41G-R1S6) steps up to AMD’s eight-core,1.9GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Ryzen 7 5800U chip and the 4GB GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, plus 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. Buyers who insist on Intel inside can choose from several quad-core units, ranging from $999.99 for a Core i5-11320H to $1,279.99 for a Core i7-11390H. Clad in aluminum (in a hue dubbed “Safari Gold”) with a chrome Acer logo on the lid, the laptop measures 0.7 by 12.7 by 8.4 inches, about the same as other 14-inch slimlines like the VAIO SX14 and HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8, though they’re lighter (about 2.5 pounds each). There’s a slight amount of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck, which tilts slightly for a comfortable typing angle as you open the lid. The top and side screen bezels are attractively thin; the webcam in the top bezel has no security shutter, though one of the top-row function keys mutes the system’s microphone. A small, rectangular (rather than square) fingerprint reader below the keyboard lets you skip passwords with Windows Hello. An Amazon Alexa sticker joins the usual AMD and Nvidia labels on the palm rest. The laptop’s left edge holds two USB 3.2 ports, one Type-A and one Type-C, along with an HDMI video output and the power connector. A second USB-A port, an audio jack, and a security-cable locking notch are on the right. Acer forgot an SD or microSD card slot. Little Bitty Keys The backlit keyboard is a mixed bag. Some keys like Enter and Right Shift are almost huge, but the cursor arrow keys are jammed together with Page Up and Page Down—the latter two serve double duty as Home and End with the Fn key—and quite small. The top-row keys including Escape, Delete, and the brightness and volume controls are petite, too. The keyboard has a shallow, wooden typing feel that isn’t actually uncomfortable but isn’t snappy or responsive, either. The buttonless touchpad feels slick; it glides and taps smoothly, and its bottom half clicks easily, but its upper half is stiff and balky. The 14-inch, non-touch screen is sufficiently if not dazzlingly bright, with good contrast. Viewing angles are relatively broad, and white backgrounds are nicely clean instead of grayish or dingy.
