Acer Swift X (2021): MacBook Competitor for students on a budget with a few compromises.

OVERVIEW:
This particular generation of Acer Swift X Laptops was recently released at end 2021. It is basically a counterpart to a M1 MacBook Pro. It is classified as a subnotebook, being lightweight enough though not quite an Ultrabook. It even comes with dedicated graphics, something you cannot really find at that form factor or price. Being...well...Acer, usually there are usually some compromises that have to be made, we will see further in the review.

This laptop is available in a few flavors in terms of the CPU, GPU and Storage. Do keep in mind that a lot of the parts are not upgradable so make your choice wisely. The ones in bold are the attributes that came with mine which is pretty much the highest end of the AMD Models.

CPU:
Intel 12th Generation: Core i5 1240P, Core i7 1260P
AMD 5000 series: Ryzen 5 5600U, Ryzen 7 5700U, Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5825U

Storage:
512 GB nVMe SSD, 1TB nVMe SSD

RAM:
8GB, 16GB 

GPU:
RTX 3050, RTX 3050 Ti

POWER ADAPTER

The Acer Swift X is supplied with a 90W Lite-On Power Brick which is nice and small to keep it portable. Unfortunately the slim barrel / stick connector is quite proprietary to this laptop. But! That's not the only option to charge due to another trick it has up its sleeve.

PORTS:

Which leads to this section. On the left side is the power jack and USB-C. Not a thunderbolt port due to, yeah, AMD... but it has power delivery which alone is already almost too good to pass up. As such, and I tested it, the Acer Swift X can be even powered by my MacBook Pro USB C charger. In fact it is able to be powered by my 20000mAH Power Bank. So if you need to last pretty much a full day off the mains, the options are there.

Other ports it also has are USB-As, 1 each in USB 3.2 and 2.0 standard, a Combo 3.5mm Audio Jack, And a full size HDMI Port. Personally I would love a 2nd USB Type C even if it is dedicated solely Data Transfer.  The Intel Version of the X14 does have a 2nd USB C port, which replaces the Power Jack, and for that model it is nice to have that both USB C ports are Thunderbolt 4 Ready.

CPU: Ryzen 7 5825U

Yes this SoC / CPU may be 2 generations old at this point but it is still a bloody capable and efficient CPU. Funnily enough, it IS amongst one of my most powerful CPUs that I have of all my systems I own, considering it is only 15 Watts. 8 Cores 16 Threads seems to be the norm of most CPUs these days and it's funny it has found its way to an almost budget and small, thin and light laptop. 15W is its TDP but most laptop manufacturers will tune it slightly higher, up to 25 Watts. That said, it is plenty powerful when it gets pushed a little bit. 21,000+ on its physics score in 3DMark FireStrike places it in line with even with higher TDP 9-11th Gen Core i9s. That makes it great for productivity, considering its size. The only shortcoming of this particular CPU or rather this generation of SoCs is that USBs supported is limited to USB 3.2 rather than USB 4 with the 6000 series APUs, which otherwise would have given capabilities of Thunderbolt 4.

GPU: nVidia RTX 3050 Ti (40W TDP)
2560 CUDA Cores, 20 Ray Tracing Units, 4GB GDDR6 VRAM at 128bit bus with 192GB/s Bandwidth, 

To be fair, to keep things in a more efficient power envelope, Acer has the dedicated GPU's TDP Capped at 40W, 35W base with 5W dynamic boost. This means usually the GPU's base speed is just above 1GHz and turbos to 1.25GHz which is quite abit slower than the 85 Watts that gets pretty much its full speed. Nonetheless, a huge majority of games ran at Full HD with high to max details shouldn't be a problem for this 40W chip. Keep in mind, having just 4GB of VRAM may present itself as a bottleneck in some more demanding titles despite it running GDDR6 VRAM minimum as with all GeForce 20-40 cards. Personally I would have loved an update to the RTX 4050 with 6GB VRAM but it is what it is. It is still an upgrade over the GTX 1650 it replaced in the last iteration before the current facelift.

DISPLAY: 1080p IPS 14" Display at 60Hz

Even for the affordable price, the display provided is actually way better than I expected it to be. At about 400 nits, the display is bright and with good contrasts. Shame it doesn't have a high refresh rate. But if you're a student that is solely focused in doing your day to day tasks, homework, basic rendering or ever content creation at a basic level, this will do absolutely fine.

Color accuracy looks good and adequately vibrant too. And good there isn't any backlight bleeding.

The Intel versions do carry a higher 2240 x 1400 resolution, although for most people and in a laptop this small, that's not a deal breaker.

WEIGHT: 1.31 Kilos

1.31 Kilos for an 14 Inch is a few ounces too heavy to be classified as an Ultrabook. However it is still lightweight considering the specs it has and you can still easily carry it around in a backpack or sling bag without putting much strain on your shoulders and back. The power supply it comes with is also nice and small. So far this is one of my lightest windows based Laptops (the ones lighter than it I got are the Chuwi MiniBook and the Ubook Pro), and the lightest one with a dedicated GPU. 

BATTERY LIFE:

Because of the lower tuned hardware

Benchmarks:

3D Mark

The performance of this laptop is actually good for its size. 9279 is about on par with a GTX 970. It may seem low till you consider the GPU TDP is hard capped at only 40 Watts. The CPU performs right as expected at 21,000+ in its physics score. It even beats out my Ryzen 7 1700X which had 18,472 points in a run I did 2 years ago and around 26000 points on my Ryzen 5 7500F. Keep in mind with these scores as there'll be another desktop I'll be testing so stay tuned for that.

Diablo IV:

A new game that had a solid launch and it runs perfectly fine on even older hardware. Surprisingly, once you turn on DLSS on at Quality, you can run 1080p Max Settings at around 70 fps all day long. It was jittery without it, most likely due to the 4GB frame buffer, but with DLSS I can live with that settings.

Battlefield 3:

Old game, I know. But it can definitely handle maximum settings at 1080p. Around 80-90fps is easily achievable on this with occasional dips into the mid 70s like this one.

DIABLO II RESURRECTED
Maximum Settings at 1080p, screen resolution upscaled to 1440p

Though abit older now, te game gets plenty demanding when the resolution scaling is brought significantly past 100% of its native resolution. Already 1080p at max settings finds its 4GB of VRAM completely saturated and the VRAM consumption is already in the red in the game menus. However that doesn't stop me from pushing this higher. At 133% of 1080p which is scaled to 1440p, the game still delivers a passable gaming experience if you're used to 24fps provided by the classic game.

*More games to be added to the suite.

BOTTOMLINE:

The Acer Swift X14 does compromise on a few components and features. However that doesn't take away that this is actually a good everyday laptop. You still have quite a powerful CPU, and decent entry to midrange dedicated GPU and for what it is designed to do, it does very well. For a laptop that weighs only 1.4 kilos, the performance that you get is still impressive. Moreover it is quite quiet when running with a load on. Yes you can still hear the fan when fully stressed, but not quite enough to be annoyed with it and nowhere as noisy as Intel's offering which in this case would fit better for most cases.

For gaming, the 35W-40W power limit set on this GPU by Acer is clearly the bottleneck here. However, even that is still more than adequate for E-Sport Titles and older AAA games at 1080p with decent settings.

If you're someone like myself that can easily do without Thunderbolt 4 and a high resolution screen, then this laptop will fit better for you than the Intel version. That's also on top of having a quieter running system too.