The Acer SF313-53-78UG is a new midrange laptop in the Swift 3 Series that gives you the best bang for your buck. Its battery life is one of the appealing features that will appeal to most buyers, lasting you most of the day, whether at work or school. Our review model offers great performance thanks to the 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7, 8GB RAM and Intel Iris Xe graphics. Not to mention its incredibly light and compact profile, making it easy to tote around with you.
However, in this Acer Swift 3 review, we’ll explain why its display isn’t exactly perfect for streaming Netflix or Disney Plus. Also, with the speakers located on the bottom of the laptop, the audio output isn’t something you can call immersive. But if you can overlook those few drawbacks and focus on decent battery life and great overall performance, the Acer Swift 3 is, without a doubt, one of the best laptops.
Design
The SF313-53-78UG sports a simple design, with a metallic silver lid with an Acer logo emblemed at the center. The rest of the chassis is cut from magnesium and aluminum, and that’s exactly where the laptop gets its light weight profile. When you flip it open, the metallic look on the deck blends well with the keyboard’s silver keys. You also find a Windows Hello-enabled fingerprint reader on the deck.
As mentioned earlier, the Acer Swift 3 (both AMD and Intel versions) is feather-light, weighing just 2.6 pounds, making it much lighter than the HP Envy 13 (2.8 pounds). It measures 11.91 x 9.21 x 0.63 inches, which is slightly thicker than the HP Envy (12.9 x 8.9 x 0.5 inches) which is slightly large.
Ports
There’s a robust selection of ports on the Acer SF313-53-78UG.
The right side holds a Kensington lock slot, a USB Type-A 2.0 port and a headphone jack, alongside a battery charge indicator. On the left side, there’s a DC jack, a USB Type-C port, one HDMI and a USB Type-A 3.2 port. If you notice a small rectangle, on the right side below the keyboard, that’s the fingerprint reader.
Display
The Swift 3 rocks 1 14-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) display, that isn’t the brightest you’ll ever see in the market, just sufficient enough for most purposes and several hours of streaming movies. Movies look excellently bright enough in all but the most of direct sunlight, otherwise, in a darkly-lit room, it looks dim.
Once again, the display’s color profile doesn’t necessarily stand out, but it feels like it at least meets our expectations for a standard 1080p resolution display. The bezels around the display are thick, especially when you compare them with the Infinity Edge on the Dell XPS 13. The bottom bezel is the largest but it isn’t awful.
Keyboard & Touchpad
On this Swift 3, there’s an island-style keyboard that features responsive, chicklet keys, and a Windows-Hello-enabled fingerprint scanner. Some, especially those coming from a 15-inch laptop, might find the keyboard to be a bit cramped, but the keys are well-spaced for a laptop of this size. It lacks a dedicated number pad, but the black keys are backlit with soft white LEDs for enhanced visibility.
The trackpad is a good size and responds well to swipes and touches during everyday, general use. It also handles itself pretty well in few basic gaming sessions on Stellaris and Civilization VI, but anything more than that you’ll need a separate mouse or gamepad.
Acer Swift 3 review: Performance
This Acer Swift 3, running on 4.7Ghz Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD storage, provides serious speed for multitasking. It lets you have upto five YouTube videos showing simultaneously while juggling pretty over 50 Google Chrome tabs, without showing signs of lagging. Simply put, when it comes to playing video and general use, there’s very little to complain about the Acer Swift 3.
The system is able to handle some light gaming through Steam without any hitches ad easily keeps a solid frame rate through the mid-point of Stellaris, but anything above that will be a struggle for the Intel Iris Xe graphics card.
Meanwhile, the Swift 3 handles multimedia content creation pretty well for a system fitted with 8GB of RAM. You can load up Photoshop and doing basic photo editing with a dozen or so open files will be pretty smooth without any glitches.
Battery Life
The biggest improvement we’ve seen over last ear’s Acer Swift 3 comes in battery life. The Swift SF313-53-78UG lasts over 11 hours and 18 minutes, while browsing the web at 150 nits of brightness. It will definitely last you a whole day at work or college and then some.
It also offers fast charging, so for 30 minutes of charge, you have enough juice for 4 hours of use.
Bottom Line
The Acer Swift 3 offers impressive performance for its mid-range price, with its Intel Core i7 processor, long battery life and a very lightweight chassis. Granted the display isn’t as bright as it should and the speakers would be better as well. If you’re looking for something with a brighter, more colorful screen, you might want to check out the HP Envy 13.
Otherwise, this Acer SF313-53-78UG remains a great choice as well, one that will deliver great laptop experience, especially for those looking to use if for work and school.