The Acer Swift X 14 is a high-performance laptop that doesn’t trade away all its gloss at the alter of practicality and power.
You get a metal casing, a fabulously colour-accurate OLED screen and reasonably portable-friendly design, plus a dedicated graphics card. And byMacBook ProorDell XPSstandard, it’s not badly priced either.
This feels like a laptop made for content creators, video editors and designer types. But there are three issues. Like a lot of recent high-end Acer laptops, the Acer Swift X 14 has a plastic touchpad rather than a glass one. Its speakers are pretty poor by the standards of this burgeoning category. And you won’t get a full day of work from a charge - even light work.
Not perfect, then, but an Acer Swift X 14 will still make a lot of sense for a lot of folks. Our review spec is the same one you’ll find online selling for $1499/£1499.
Acer Swift X 14
Portable, powerful and with the build of a style-driven laptop, the Acer Swift X 14 has a lot to offer. And it doesn’t cost quite as much as some of these “do everything” models. Some of the finer points aren’t best-in-class, and it’s not the best way for gamers to spend $/£1500, but that was never the idea here.
It can often seem that as soon as you stick a GPU in a laptop, the look and feel of the thing drops like a stone in the priority stakes. Unless you’re a big fan of LED lights and the tribal tattoo-adjacent styling of some gaming laptops, anyway.
This doesn’t hold for series like the Acer Swift X 14. While it’s no style icon, this laptop does have a full metal shell. The keyboard surround, the underside and the lid are all aluminium. This laptop’s first impression is more that of a style laptop than a performance one. In a positive sense.
The Acer Swift X 14 is 18mm thick and weighs 1.55kg. Both of these are a bit higher than the portable ideal, but are easily within comfort limits, and excellent figures for a legit performance laptop.
I’ve used the Acer Swift X 14 on trains, in pubs and perched on my knees. It feels way more at ease in these scenarios than most laptops with dedicated graphics cards. You just have to verify you don’t block too much of the underside as it’s where the air intake sits.
Perched on a pillow, though, the Acer Swift X 14 will soon start sounding like an unhappy air conditioning unit. Still, that’s nothing unusual.
The Acer Swift X 14 has an alluring screen. This is a 14.5-inch 2880 x 1800 pixel 16:10 OLED panel, something that could have seemed hopelessly exotic just a couple of years ago.
As an OLED, you get fantastic black levels and contrast, and ultra-deep colour. Acer seems to be aiming for the DCI P3 colour gamut with this one, much like the top Apple Macs and iPhones, and nails it.
The picture really pops off the screen. And, according to a display tester tool, colour accuracy is truly fantastic. It’s about as pro-grade a display as you’re going to find in a $/£1500 Windows laptop.
There are a few bits to note, though. Maximum brightness of 400 nits is only “normal”, not even close to the 1000-plus nit power we’re seeing in new miniLED laptops including the MacBook Pro. These bring issues of their own, though, and based on our testing, OLEDs introduce fewer figurative headaches.
The Acer Swift X 14 also has a plastic screen surface, rather than a glass one, and it’s not a touchscreen either. Acer continues to use a glossy finish here, not the matt style often seen in plastic laptops, likely in order to retain image “pop.” But it does mean reflections are more noticeable when you use the Swift X 14 outdoors or by a bright window.
Acer says this laptop supports the VESA True Black 500 HDR standard. And you’d guess this means it can hit 500 nit brightness. However, just over 400 was the maximum we saw in actual use. Oh well.
Keyboard and touchpad
Acer has put concerted effort into the feel of the Swift X 14 keyboard and touchpad. On the keyboard side that means you get a good amount of travel, while there’s a certain softening out of the feel as each key reaches its lowest, most depressed, position.
It’s rather nice, combining the clear feedback of a clicky style with the substance and meatiness of a darker style of keyboard feel. We wrote this review, among other articles, on the Swift X 14, and have no major complaints.
These keys have a simply white backlight, which can only be set to two levels. But it does the job. The lack of RGB is a reminder the Acer Swift X 14 is not a gaming laptop, even if it does have an Nvidia RTX graphics card.
As you can see, there’s no NUM pad, which lets the touchpad sit in a more central, more comfy position.
The pad itself is yet another victim of Acer’s current obsession with Oceanglass. Just as “fruits de mer” is fish, crabs and suchlike, not salty apples, Oceanglass is not glass. It’s plastic.
On the one side, this is all part of Acer’s multi-pronged initiative to make laptop production more environmentally friendly. On the other, plastic pads are never quite as nice as glass ones, no matter how lovely a texture you etch into the plastic.
It’s a shame because, once again, Acer has clearly spent real effort on perfecting the clicker feel. There’s a touch of velvet to its depress, combined with a bright-enough initial click. It’s not far off the best from Lenovo and Microsoft. But married to a slightly squeaky plastic surface? It’s not quite the full package.
Still, as plastic pads go, this is a damn good one.
Performance
The Acer Swift X 14 has about as much power as you could reasonably ask for from a laptop this slim and light. It uses the Intel Core i7-13700H processor, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics card, has 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. It’s a super-fast SSD too, capable of read speeds of up to 6200MB/s.
The crucial bits to note here are that the CPU isn’t one of the lower voltage ones you typically see in a slim laptop. Intel’s “H” series processors like this are often found in workstation-style models. And, of course, we have that actual dedicated graphics card.
Is it a do-it-all hero? For some people, sure. However, don’t forget the limits.
The Nvidia RTX 4050 is the entry-level card in this series, and the laptop version is significantly less powerful than the desktop PC one.
Acer has also played it either safe or sensible here, in using a version of the Nvidia RTX 4050 limited to 50W power draw. This card series is rated for up to 115W, while some laptops add even more juice by nicking some of the CPU’s share. There’s none of that with the Swift X 14.
We are therefore dealing with one of the weaker implementations of a laptop RTX 4050. This is no unexpected given how compact the Swift X 14, but you should bear this in mind.
Testing its limits withCyberpunk 2077, the laptop struggles as soon as you switch onray tracing, the latest hot stuff in the world of graphics. Even with Nvidia’s borderline-magic frame generation feature, I struggled to achieve a solid 30fps.
After switching fully modelled lighting off? Much better results. However, if gaming is your number one priority, $1500 can go a lot further elsewhere, in a propergaming laptop.
Despite this careful power ceiling, the Acer Swift X’s fans run all the time as standard. Even when idle they keep spinning in the default mode.
you may quieten the fans by using the silent/night mode. But even this may go unrecognised by some Swift X 14 owners. Where plenty of laptops like this put a performance mode shortcut key in the F-keys at the top of the keyboard, you have to press “fn+e” to access them here.
The fans can also get quite loud under pressure, a common (almost ubiquitous) knock-on effect of putting powerful components in a slim laptop shell. It also gets noticeably hot after playing a a game for a while, including at the upper part of the keyboard where your fingers may well be.
It’s a knock-on effect of having a metal casing. As nice as it looks, metal conducts heat a lot quicker than plastic.
Battery life and connections
The Swift X 14 has a mid-size battery. Acer claims it can last up to 15 hours between charges, but this is not realistic.
In benchmark testing it lasts 7 hours 4 minutes. Using the laptop for browsing and writing documents, the Swift X 14 lasted just under six hours.
It’s not going to power through a full day of work in normal conditions, and things are only going to get worse if you need to do something more taxing. This is not a MacBook, famed for their ability to last a long time even under pressure.
However, Acer gains some practicality points back with its connectors. The Swift X 14 has two Thunderbolt USB-C sockets, one of which you’ll use to charge. There are two USB-A 3 ports, an HDMI 2.1 video connector and a microSD slot. Adapters not necessary.
Webcam and speakers
A fair few laptops that merge slim and light design elements with gaming laptop power have great speakers, like theLenovo Yoga 9i Pro. The Acer Swift 14 X does not.
Despite having what looks like a long speaker grille above the keyboard, accompanied by a DTS logo, these speakers have no bass and maximum volume is nothing special.
The Acer Swift X 14 also arrives to test a bit late for us to be too impressed by the 1080p webcam, even if it is a substantial upgrade over previous-generation Swift laptops. Still, it’s not a bad video chat and meetings camera, all things considered.
The Acer Swift 14 X melds style laptop elements with those of a pure performance PC. And it mostly works, especially as Acer doesn’t charge through the nose considering what you get here.
It’s fairly slim, made of metal, has a great screen and also offers enough power that video editors and less demanding gamers be more than happy with.
In return you have to limit your battery life expectations, and accept that fan noise will be a thing 99 per cent of the time.
