Acer Swift 5 (2020) review: This MacBook Air alternative plays Fortnite - codycoved1936

Now that Apple's M1 crisp has raised the block u for lightweight laptop computer performance, there's a oppugn every ultraportable PC Godhead must accost: Wherefore would mortal buy this instead of a MacBook Air?

Well, here's an suffice for the newfangled Acer Swift 5: It's fast enough to play Fortnite and a bunch of other games that are absent from Apple's political platform, but it still weighs only 2.3 pounds and gets prima battery life for play or web browsing. It also has a touchscreen and a bunch of useful ports, including HDMI out and USB-A, none of which you'll determine on Malus pumila's thin-and-floodlighted.

That's not to say it's any cheaper. With a starting price of $1,000 (and $1,300 happening Amazon for our review building block), the Acer Swift 5 is very much a insurance premium ultraportable PC. Merely with no huge flaws and lots of upsides, it's well worth putting on your short list.

This review articl is division of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for information on competitory products and how we time-tested them.

Acer Swift 5 specs and features

The $1,300 Acer Blue-belly 5 model we tested (SF514-55TA-74EC) has the following specifications:

CPU: 11th-gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU

RAM: 16 GB of LPDDR4X RAM

Storage: 1 TB NVMe SSD storage

Exhibit: 14-inch 1080p IPS touchscreen

Art: Iris Xe

Networking: Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1

Webcam resolution: 720p

Remaining side ports: DC-in power, HDMI 2.0, USB-A 3.2, USB-C Gen 2 with Bolt 4

Rightist side ports: USB-A 3.2, phone gob, Kensington lock

Dimensions: 12.56 x 8.15 x 0.59 inches

Weight: 2.31 pounds

Acer also offers a $1,000 configurationTransfer non-product unite with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.

Jared Newman / IDG

The Acer Fleet 5 includes HDMI output and a pair of USB-A ports (one and only on for each one side).

Although you'll still find rafts of laptops with 10th-generation Intel processors in late 2020, the Swift 5 is among the first with an 11th-generation chip. The intense magnet is vastly improved integrated Iris Xe graphics for gaming. It also boasts Intel's "Evo" branding, which highlights laptops that get nine hours of "genuine-world" battery life at 1080p resolution and can charge to four hours of use in 30 minutes.

One caveat, though: While the Swift 5 can draw a saddle over USB-C, you'll need to use Acer's included barrel charger to obtain the best gaming public presentation. Even with a 65W USB-C battery charger, the Swift 5 delivered untold slower framerates for 3D graphics. While we'ray old to proprietary chargers for workhorse gaming laptops, needing unity for an ultraportable is a bummer.

Design and display

Like a lot of other extremely low-cal laptops, the Acer Swift 5 uses a magnesium alloy chassis as an alternative of standard Al to stay fresh its weight down. Still, the laptop feels hardline, with little noticeable twist on or around the keyboard.

Jared Newman / IDG

It's not super-obvious, but the Swift 5's Mg chassis comes in a light-green hoar.

Acer also deserves approximately credit for its inspired color choices. Instead of the usual dull grays, our review unit came in a subtle super hue (with less-subtle gold accents along the keys and flexible joint). Acer also plans to sell a "campaign gold" option. The surface has an unusual hunky-dory-grained texture as well, and Genus Acer says it's applied an antimicrobic coating that you won't feature to wipe down as often.

Jared John Henry Newman / IDG

Beam vents beside the hinges service the Dean Swift 5 stay cool and quiet.

Plausible design besides extends to the Swift 5's show, which has extra-slim borders around its 1080p touchscreen. The Corning Gorilla Glass branding at the top-left tree is a elfin tatty, but at least you know it can hold an errant scratch or two. Acer uses a drop hinge that dips well-nig a half-column inch to a lower place the laptop's frame when the block out is fully unfolded, propping up the keyboard at an Angle as you type.

Jared Newman / IDG

The Swift 5's hinge lifts improving the keyboard when it's resting on a flat surface.

Arsenic for the display itself, it offers a peak brightness of 350 nits, which is just a teeny-weeny above intermediate at a time when we'Ra seeing premium laptops with 500-nit panels and Dolby Visual sensation HDR. To my middle, it also doesn't offer rather enough dividing line out of the box seat, necessitating a hardly a tweaks in Intel's Graphics Command Center package. Information technology's not a corked presentation whole, just we potential major from a laptop at this price point.

Keyboard and trackpad

Although it only weighs 2.31 pounds, the Acer Blue-belly 5 is thick enough to let elbow room for a solid keyboard. In that location's a teeny bit of wobble roughly the edges of each key, but they give off a satisfactory find and have a nice sum of travel. The laptop's stalwart chassis keeps the keys from impression soupy when pressed each the way down.

The sole nitpick Hera is with the Swift 5's bi-lock keystone, which turns the right English of the keyboard into a number lodgings when pressed. It's could be a handy feature for the Surpass wizards among us, but because the amoun lock key has no indicator light, some folks might get tripped up if they press it away accident.

Jared Newman / IDG

Press the number-lock key, and you'll get access to a numeral keypad.

The trackpad, meanwhile, is typical of what you'd observe on well-nig premium Windows laptops: The show u feels super-smooth under your fingers, but the clicking mechanics is on the stiff side, especially as you move further up the trackpad. Microsoft's Precision Touchpad drivers are happening board, bearing gestures much as ternary-finger swipes to show the desktop or task view, three-finger taps to search, and four-finger swipes to act between desktops.

Webcam, security, and audio

The Acer Swift 5 webcam is average. Despite Acer's boast of "comprehensive high dynamic range" on its webcam, it's still just blurry, grainy 720p camera that turns unreal images into nebulous blobs. Unlike many unusual high-end laptops these days, the Swift 5 offers zero privacy shutter or keyboard switch for its television camera and microphones.

Jared Newman / IDG

A privacy shutter and branding-free bezel would have been nice.

The Swift 5 does ingest a fingerprint reader, though, and while the fles is unusual—it's rectangular, non right-angled like most Windows laptops—it seems accurate enough and can almost in real time wake the PC from standby.

The unusable buzzwords also apply on the audio breast, where Acer boasts of "TrueHarmony" technology for "headphone-like" audio along with DTS Audio for optimized bass response. In realism, the speakers are terrible: They garden truck almost no bass whatsoever and go wrong to summon enough bulk to compete in loud environments.

A note about bloatware

While we're griping, Acer's pre-loaded software is fair-and-square slightly to a greater extent annoying than average for a Windows PC. Beyond the usual bundled antivirus (in this case, from Norton), Acer includes a bunch of programs that nag you with notifications over time, including Dropbox, Firefox, and Acer's own JumpStart software (which uses its notifications to advertise games).

Jared Newman / IDG

Apprisal ads are not a hot feeling, Acer.

All this can be separate, of course, simply acquiring nagged when you'ray trying to work is not a supportive experience and doesn't assist the software system companies caught up.

Performance

With all that out of the elbow room, we progress to the heart of the matter: The Genus Acer Swift 5, scorn its size of it and weight, is a remarkably right laptop computer, with vast gains in carrying out and bombardment life over final stage year's model.

Let's jump out right into our HandBrake benchmark, which tests multi-core performance finished clock time past encoding a large video file. Intel's 11th-generation "Tiger Lake" CPU yields some major performance gains finished the old generation—compare the new Swift 5, for example, to its predecessor from late 2019—and edges out Dingle's convertible XPS 2-in-1, which has the assonant Core i7-1165G7 Central processor.

Jared Paul Leonard Newman / IDG

The Swift 5 encoded our test video file in to a lesser extent than 55 proceedings—not bad for a small, lightweight laptop computer.

The results were straight-grained more approbative in Cinebench, which tests a CPU's ability to handle quick bursts of activity. We'rhenium exploited to seeing small, ultralight laptops levitate or so the 600-800 range for the multi-threaded version of this test and diminish below 200 for the single-thread test, but that's opening to change with Panthera tigris Lake. Again, the Acer Gustavus Franklin Swift 5 turned in better lashing than Dell's XPS 2-in-1 with the same chip.

Jared Newman / IDG

The Swift 5's 11th-gen Intel processor showed zippier performance than laptops with previous-gen CPUs.

Given the above results, it's no surprise that the Swift 5 also did well in PCMark 8's Influence 2.0 bench mark, which simulates a gamut of productiveness tasks such as spreadsheet editing, TV chatting, and vane browsing. While most bounty laptops can handle these tasks without issue, information technology's nice to see the Swift 5 land a unmistakable maltreat in the lead of laptops with older processors. Anecdotally, the machine feels pretty speedy.

Jared Newman / IDG

The Swift 5 cruises done office tasks and web browse, as PCMark's Work out 8 bench mark shows.

The real number mantrap, though, is gaming performance. Sure, we already knew Intel's integrated Iris Xe graphics was supposed to put up a macro leap forward, but witnessing it in the real life is another matter. In 3DMark's Sky Diver benchmark, the Dean Swift 5 handily outperforms a laptop with Nvidia's entry-level GeForce MX350 graphics and crushes laptops with Intel's older Iris Advantageous incorporate graphics. While Nvidia's GTX 1650 is still a step ahead, the comparison is closer than you might think.

Jared Paul Newman / IDG

Thanks to Intel Iris Xe art, the Swift 5's gaming performance waterfall between Nvidia's MX350 and GTX 1650 discrete GPUs.

In actual use, this means you can comfortably achieve smooth framerates in Fortnite at 1080p with medium artwork settings. If you'ray happy to make further sacrifices, you power be able to eke come out a playable experience in more demanding games. I was able to play Look on Dogs 2, for instance, at 720p and a stable 30 frames per endorsement on medium settings, disdain Ubisoft's warnings that my graphics carte du jour did not foregather minimum requirements. For a 2.3-pound laptop computer with integrated graphics, that's impressive.

Bear in mind, that performance doesn't kill battery life, which is typically the case with laptops that induce discrete artwork card game. In our video summing up test, the Swift 5 lasted for 13 hours and 9 minutes, behind Dell's XPS 2-in-1 merely nearly five hours longer than last yr's Swift 5. While its predecessor couldn't get through a full work day, I had no problems doing so on the new rendering, bolstering Intel's claims of nine-hour "real-worldwide" battery life for laptops bearing the "Evo" label.

Jared Newman / IDG

Though it doesn't beat Dell's XPS 13 2-in-1, the Blue-belly 5 quieten offers entirely-solar day shelling life.

Look-alike any computer, the Acer Blue-belly 5 has its weaknesses. Thither are laptops with richer, brighter displays, and laptops with better audio quality. The lack of a webcam privacy shutter likewise seems out of reach with current premium laptop trends, even if it's not an essential feature. The rash color choices and use of lightweight magnesium mightiness turn away turned a fewer folks given the $1,000-and-up price tag.

But if you can look quondam those quibbles, the Swift 5 is a entertaining little laptop, cardinal that you can easily carry around, that lasts for hours along end, and that you can chew in at the end of the day to enjoy a bountifulness of games that only the Windows ecosystem provides. At a strictly bowel level, I've really enjoyed having IT more or less. Patc information technology may not be an M1-powered MacBook, it raises the bar in its own way.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/393780/acer-swift-5-2020-review-this-macbook-air-alternative-plays-fortnite.html

Posted by: codycoved1936.blogspot.com

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