Acer’s ultra-thin affordable laptop line-up has never failed to impress consumers as compared to the competition and the Acer Swift 5 series is no exception. We take a look at the latest Acer Swift 5 premium thin-and-light laptop that features the Intel 10th Gen processor chipset for stellar performance and a unique lightweight design that pleases the crowd.
Design
Acer’s design philosophy has always been quite impressive when it comes to thin-and-light laptops. The Swift 5 that we have here features the Moonlight White colour and comes with physical characteristics such as 14.95mm of thickness, 318.7mm of width, and 210.5mm depth. The weight is one of the most impressive features of the Acer Swift 5. What we have here is a laptop that weighs hardly 990g and that is a feat of its own. That is because the laptop is made of ultra-light magnesium-lithium and magnesium-aluminum metal chassis.
While the white colour does look good, there are chances that the smudges and dirt can be easily seen. The Swift 5 comes with a 14-inch IPS display with LED-backlit technology and a standard Full HD resolution. The display also features 300 nits of brightness and the screen bezels are very narrow which results in an 86.4% screen-to-body ratio. The viewing angles and the colours on the screen are very good. There is also a 720p integrated camera that is located on the upper middle bezel of the screen. It’s quite impressive that Acer managed to squeeze the camera on such a thin bezel.
The Swift 5 features a backlit chiclet keyboard with good key travel characteristics. While the keys do feel a bit squishy, it feels pleasant to type on the keyboard. The power button is placed along with the keyboard keys and located on the upper right side, next to the insert/delete button. So there are chances that users may press the power button while trying to delete a file. Along with the smooth and spacious touchpad, there is also a fingerprint scanner located on the right side.
As for the ports, we have the power connection, a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port, a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port, and an HDMI port on the left side. The Type-C port supports Display Port connections, Thunderbolt 3, and USB charging capability. On the right, there is the headphone jack, a USB 2.0 port, and the battery indicator for charge/usage status. The laptop also features two stereo speakers located on the bottom left and right side of the laptop.
There is also a golden hinge on the backside and cooling vents on the bottom of the laptop. While the fans do spin faster in heavy-loads, I was able to notice some grinding sounds of the cooling fan at times that I’ve previously heard with many other previous Acer laptops of the past. I’m sure that many Acer laptop owners may have noticed this issue with their devices.
Specifications and Performance
The Acer Swift 5 that we got for review, features the latest Intel 10th generation i5-1035G7 quad-core processor, clocked with a base speed of 1 GHz, and can go up to 3.7 GHz turbo speeds. The laptop also includes 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a fast 512GB Kingston RBUSNs8154p3512gj1 NVMe SSD with Windows 10 Home. With my usage of the laptop, Swift 5 performed well for most applications and quick boot-ups. I did not notice any slowdowns during my usage and the battery mode was kept at the balanced mode. The Swift 5 also features a dedicated NVIDIA MX250 GPU with 2GB GDDR5. It’s an entry-level GPU so do not expect high performance out of the box. The inclusion of the NVIDIA GPU can also be beneficial for those planning to do some light video rendering projects on the go. The Acer Swift 5 features a 56 Wh Lithium-Ion battery and is stated to run for 9 hours of usage. I used the laptop for surfing the internet with Google Chrome and watched videos and the laptop lasted easily for 4-5 hours in balanced mode.
We have performed some benchmarks so take a look at the scores below. In our PC Mark 8 tests, the laptop scored 4517 points. The GPU was able to achieve a score of 792 points in Heaven benchmark and with 31.4 fps average at medium settings. We also tested the SSD with CrystalDiskMark and achieved a score of 1631MB/s for read speeds and 1029MB/s for write speeds for a 2GB data load.
Verdict
Acer has been one of my favorite brands when it comes to thin-and-light laptops at slightly affordable prices, and the Swift 5 keeps up with the competition. For those looking out for a laptop that offers a stylish design with a lightweight design and the performance to back it up, then the Acer Swift 5 is a good choice to consider. The laptop features the latest of the low-power Intel Core i5 10th generation processors which perform very good and the 8GB DDR4 RAM is sufficient enough to handle multitasking operations. The fast 512GB NVMe SSD adds up to the snappy performance of the laptop and the drive offers blazing fast read and copy speeds. While it may not be able to play demanding games all around, the MX 250 will be able to play some light gaming and perhaps even some light video editing. The inclusion of USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports ensure fast copy speeds between your portable storage devices on the go.
