Acer Swift Edge review: An extremely light and incredibly thin OLED laptop

Price at time of review

$1,499.99

Today’s lowest price: Acer Edge Swift (2022)

$1899.99

Screen size and travel weight are likely at or near the top of every laptop buyer’s priority list, and they want to maximize the former and minimize the latter. . With the Acer Swift Edge, you also have a display and some weight to carry around, offering a spacious and modern 16-inch 16:10 in a thin magnesium alloy chassis that’s just 0.5 inches thick and about 2.5 pounds thick. increase. I’ve never seen a laptop with a big screen and light weight. Although I’d happily accept an extra ounce or two for a stiffer lid for display.

The 16-inch display, an OLED panel with crisp 4K resolution, stands out and deserves to be protected. The image quality is excellent, offering vivid colors and striking contrast between inky blacks and bright whites. Octa-core AMD Ryzen 7 6800U CPU and integrated Radeon graphics power the action. This duo offers multimedia editing capabilities, but is better suited for general home entertainment and office use. If you want the thinnest, lightest design and the largest OLED display, the Acer Swift Edge is for you.

Looking for a thinner and lighter laptop? Check out our roundup of the best 2-in-1s.

Acer Swift Edge: Specs and Features

Our Acer Swift Edge test system is available from Acer for $1,499.99 and features the following specifications:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 6800U
• memory: 16 GB
• graphic: AMD Radeon 680M (integrated)
• Storage: 1TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
• screen: 16 inch 16:10 4K (3840×2400)
• webcam: 1080p
• Connectivity: 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI 2.1, combo audio jacks
• networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
• Biometrics: fingerprint reader
• Battery capacity: 55 watt hours
• Size: 14.0 x 9.5 x 0.55 inches
• Measurement weight: 2.59 pounds
• price: $1,499.99

Acer Swift Edge: design and keyboard

With its matte black surface and understated aesthetics, the Acer Swift Edge gives off a ThinkPad vibe. It looks like ultra-thin X1 carbon. The lid is plain black, and the inner keyboard and keyboard deck are also black, with a simple Acer logo on the top edge of the lid and another in the center of the lower bezel below the display. Below is a small, subtle Swift logo. The Swift Edge looks like a workhorse enterprise laptop, but it’s incredibly thin.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

The laptop is over half an inch thicker and weighs just over 2.5 pounds. That’s a weight I’ve never seen for a 16-inch laptop. At 3.86 pounds, the Acer Swift 3 is over a pound heavier. Even the impressively thin and tiny 14-inch Lenovo Slim 9i weighs in at 3.0 pounds. The Swift Edge isn’t made out of aluminum like most laptops, but a magnesium alloy that Acer says is 20% lighter than aluminum and twice as strong as his aluminum, so the Swift Edge has such a low profile design and Weight reduction can be achieved.

Even with a reported double strength, the Swift Edge’s magnesium alloy chassis is the stiffest and least stiff. The keyboard deck has some flex, and the lid allows the display to flex almost to the point of concern.A thicker aluminum lid for added protection, even if that means the Swift Edge is a little thicker and weighs a few ounces more. Never mind. Even with a sturdier lid, the Swift Edge probably weighs less than 3 pounds, allowing it to remain highly portable.

Start typing in Swift Edge and the ThinkPad vibe starts to fade. The keys are flat and offer very shallow travel – not surprising given the thinnest of the machine, they feel like Apple’s mocked butterfly his keyboard. If you’re a quick touch typist, you’ll probably enjoy quick feedback, but others may lament the lack of a more traditional feel with deeper travel and quicker reactions. and can be easily controlled from the F11 key. The power button is located in the upper right corner of the keyboard and doubles as a fingerprint reader for easy and secure login.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

The touchpad is spacious and responsive, offering just the right amount of travel with a comfortable click response. The matte finish allows for smooth glide, and pinches, swipes, and other mouse gestures were accurately recorded.

Acer Swift Edge: Display and Ports

Aside from the chassis’ extreme thinness and incredibly light weight, the display is the star of the Swift Edge show. This is a spacious 16-inch OLED panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio and his 4K (3840 x 2400 pixels) high resolution. The display is outstanding in every respect. Brilliant, crisp, incredible contrast and vivid, accurate colors. 4K resolution produces stunningly sharp images with crisp text and edges. We measured the maximum brightness and it was an impressive 630 nits. This is a laptop that can be used outdoors in direct sunlight. OLED panels produce absolute black levels and bright whites. Nothing beats the contrast ratio of an OLED display.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

A tall 16-inch display with a 16:10 aspect ratio feels large. It offers plenty of room for juggling multiple windows and a large screen for watching shows and movies. Swift Edge’s display is taller than traditional 16:9 widescreen laptop displays, eliminating the need to scroll through long documents and web pages.

The webcam above the display is a state-of-the-art 1080p camera that produces sharp, balanced images with accurate colors and skin tones. While I have no complaints about the webcam’s performance, I do complain about the lack of a physical shutter or electronic kill switch to protect your privacy when the camera is not in use.

Don’t let the dot grill on your keyboard fool you. The wide stripes of dots are vents for the laptop’s cooling system, not speaker grills. The Swift Edge features two downward-facing speakers that produce average laptop audio. It’s good enough for YouTube videos, but lacks the bass needed for music playback and movie effects and explosions.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

IDG / Matthew Elliott

The Swift Edge features a pair of USB-C ports and a pair of USB-A ports, so you don’t need to carry around adapters. The USB-A ports are split left and right, while the USB-C ports are both on the left. This means that if you are sitting at an outlet, the power cord should be wrapped around the far left. to your right. Due to AMD chipset, the USB-C port does not support Thunderbolt 4. These are USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, with transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps compared to Thunderbolt 4’s 40Gbps. The Swift Edge also has an HDMI 2.1 port, which is often omitted on thin and light laptops. There is no Ethernet port, so a dongle is required to connect to a wired network.

Acer Swift Edge: Performance

The Swift Edge features the Ryzen 7 6800U, a CPU with 8 cores and 16 processing threads. This is an efficient CPU with a TDP of 15-28 Watts. Other core specs are a generous 16 GB of RAM, integrated AMD Radeon 680M graphics, and a spacious 1 TB SSD. We compared the performance of models powered by Intel’s current 12th Generation Intel Core i7 processors to laptops powered by AMD’s previous Ryzen 5000 series Ryzen 7 chips.

In general, the Swift Edge felt bouncy when navigating Windows and multitasking with a few open apps, including Chrome with lots of open tabs. Overall performance felt fast, but the ultra-thin chassis resulted in heavy use of the cooling fan during multimedia editing and 3D graphics tasks.

The first benchmark is PCMark 10, which measures performance for everyday computing tasks such as office productivity tasks, web browsing, and video chat. The Swift Edge got off to a good start in our lab tests, crossing the 6,000 threshold and coming in second behind the mighty MSI Summit E-16 Flip with its dedicated RTX graphics advantage.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

Our HandBrake benchmark tests how laptops handle CPU loads for long periods of time. In this case, he uses HandBrake, a free video encoding utility, to transcode his 30 GB MKV file into a format suitable for Android tablets. The Swift Edge ranked first among systems with integrated graphics, although in HandBrake he dropped to third place behind his two laptops with RTX graphics.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

Next is Cinebench. This is another CPU-intensive test that renders a complex 2D scene in a short amount of time. The Swift Edge performed well on his Cinebench, but the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i took top honors among laptops with integrated graphics.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

Not surprisingly, the two RTX-based laptops finished 1st and 2nd in the 3DMark benchmark, while the Swift Edge with its integrated Radeon 680M GPU outperformed the previous-generation Radeon-powered Dell Inspiron 14 7000. As such, it clearly outperforms the Intel Iris Xe machines. graphic.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

To test the laptop’s battery life, I looped a 4K video using Windows 11’s Movies & TV app with the laptop in airplane mode and earphones plugged in. Bright enough to watch movies in a lit office. With the efficient Ryzen 7 6000 U-series chips, we expected the Swift Edge to run longer. A 10-hour run time should get you through most workdays, but competing laptops here can run longer.The Swift Edge’s high-resolution 4K OLED display is responsible for its average run time. could be. Powering all those pixels is the biggest drain on battery resources. A lower display resolution will make it run longer. It has also been confirmed that the OLED panel has a slight negative impact on battery life.

IDG / Matthew Elliott

Acer Swift Edge: Summary

Please find another 16-inch 16:10 laptop that’s 0.55 inches thinner and 2.59 pounds lighter. We have yet to come across such a machine. The Acer Swift Edge is great for commuting with a screen big enough to work and multitask all day long. Even better, the display is a 4K OLED panel that offers gorgeous images. I’d argue for a slightly thicker, heavier chassis if the lid behind the display was a little more solid and the keyboard deck meant it would allow for deeper travel and keys with quicker feedback. The Acer Swift Edge, designed to offer an unrivaled combination of screen size and portability.