Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 Laptop Review: Fast, slim and with good battery life - The Ryzen subnotebook is almost completely convincing

[Redaktion]

Acer's new 14-inch laptop has AMD's brand-new Ryzen 7 4700U APU on board, which lacks neither CPU nor GPU performance. Good battery life has not compromised on despite the machine's large computing power, though. The new Swift 3 is well-equipped in other areas too, with Acer including an NVMe SSD, a matte IPS screen, a backlit keyboard and dual-channel RAM.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Swift-3-SF314-42-Laptop-Review-Fast-slim-and-with-good-battery-life-The-Ryzen-subnotebook-is-almost-completely-convincing.469302.0.html

[Jim Akers]

I have this laptop and absolutely love it! It is a game changer and fantastic daily driver.

[Agbli P]

Limited to 15W USB-C charging supplemented by a bulky DC charging block
absolutely bare-minimum provided I/O ports
terrible keyboard, ugly and cheap looking chassis
Extremely budget internal construction
tiny screen with insanely pointlessly high resolution in extremely non-standard pixel dimensions and still only constrained to 16:9 (bad for productivity)
Literally no air intake/exhaust vents
Seems like a horrendously bad product from crappy Acer
The only thing justifying its existence is the relatively powerful but affordable Ryzen 4000 notebook GPU
No buy, 140 models of more Ryzen 4000 laptops will be coming this year.

[Alfredo]

This laptop might be enough for a certain market segment , it is selling like hotcakes in Amazon.

[DavidC1]

Hmm, in Witcher 3 it uses 19W more power than on Load Average.

I have a suspicion that in Renoir it counts GPU ASIC power separately from CPU package power. And its in games that does that.

In all the other systems Witcher 3 is comparable to Load Average.

Then we cannot say 4700U is at 15W when running games. It seems its closer to 30W.

And does the system throttle on battery or not?

[Padmakara]

This is an incredibly fast laptop. 2x faster than intel i5 8265. For $650 there is nothing close. The screen could be brighter but it is not bad at all. The ram you should get 16gb if you can find.
I would recommend this to anyone who doesn't need a gaming or video editing device. You can't go wrong with this, flex 5 or ideapad 5.
These are the best bang for your buck.

[DeepskyScorpion]

Is it just me, or did this article not mention the battery size? also, can you standardize the stresstest readout screen? hwinfo being the go to, showing temp, freq, wattage and power limits.

[DavidC1]

Is it just me, or did this article not mention the battery size? also, can you standardize the stresstest readout screen? hwinfo being the go to, showing temp, freq, wattage and power limits.

Battery is 48.85WHr. It's shown in the battery life testing section.

HWInfo64 doesn't show power limits(you are talking PL1 like on Intel yes?) for AMD. It shows current and past power use though.

(Oh and I hope Notebookcheck takes Google Recaptcha and dies in a fire)

[heffeque]

Mostly all looked fine, but... 56% sRGB... dear god... My 2008 cell phone had better color space than that. That's a complete turn off for me.

[hooper]

Not only this laptop review but also other laptop review, I need to consider to add the thing to compare the price to performance. There are so many dump laptops in price to performance.

[ZODD]

Wish this had a decent screen, would gladly pay a bit extra for a brighter more colorful screen.
ACER always does this with there budget line, great hardware  with below average screens.

[Valantar]

This look downright excellent for a budget thin-and-light, performance, thermals and battery life are all fantastic for the price. Certainly bodes well for well-designed 25W cTDP versions in more premium designs with better displays. Looking forward to that Lenovo Slim 7 or whatever it's called finally arriving - we're going on four months from the projected launch now ...

[Padmakara]

Wish this had a decent screen, would gladly pay a bit extra for a brighter more colorful screen.
ACER always does this with there budget line, great hardware  with below average screens.

Unfortunately yes. Probably they want to force the customer to pay $1200+ for a decent build.
Otherwise this acer and lenovos trash all the 1000+$ laptops, xps, regarding performance and battery life. This has 16h for video playback. It's amazing the laptop's autonomy, 8 core cpu with a  with such a small battery.
Probably the only good laptops with a 100% sRgb are the ideapad 5 (top ips display to choose for 40$) and xiaomi redmi book 13-14-16

[neblogai]

Renoir can be configured the way manufacturer wants. There are 3 power levels that depend on how long is the load, which can also change depending on active profile. For Swift 3- there is a very short 30W boost, after which it goes into longer, 25W boost (can be several minutes), which settles at 18W of sustained power.
For example Lenovo Ideapad 5 has 12.5W, 15W and 25W profiles, and they all also boost much higher than that for short tasks. This is standard for U-series notebooks, and it seems Intel is even bringing it to desktops with their latest power hungry CPUs.

As for the other question- reviewers have noticed some throttling, but only in select applications- with the majority running at full 18W indefinitely without throttling. One Chinese reviewer fixed this by adding a thermal pad inside the laptop, to connect the heatpipe with the aluminium back, which improved the performance a bit, and stopped occasional throttling in CB.

Then we cannot say 4700U is at 15W when running games. It seems its closer to 30W.

And does the system throttle on battery or not?

[_MT_]

For example Lenovo Ideapad 5 has 12.5W, 15W and 25W profiles, and they all also boost much higher than that for short tasks. This is standard for U-series notebooks, and it seems Intel is even bringing it to desktops with their latest power hungry CPUs.

AFAIK, boost has always behaved this way. Even in desktops. The problem in desktops is that motherboard manufacturers often don't follow Intel's guidelines and configure the system to take more energy than it should with the view to improve performance and gain some advantage over the other manufacturers. Whether it's good or bad depends. You can get extra performance without having to do any overclocking yourself and it works even on cheaper non-K processors with locked multipliers. But it makes the processor look worse when it comes to efficiency. Few people go to the trouble of ensuring that the motherboard behaves as it should and the processor works as Intel intended. However, this is nothing new either. It has been that way for some time. They can afford to do it because consumption is tracked in CPU reviews, not motherboard reviews.