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日本Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512) – Top 5 Pros and Cons
The Swift series from Acer tries to be a bit higher up in the Acer pyramid, certainly above the Aspire class of laptops. They do this by often offering OLED displays, while most of the time, the laptops are well built, using premium materials like aluminum and other metals.
Today we have the new Swift 3, which takes full advantage of the Alder Lake P-series, which has shown to be quite potent with good cooling. Even with only an iGPU, these CPUs have shown to be capable of handling some pretty complex productivity work, so using a Swift 3 as a portable setup to get your work on is definitely not a bad option.
Today we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512).
Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512): Full Specs / In-depth Review
3 reasons to BUY the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512)
1. Performance
CPU benchmarks
The Core i5-1240P is an excellent CPU choice for the Swift 3. It’s got enough resources to handle complex workloads, offering 12 cores and 16 threads. In our CPU benchmarks, the Core i5 fares well in 3D Rendering, only being outperformed by the Ryzen 7 5800U and the Ryzen 7 6850U. However, it completely stomps them both in Photoshop, with leads of more than a second.
Results are from the Cinebench R23 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)
Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)
2. Display quality
The laptop is equipped with an FHD IPS display, which is a total show stealer. It’s got excellent viewing angles and reaches 360 nits of brightness, which is decent, but not groundbreaking. However, the contrast ratio is quite high, at 1920:1. The display covers 98% of the sRGB gamut, providing a punchy and vibrant image.
The laptop comes with good color accuracy out of the box, with a dE value of 1.7. However, once we apply our Design and Gaming profile, the dE value is lowered to 1.0. Here are the test results with our stock settings (left) and with our profile applied (right).
Buy our profiles
Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512) configurations with 14.0″ AUO B140HAN06.8 (AUO683D) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS.
*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected].
Read more about the profiles HERE.
In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.
Office Work
Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.
Design and Gaming
This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.
Health-Guard
Health-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.
Get all 3 profiles with 33% discount
3. Battery life
The Swift 3 comes with a 54.6Wh battery pack which lasts for 12 hours and 26 minutes of Web browsing, or 9 hours and 10 minutes of video playback. Now, we conduct the battery tests with the Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.
2 reasons NOT to buy the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-512)
1. Input devices
Sadly, Acer fails a bit with the keyboard. While we can excuse the shorter key travel, due to the slim 16 mm profile, the soft feedback makes the keys not feel that good when typing. The touchpad has its issues as well, as the small size leaves a lot to be desired. Also, it’s not that responsive, as we’ve detected some lags here and there.
2. Upgradeability
The Swift 3 also shares the same bane that all small laptops fear. It comes with soldered memory, and the highest amount that you can purchase is 16GB. The laptop uses LPDDR4x RAM that runs at 4267 MHz and in quad-channel mode. Storage-wise, there’s one M.2 PCIe x4 slot that fits Gen 4 SSDs.
Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to access the Swift 3 on the inside.
