Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511) – Top 5 Pros and Cons

Here is a laptop that everyone can appreciate. The Swift 3 series is known for its quality and decent pricing, and the Swift 3 (SF314-511) cements that statement even further, offering a powerful range of CPUs, along with a great display and a portable form factor, which makes it perfect for on-the-go work.

The laptop, if equipped appropriately, can decently heavy tasks, without much strain. This includes the Creator suite, as the display here does offer good characteristics for color-sensitive work.

Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511).

Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511): Full Specs / In-depth Review


4 reasons to BUY the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511)

1. Design and build quality

The Acer device comes with a premium build quality, featuring an aluminum lid and base. Despite that, there is some flex from both of them, so you just have to be extra careful when using or carrying the device. However, with a thickness of only 15.9 mm and a weight of 1.20 kg, there isn’t much to carry, and you’d rarely feel the laptop in your backpack.

The lid opens with one hand, revealing a lever mechanism, that lifts up the rear of the device, allowing fresh air to enter from below. The display has thin bezels all around, with the top and bottom ones, featuring an HD Webcam and an Acer logo, respectively.


2. I/O

The situation with the ports is better than what we would have predicted, with the device offering two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, a single USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.


3. Display quality

The laptop packs a 14-inch Full HD IPS panel with comfortable viewing angles, a max brightness of 299 nits in the middle of the screen, 281 nits average across the surface with a maximum deviation of 10%. The contrast ratio of 2100:1 is very high.

Moving over to the color coverage, we see 98% sRGB coverage.

The color accuracy is poor with the stock settings, but the laptop is transformed once we applied our Design and Gaming profile, which brought the dE value from 5.5 to 0.8. Here are the test results with the stock settings (left) and with our profile applied (right).


Buy our profile

Since our profiles are tailored for each display model, this article and its respective profile package are meant for Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511) configurations with 14.0″ Innolux N140HCG-EQ1 (CMN1408) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS panel.

*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


4. Battery life

With a 53Wh battery pack and the power-efficient Tiger Lake U-family (our laptop featured the Core i5-1135G7), the laptop lasts for 10 hours and 44 minutes of Web browsing, or 9 hours and 27 minutes of video playback. Now, we conduct the battery tests with 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.


1 reason NOT to buy the Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511)

1. Upgradeability

The laptop is held together by 8 Torx-head screws which, when removed, reveal 16GB of quad-channel memory, along with a single M.2 PCIe x4 Gen 4 slot.

Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to access the single SSD slot.


All Acer Swift 3 (SF314-511) configurations:

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