Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51)

The Swift 3 lineup from Acer has enjoyed a lot of success, combining elegant designs with powerful hardware to create some great value notebooks. Today we have the future of the Swift 3 brand, which packs a 16.1-inch Full HD screen with a supposed Full sRGB coverage. Hardware-wise, you have the Tiger Lake H-series, which are the big boys in Intel’s arsenal.

Today we present you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51).

Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51): Full Specs / In-depth Review


3 reasons to BUY the Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51)

1. Design and build quality

As with most of the Swift laptops, this one gets a full-aluminum construction, which provides strength and makes the laptop lightweight for its size. The laptop is only 1.70 kg heavy while being 15.9 mm tall. While there was some flex it was nothing out of the ordinary.

The lid is unable to be opened with a single hand, which is weird since we were satisfied with the overall build quality of the laptop. We expected better hinges, but at least we get some rubber feet on the bottom which lift up the base of the device.


2. Display

The display that is chosen here is pretty darn good. It provides an excellent platform for a creator to thrive. The display has comfortable viewing angles, a maximum brightness of 357 nits in the middle of the screen, 329 nits as an average for the entire display area, and a maximum deviation of 11%. The contrast ratio is also quite good – 1350:1. The panel covers 98% of the sRGB color gamut.

The color accuracy was a bit off with the factory settings but quickly got within the standard after we applied our Design and Gaming profile. Here are the results of the color accuracy test with both the factory settings (left) and with our Design and Gaming 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 (SF316-51) configurations with 16.1″ FHD IPS Innolux N161HCA-EA3 (CMN160B).

*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 laptop packs a 60Wh battery unit, which provided excellent battery life. The battery pack lasted for  15 hours and 25 minutes of Web browsing, and 10 hours and 17 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.


2 reasons NOT to buy the Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51)

1. I/O

The I/O here is shallow and lacks a MicroSD card slot, which is important for Photographers, who want to quickly edit photos on the go. Despite that, you get a Thunderbolt 4 connector, two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports, an HDMI connector, the power plug, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.


2. Upgradeability

Sadly, due to the lightweight and portable nature of the laptop, the upgradeability has been sacked. There are zero SODIMM slots, leaving you with soldered RAM. As for the storage, there is one M.2 PCIe x4 drive, which actually supports PCIe 4.0 drives, delivering faster read and write speeds.

Here is our teardown video, which shows exactly how to access said SSD slot.


All Acer Swift 3 (SF316-51) configurations:

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Zak
Zak
1 year ago

£1000 for a laptop that can’t be opened with one hand?

No thanks!