Acer Swift 3 OLED Review

With the 2022 version of the Acer Swift 3 (starts at $929; $1,229 as tested), the company’s 14-inch ultraportable has landed in the Goldilocks Zone. Two years ago, the Swift 3 featured a display with a boxy 3:2 aspect ratio, and last year’s model went widescreen with a 16:9 panel. The screen on this year’s version is neither too tall nor too wide, with a 16:10 ratio that feels just right. An even better visual development: OLED on the 2,880-by-1,800-pixel display, which delivers an incredibly dynamic picture. Powering it all is a 12th Gen Intel Core i7 H-series processor, a high-power mobile chip that requires a chassis that’s heavier and bulkier than most 14-inch models. The Swift 3 also offers less battery runtime than competing models with more efficient CPUs, a trade-off for its increased performance.

An Ultraportable Design That's a Bit…Portly

Acer sells two models of the Swift 3 OLED laptop. The baseline model costs $929 and features a Core i5-12500H CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD). We reviewed the higher-end $1,229 model. The added $300 bumps you up to the Core i7-12700H CPU while doubling the memory to 16GB and the SSD to 1TB. 

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The looks are fairly standard for a laptop in 2022: a brushed aluminum chassis with a dark gray finish and thin, black bezels framing the display. It’s compact for a 14-inch laptop with a 16:10 aspect ratio display, measuring 0.7 by 12.3 by 8.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 3 pounds. It’s a bit narrower than last year’s wider 16:9 model but no taller—Acer just shrunk the bezels to make the entire package a bit more compact despite the taller display. It’s thicker and heavier than last year’s model, which was only 0.63 inch thick and 2.7 pounds.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The added bulk helps accommodate the high-power, 45-watt (W) H-series CPU. (Intel's other two mobile chip classes in its current 12th Gen Core lineup—the 28W P series and 15W U series—are more efficient and can be squeezed into thinner designs.)

The other hint that the Swift 3 OLED features a high-performance CPU is the large vents that run along the right half of the top edge of the keyboard deck. Such venting is more common on a gaming laptop with a high-powered graphics processor (GPU) that needs the added airflow than a general-use laptop with integrated graphics. Two rows of vents also run along the aluminum bottom panel.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Overall, the Swift 3 OLED has a modern, clean look, but it follows a laptop trend we're not fond of. Instead of a traditional black keyboard, Acer opted for silver keys to match the rest of the silver chassis. We have two issues with this arrangement.

For one, the keys are a lighter shade of silver than the body of the laptop, so they don't really match. More problematic than the aesthetics is the poor contrast between the silver keys themselves and the gray key characters. When lighting is either too bright or too dark, it’s hard to see which key is which.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Poor contrast aside, the keys feel springy with the perfect amount of travel, providing a speedy and comfortable typing experience. At least your fingers should be happy. The touchpad, meanwhile, is undersized by modern standards, but it accurately records my swipes, pinches, and other mousing gestures. The click response offers a touch too much travel but feels snappy.

Last year’s model featured a fingerprint reader below the keyboard, and this model has integrated it into the power button in the top-right corner of the keyboard for a cleaner overall look. With an IR webcam, the fingerprint reader is the only biometric device for secure logins without needing to type in a password.

An OLED Panel With the Right Ratio

The display is the biggest improvement from last year’s model. Not only does it move from the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio to a more useful and roomier 16:10 display, but it also is an OLED panel. The 16:10 ratio makes the display feel roomier than its 14-inch size might suggest. With the added vertical space, more content fits on the screen, which means less scrolling through long web pages and documents. It’s incredibly helpful on a 14-inch laptop that can feel a bit cramped at 16:9.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

We applaud the move to the 16:10 aspect ratio, and we give a standing ovation to the shift to an OLED display. Combined with the fine QHD, 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution, it provides a sharp and dynamic picture. The OLED panel boasts incredible contrast with bright whites, inky blacks, and vivid colors—it covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut. It’s also very bright, measuring an impressive 444 nits at maximum brightness in testing.

Beyond OLED displays, the biggest development in laptop AV is the move from grainy 720p webcams to 1080p webcams with a crisper, better balanced picture. The Swift 3’s webcam produces sharp images that will have your video conference mates seeing you better. We wish, however, that it had a physical privacy shutter to prevent snooping when not in use.

It’s too bad there hasn’t been the equivalent to OLED technology when it comes to laptop speakers. The Swift 3’s two bottom-firing stereo speakers emit typically disappointing laptop sound. Their output sounds muddy, with little separation between high and mid-tones and nothing in the way of a bass response. Keep a pair of headphones handy for music playback. You also might want them for watching movies and shows.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The port selection doesn’t disappoint, with both USB Type-C and Type-A ports and an HDMI port. Located on the left side, the Type-C ports both feature Thunderbolt 4 support for fast data transfers and video connectivity via DisplayPort. Because you’ll need to use one of the Thunderbolt 4 ports to charge the Swift 3’s battery, I wish they were split across the left and right edges of the laptop, so I’d have the flexibility to charge from either side. After all, I’m not always sitting to the right of the nearest power outlet. The only item missing from the external connectivity offerings is an SD card reader.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the Acer Swift 3: ‘H' Is for High Performance

Our Acer Swift 3 test system features the Intel Core i7-12700H CPU, 16GB of RAM, integrated Iris Xe graphics, and a 1TB SSD. The Core i7-12700H is a member of Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake H series of 45W mobile chips. The H series is tipped toward the performance end of the mobile CPU spectrum, with the 28W P series in the middle and the 15W U series geared more toward efficiency and longer battery life. The Core i7-12700H features Intel’s new hybrid architecture with performance and efficiency cores; the chip has six Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and support for up to 20 processing threads.

To get a sense of the Swift 3’s performance, we compared it to other similarly sized laptops, including the HP Pavilion Plus 14, which also features the same Core i7-12700H CPU. Three others—the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1, the HP Elite Dragonfly G3, and the Lenovo Yoga 7i 14—feature a 12th Gen Core i7 U-series chip. Rounding out the charts is the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon, which uses a Ryzen 7 CPU from AMD’s previous 5000 series.

Not surprisingly, given its high-powered mobile CPU and sufficient RAM, the system feels zippy during typical Windows use. Applications load quickly, and multitasking progresses without any lag or freezes. Given the large vents on the back edge and the 45W CPU, I expected fan noise to be an issue at times, but I was pleasantly surprised at how quiet the Swift 3 operates in nearly every instance. Only when engaged in video encoding did I hear the cooling fan kick on, and even then it is fairly quiet.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks, such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Beyond that, three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our last productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Swift 3 performed well on PCMark 10; we consider any score above 5,000 to be more than satisfactory. Its score on the PCMark 10 Storage test was well behind the competition, but the system felt as speedy as any other laptop with an SSD when accessing the disk. It didn’t separate itself from the U-series laptops, however, to any great extent and finished second to the AMD-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon.

We saw similar results on HandBrake, where the Swift 3 finished the encode with alacrity but still was a minute slower than one of the U-series systems in the Dell Inspiron 14. The Swift 3 was able to flex its muscle more on our Cinebench R23 and Geekbench tests; it and the other Core i7-12700H-based laptop, the HP Pavilion Plus 14, were the clear winners on each of these tests. This pair also did well on our Photoshop test, but the AMD-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon was the top performer on that test.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines, like texturing, and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Swift 3 finished first among this group on both 3DMark tests, but these victories should not be construed as the laptop having any 3D gaming capabilities. As with any laptop with integrated Iris Xe graphics, it does not have the graphics oomph to play 3D shooters or other AAA titles.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Swift 3 did well on all of our DataColor tests, showing wide color gamut at or near 100% and was the brightest of the bunch. Battery life is a different tale. The trade-off for the strong multimedia performance you get from an H-series processor is shorter battery life.

Each of the systems with a U-series chip ran for hours longer on our battery drain test than either the Swift 3 or HP Pavilion Plus 14. The AMD-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon also delivers hours more in runtime. 

The Acer Swift 3 is an OLED ultraportable that’s best for media creators who will make use of its high-powered Core i7 H-series processor. For general use, you will get better battery life and a thinner design from an OLED ultraportable with a U-series chip, such as the HP Elite Dragonfly G3. The AMD-based Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is also another option for a sleek, long-running OLED ultraportable. If you are willing to trade longevity for greater multimedia capabilities, then there’s lots to like about the Swift 3, from its roomy, gorgeous 14-inch OLED display to its sturdy, all-aluminum frame.