Acer Swift Go 14 Review

Coming as a surprise ultraportable laptop, the Acer Swift Go 14 (starts at $799.99; $1,099.99 as tested) looks like the same basic notebook the company has pumped out for several years now, with a design we’ve seen a half-dozen times. However, Acer has done something special this time: It placed impressive hardware inside to drive a gorgeous high-resolution OLED display. That all gives the Acer Swift Go 14 a lot going for it as an $1,100 laptop and gives little quarter to machines like the Dell XPS 13 (9315) and Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 when it comes to the full value on offer. Only a ho-hum keyboard keeps it from soaring higher.

Acer Swift Go 14 Build and Configurations

The Acer Swift Go 14 is terribly unassuming, so much so that I almost called it an Acer Aspire in writing this paragraph. Acer is squeezing every drop out of this laptop design, as I’ve seen it on most of the Acer everyday laptops I’ve tested in the last several years. It’s robust enough with a metal chassis, a firm hinge that doesn’t wiggle much, and only a subtle flex to the keyboard deck.

This model has trimmed the bezels around the display a bit to squeeze in a 16:10 screen instead of 16:9. The surface-mounted vent above the keyboard is more fitting on this model than some others I’ve tested, though, as it has an actually powerful processor to keep cool. 

Unfortunately, the design means the Acer Swift Go 14 gets the same keyboard setup as some much cheaper machines. It’s not horrific, but the convex key caps are hard to feel at home on, and they have a little too much wiggle in the corners to feel perfectly dependable.

The key layout also squeezes a fingerprint reader onto the power button in the top right corner, displacing the Delete in an error-encouraging way. Likewise, the arrow keys get stuffed into a tight little bundle in the bottom right corner that can be harder to use.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Acer doesn’t seem to know how big or heavy its own machine is. I’m used to seeing weights not line up, as different configurations can measure differently, but I found a considerable difference between what Acer reported and what I measured, with Acer suggesting a 2.76-pound package and 0.59-inch depth, while I found it to weigh 2.9 pounds and measure 0.73 inch in depth—all using precise digital calipers and scale.

On its website, Acer lists five different Swift Go 14 configurations, though the one we've reviewed here is not listed. Instead, we were able to find it on retailer websites like Amazon and Walmart. Most configurations are quite similar, starting out with a 13th Generation Intel Core i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD and going up to a Core i7 H Series CPU with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

What's important to note is that models selling for under $1,000 come with a 1080p LCD display, while those above $1,000 have a sharper OLED display. The 14-inch OLED display on the Acer Swift Go 14 has a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel (or 1800p) resolution that’s exceedingly crisp at the size. It also refreshes at 90Hz to provide smooth scrolling and visuals. The display’s glossy finish is prone to glare, but the panel can get plenty bright to provide decent visibility in spite of this. (Acer also lists a model for $1,199.99 with the same internals but an even sharper 3,200-by-1,800-pixel screen, though we haven't seen it elsewhere.)

Despite reusing its older designs, Acer is clearly sneaking in upgrades. Another is the fingerprint reader in the power button, and one more is a fairly sharp webcam recording at 1440p resolution.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Though the Acer Swift Go 14 isn’t as thin as Acer made out, its relative thickness comes with a decent selection of ports compared with some of its thin-and-light competitors—cough, Dell, cough. Each side includes a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (5Gbps) port. Meanwhile, the left side houses two Thunderbolt 4 ports (that also can facilitate charging) and an HDMI 2.1 port. The right side squeezes in a 3.5mm headset jack and a microSD slot. The speakers continue to sit on the bottom outer edges of the laptop frame.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

If you believed Acer’s product page specs (a risky move given the track record so far), you’d think it skimped on wireless capabilities, as the page lists only 802.11n wireless, or Wi-Fi 4. But the actual wireless card in the system is Killer Wi-Fi 6E AX1675i, capable of substantially better Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity.

Using the Acer Swift Go 14

Though I don’t love the feel of Acer’s convex keyboards, I can’t knock them too harshly. With only a small period of adjustment, I was able to get my typing speed up to 107 words per minute with 95% accuracy, as measured in Monkeytype. I’ve used the laptop for a week’s worth of work and didn’t struggle to maintain my usual working pace. Only the small arrow keys, shifted Delete key, and lack of dedicated page navigation keys add difficulty in text editing.

However, the trackpad is a little more underwhelming. It’s simply smaller than I'd like, though the glass surface is smooth and doesn't impede navigation.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Acer regains some of the ground ceded by the keyboard and trackpad with its screen quality. A 90Hz OLED screen is always a joy to look at, and the extra room provided by its 16:10 aspect ratio lets me see plenty on the screen at once while working on documents. Even when I zoom out on webpages to see as much as possible, the high resolution of the display keeps small details distinguishable, so even tiny text is legible.

Despite the down-firing speaker placement, the sound that comes out is fairly crisp and has a decent volume for listening in a quiet or small room. However, I find so little low end that some music that relies heavily on the bass ends up with an empty void of sound. It’s just gone. They’ll do fine for video calls and human voices but these speakers are no friends to music lovers.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Acer doesn’t stick too much bloatware onto its laptops these days from what I’ve seen. It does include a few popular social media and messaging apps and a couple of small games. While Acer tacks on weblinks to a few services, it’s not bogging down the storage with too much.

Testing the Acer Swift Go 14: A Clear Leader in Its Class

Priced at around $1,000, the Acer Swift Go 14 isn’t quite a budget laptop, but it still falls at the low end for thin-and-light, premium laptops. However, it’s not quite as thin as some of the competition. With its configuration and price, it has some considerable rivals to contend with. The Dell XPS 13 (9315) is perhaps the most notable, though that model requires paying more to match the Acer Swift Go 14 for storage and memory, and it runs a lower-power 12th Gen Core i5 U Series processor. It’s a similar story for the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8, which is competitive but more expensive and runs a lower-power CPU.

Acer has an HP to contend with as well. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is similarly configured, though running a generation behind in silicon, and even comes in a similar design. Meanwhile, the Acer Swift Edge is a thinner and lighter package with a bigger and sharper OLED display and, though its list price is higher, it sees frequent discounts to $1,000.

Productivity Tests

We compare each laptop’s real-world productivity potential using UL's PCMark 10 to simulate office and content-creation workflows and 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.

Then, we continue assessing the system’s CPU performance with benchmarks that take advantage of the many cores and threads available in each system. This lets us 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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs 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).

Unfortunately, we couldn't get a result in PugetBench as a result of an error in the test we’ve been seeing frequently on many new, 13th Gen Intel chips.

At PCMag, any score above 4,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark is viewed as respectable and a reliable sign that the machine will hold up well in everyday office work. The Acer Swift Go 14 not only met that mark but exceeded it dramatically—hardly surprising given the high-performance CPU inside the Swift Go 14 and its ample memory. Even the storage used in this laptop proved to be on the more-capable end of the spectrum. Despite the known lineage of Dell’s XPS laptops, the XPS 13 had the weakest showing here across the board.

In almost all of these tests, the Acer Swift Go 14 earned the highest score. In the one case that it didn't, it was neck in neck. This is likely thanks to the fact that the CPU here is a higher-power H Series part than what’s found in these competitors. (The ample cooling that the Swift Go's frame provides its CPU also helps.)

Graphics Tests

To evaluate graphical performance, we test Windows PC graphics with a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations using UL's 3DMark Night Raid (low-intensity)  and Time Spy (high-intensity) tests.

We also use GFXBench 5, which provides a cross-platform GPU benchmark stressing both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are 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.

With graphics testing, we saw another impressive showing for the Acer Swift Go 14. The integrated Iris Xe Graphics on the Core i7-13700H showed some improvements, leaping well ahead of what we saw in the HP Pavilion Plus 14’s Core i7-12700H and crushing the XPS 13’s result. The Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8 did a decent job not trailing too far behind, as it was running similar graphics hardware on Intel’s Raptor Lake architecture. Only the Acer Swift Edge managed to put up a fight, showing the staying power of AMD’s Radeon integrated graphics. Even then, it was a close one.

Battery and Display Tests

To compare the battery life among laptops, we do a battery rundown test playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with the laptop’s display brightness set to 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 perform the display tests using 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 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

You’d think with all of its performance and its low price, the Acer Swift Go 14 would have to sacrifice on display quality, but it doesn’t. The 14-inch OLED panel on this laptop is exceptional. It has a high peak brightness of 489.7 in standard dynamic range or SDR, and I measured it shining as bright as 616 nits in high dynamic range or HDR highlights. This screen also has a spectacular color gamut, covering 100% of the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces as well as 98% of Adobe RGB. That’s the most complete coverage of all five laptops here. It’s accurate, too, with an average Delta E reading of just 0.59 and a max of 1.22. That accuracy is with the display at 50% brightness, though, as bumping it up to 100% brightness seems to over-brighten colors.

While the Acer Swift Go 14 flew above its competitors in display quality, it falls below them in battery life. It landed shy of just nine hours in our battery test while the rest of the pack managed nine or more hours. The Yoga 9i Gen 8 managed an extra-impressive 14 hours and 5 minutes, for instance. However, it’s not a terrible showing for Acer, as the Swift Go 14 is brighter in its 50% setting than all but the Dell XPS 13. Compared with the Yoga 9i Gen 8, Acer was running almost twice as bright during the test. Dialing back the Acer Swift Go 14’s brightness would likely extend the battery life noticeably, as OLED displays tend to be hungrier than IPS models (as demonstrated by the Dell XPS 13’s battery life).

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: A Surprising Value in Everyday Laptops

The Acer Swift Go 14 is a surprising machine. Its performance, display, and battery life leave little to be desired from a device at this price. You might think it’d be cheaper given the “Go” in the name, or thinner given its close competition with thin-and-light laptops, but it manages to strike a decent enough balance between its capabilities and hardware to really stand out as an exceptional value.