Almost two years ago to the day, we had a chance to check out Acer’s Swift 3 laptop featuring AMD's first Ryzen Mobile platform, Raven Ridge. Acer has been a strong partner for AMD, generally being one of the first out of the gate with new designs featuring AMD’s latest platforms, and this year that partnership has played out again. Today we are taking a look at the newest AMD APU offering, the Ryzen 4000 "Renoir", which is at the heart of Acer’s latest iteration of the 14-inch Swift 3. With a brand-new AMD processor and some innovations in the Swift 3 design itself, both AMD and Acer have made some tremendous improvements for 2020.

Ryzen 7 4700U

The big news for 2020 is AMD’s new APU platform, codenamed Renoir. Selling as the Ryzen 4000 series, these new APUs bring a number of major updates to AMD's platform, as the company further sands down the rough edges from the Ryzen 3000 Picasso series. Key to this is a much-needed jump from GlobalFoundries' 12nm process to TSMC's class-leading 7nm process, giving AMD a much-wanted boost in transistor performance and overall energy efficiency. Coupled with a number of further optimizations at the chip and driver level, and AMD's latest APUs are proving far better suited for thin-and-light mobile designs than their predecessors.

Under the hood, like AMD's desktop processors introduced last year, the new Ryzen 4000 series APUs are the first laptop-focused products from AMD which feature their Zen 2 CPU cores. Designed hand-in-hand with TSMC's 7nm process, the Zen 2 architecture has further boosted AMD's performance across both IPC and clockspeeds, and the small cores have allowed AMD to get away with 8 of them in even a laptop APU. Meanwhile the iGPU is based on the same Vega architecture graphics as both the 2000-series and 3000-series APUs, but in a new configuration. Thanks to TSMC’s 7nm process, AMD has been able to crank up the GPU frequency much higher than before – so much higher that they’ve actually scaled back on the number of GPU compute units, while still promising improved GPU performance over the previous generation of APUs.

Ian had a chance to take the new Ryzen 4000 platform for a spin in early April, although that sample was the 45-Watt H series. Many of the concepts carry across though, so if you’ve not yet had a chance to catch up on Renoir, be sure to check out the Ryzen 9 4900HS review. The 45-Watt processor range is pretty much the standard in high-performance notebooks, but the vast majority of laptops on the market stick to the lower-powered 15-Watt range, which is what we have in the Acer Swift 3.

Acer has opted for what is likely to be one of the most popular SKUs in the AMD Ryzen 4000 range, the Ryzen 7 4700U. AMD has gone a very non-traditional route for this part, offering eight physical CPU cores, but disabling simultaneous multithreading (SMT). All of AMD’s H-Series lineup of 45-Watt processors do offer SMT, but only two of the new U-Series provide this, with the Ryzen 5 4600U offering 6 cores and 12 threads, and the Ryzen 7 4800U providing 8 cores and 16 threads, all in the 15-Watt thermal design power (TDP) that is so common on laptops. In the typical 15-Watt laptop space, AMD is the first to offer 8 cores, just not always with SMT.

On the GPU side, the Ryzen 7 4700U offers 7 Vega-architecture Compute Units (CUs), with a maximum clockspeed of 1600 MHz. Compared to the previous generation Ryzen 7 3700U, the GPU drops three compute units, but bumps the maximum frequency from 1300 MHz to 1600 MHz, so we shall see where this plays out in terms of performance.

The Acer Swift 3

Acer has managed to bundle a lot of product into the Swift 3. The 14-inch notebook features a 1920x1080 IPS display that, albeit lacking touch support, does get showcased well thanks to the Swift 3's thin bezel surround. The laptop ships with 8 GB of DDR4-3200, and though we would have loved to see LPDDR4X, the capacity is what is important here, and 8 GB is a good amount for a budget-friendly laptop like the Swift 3. Also, Acer has managed to outfit this notebook with a 512 GB SSD, which is fantastic. They will also be offering a less-expensive version with a Ryzen 5 4500U, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD.

Acer Swift 3 SF314-42
	Ryzen 5	Ryzen 7 Model Reviewed
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 6 core 6 thread 2.3-4.0 GHz 2x 4MB L3 15W TDP	AMD Ryzen 7 4700U 8 core 8 thread 2.0-4.1 GHz 2x 4MB L3 15W TDP
GPU	AMD Vega 6 6 CUs 1500MHz Boost	AMD Vega 7 7 CUs 1600MHz Boost
RAM	8 GB Dual-Channel DDR4-3200
Storage	256 GB PCIe NVMe SSD	512 GB PCIe NVMe SSD
Display	14-inch 1920x1080 IPS
Networking	Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2x2:2 802.11ax Bluetooth 5.0
Audio	Stereo Speakers DTS Sound
Battery	48 Wh Li-Ion 65-Watt Charger (barrel connector) USB Power Delivery Support
Right Side	USB 2.0 x 1 Headset jack Battery Charge Indicator
Left Side	USB 3.2 Gen 1 x 1 with power-off charging USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C w/DisplayPort, PD HDMI 2.0 Charging connector
Dimensions	323.4 x 218.9 x 15.95 mm 12.73 x 8.62 x 0.63 inches
Weight	1.2 kg / 2.65 lbs
Camera	720p Super High Dynamic Range
Extras	Fingerprint Reader
Price (MSRP)	$629 USD	$649 USD

Despite the strong APU, RAM, and storage offerings, Acer is not done there. The Swift 3 also features Wi-Fi 6 thanks to Intel’s AX200 wireless adapter, which means 2.4/5.0 GHz wireless support with 160 Mhz channels if your router is has the correct capabilities. There’s also an integrated fingerprint reader for Windows Hello Support, and the entire package is contained in an all-aluminum chassis which weighs just 1.2 kg / 2.65 lbs. Considering the $649 MSRP, this is an incredible value.

Design

Acer’s design ethos for the new Swift 3 would make you think this is a much more expensive device. The 14-inch notebook features an all-aluminum design, offering a much more premium feel than what you’d normally expect on a notebook in this price range. At just 1.2 kg / 2.65 lbs, the 14-inch notebook is extremely portable, and with an 83% screen to body ratio, it is easily as compact as a 13.3-inch notebook from a couple of years ago. Acer’s choice of a 16:9 display does mean that the display has a hefty chin, but is almost certainly a choice that was made to keep the device in-budget.

Despite the thin design and the low price, the aluminum chassis is very stout, with little to no flex no matter how you pick it up. Acer has cut in a slot at the front to make opening the laptop easier, although it will not open with a single finger since the hinge is too stiff to allow this. There is no touch support either, so the hinge stiffness does not need to be quite so tight, but it does make for a solid platform once you open it up.

The keyboard provides a great typing experience. The keys themselves have single-level white backlighting, which works well. The white backlighting on silver keys can cause some contrast issues in bright light, but the effect is not as pronounced as it is on some other devices. Typing offers a surprisingly good keyboard feel, with solid keys that have a solid level of pressure and feedback. Acer has the power button as part of the keyboard, which does make it prone to accidentally turning the device off if you miss the delete key, and moving the power button out of the normal keys would be appreciated, but Acer is far from the only manufacturer to do this, and the laptop resumes instantly so even if it did happen it’s not as big of an issue as it was a few years ago, thanks to the new modern standby options built into Windows and the new CPU.

If there was one area where the notebook showcased it was a lower-cost device, it would be the trackpad. Although it offers the Precision touchpad drivers, the material is not as smooth and responsive as some higher-priced notebooks. This is not so much a knock against the device, but a reality of where it is situated in the market. It does offer the expected multi-touch capabilities you’d expect, it just doesn’t quite offer the level of refinement you’d see in more premium notebooks.

Acer has also included a fingerprint reader, which has great response. It unlocks the device in well under a second even if the display is off. It is a nice to see Windows Hello support despite the lower cost of this device, and the chosen reader seems to work very well. There is no IR camera included, and the built-in webcam is only a 1280x720 unit, so do not expect to be the belle of the Teams meeting, but it gets the job done with a properly located webcam in the top bezel.

Acer offers reasonable I/O as well, with a USB Type-C port on the left, which does support power delivery up to 15 Watts output, and support for charging the device via USB-C as well. There is no Thunderbolt 3, but it does offer DisplayPort output. This is in addition to the included HDMI port, and the laptop also has a USB 3.2 Gen 1 port on the left which supports power-off charging, and a USB 2.0 port on the right, along with a headset jack.

Overall, the Acer Swift 3 is a great design, with a modern feel, and premium materials. The 14-inch notebook is compact, thin, and light, and Acer has done a great job with the look and feel of this device. There are enough ports, and the included USB-C port adds the expanded ability to charge as well as I/O. Looking at this device, you could easily mistake it for a notebook that costs hundreds more.

Section by Andrei Frumusanu

SPEC: Renoir vs Picasso vs Ice Lake

Kicking off our look at performance, let's start with SPEC and analyzing how AMD managed to increase the performance against Picasso with its first-generation Zen cores. The newer generation Renoir with Zen2 cores should in theory see more significant performance upgrades thanks to the improved IPC of the new microarchitecture – but today’s 4700U also is just a mid-tier part with a lower 15W TDP as well as “just” featuring DDR4-3200 – not the fullest memory configuration possible as the SoC also support LPDDR4X up to 4266 MHz.

For our SPEC harness, We’re testing under WSL1 in Windows due to simplicity of compilation and compatibility, and are compiling the suite under LLVM compilers. The choice of LLVM is related to being able to have similar code generation across architectures and platforms. Our compiler versions and settings are as follows:

clang version 8.0.0-svn350067-1~exp1+0~20181226174230.701~1.gbp6019f2 (trunk)
clang version 7.0.1 (ssh://[email protected]/flang-compiler/flang-driver.git
  24bd54da5c41af04838bbe7b68f830840d47fc03)


-Ofast -fomit-frame-pointer
-march=x86-64
-mtune=core-avx2
-mfma -mavx -mavx2

Our compiler flags are straightforward, with basic –Ofast and relevant ISA switches to allow for AVX2 instructions.

Single-Threaded Performance

In SPECint2017, the new Zen2 based Ryzen 7 4700U is performing well, although the score increase compared to the last-generation 3780U aren’t as big for some workloads. As a reminder, the 3780U clocks up to 4.0GHz in terms of boost clocks while the 4700U clocks up to 4.1GHz. SMT being disabled on the 4700U should also give it a slight advantage in IPC over other Zen2 platforms given that it doesn’t have to statically share some core resources anymore in this mode.

Renoir showcases the biggest increases in workloads such as 548.exchange2_r and 525.x264_r which are back-end execution bound workloads, and the microarchitectural improvements here help a lot.

On the other hand, the weakest improvements are seen in workloads such as 520.omnetpp_r – this test is mostly memory latency bound and unfortunately the new chip here barely just matches its predecessor. The same can be said about 505.mcf_r where the improvements are quite meager.

The generational improvements here aren’t enough to catch up to Intel’s Sunny Cove cores in the Ice Lake i7-1065G7. Although that core might be running at higher single-core TDPs and power consumption, it still makes for a big gap in some of the more instruction pressure and cache pressure high workloads such as 500.perlbench_r and 502.gcc_r where the Intel chip still has a considerable lead in.

In SPECfp2017, these are floating point heavier test workloads. The generational increases here are also relatively smaller, with even an odd regression in 527.cam4_r. The Intel chip still has a lead across the board, and with particular large gaps in the more memory heavy workloads such as 519.lbm_r and 549.fotonik3d_r.

Overall, in terms of single-threaded performance, the Zen2 Renoir chip might seem a bit underwhelming, but when looking at the IPC improvement it’s actually not that far off from what’s expected of the new microarchitecture. In both SPECint and SPECfp we see a 12% performance per clock improvement, which is generally in line with Zen2’s generational improvements. As a reminder, the mobile chips here only feature a quarter the CCX L3 cache compared to its desktop counterparts, and that will result in smaller IPC gains, especially in memory heavy workloads.

AMD’s higher-end SKUs such as the 4900HS score slightly better due to the higher boost frequencies, but nothing significant enough to change the single-threaded competitive landscape; Intel still has a substantial advantage here thanks to a much stronger memory subsystem.

Multi-Threaded Performance

The multi-threaded performance comparison today is actually quite interesting just for the fact that the 4700U doesn’t feature SMT. Whilst it lacks multi-threading on the cores, it makes up for it by simply having 8 physical cores on the chip, double that of Picasso-based SoCs as well as Intel’s latest Ice Lake CPUs. Again, performance here will be strongly impacted by the TDP as well as cooling of the systems. Both AMD parts are 15W TDP designs, while the Intel chip sustains 25W.

The resulting multi-threaded performance is quite varied across the benchmarks. What immediately stands out is that in purer execution heavy workloads the new Renoir chip pretty much demolishes its predecessor as well as the competition. This makes sense given that Zen2 has good execution resources and Renoir has double the physical core count to scale up performance.

Renoir’s performance here is very good across most workloads, but there’s a few workloads where Intel’s Ice Lake CPU comes closes or beats it even (502.gcc_r) – again these are the workloads that are most memory intensive.

SPECfp across 8 instances again shows similar results. Renoir fares extremely well across execution bound workloads, but this time around loses a lot more often against the Ice Lake chip in memory-bound workloads even though it has a 2x core count advantage.

The chip’s performance in memory-bandwidth heavy 519.lbm_r is particularly odd as it manages to fare worse than single-core results of a desktop Zen2 based system, and again far behind the Ice Lake counterparts.

Overall, AMD’s 4700U’s multi-threaded performance is fantastic in areas where it should matter most in a laptop-based system. The 2x core count advantage more than makes up for the lack of SMT, and workloads such as rendering and other creative tasks are the platform’s strong-points. In more memory-heavy workloads, performance doesn’t scale all that well as clearly the new chip still has a big weakness in its memory subsystem – scientific workloads or code compiling won’t scale nearly as well.

We have to wonder how Renoir will fare on an LPDDR4X configured system – unfortunately we haven’t been able to test such a platform yet. Overall, the 4700U seems like an excellent chip given its 15W TDP, but let’s see how it performs in our system benchmark suite…

System Performance

AMD’s new Renoir platform has already been showcased in our SPEC testing, which made a clear case that the new design provides a much-needed performance bump over the previous Picasso platform. Despite the individual cores having generally lower single-threaded performance than Intel’s Ice Lake, they make up for that deficiency with sheer volume, doubling the core count of the competition. AMD’s mantra for the entire Zen existence has been more for less, and that continues here again. Acer has positioned this laptop at an entry-level price, but with performance that should meet or exceed other devices in its class.

Both AMD based models of this 14-inch Acer Swift 3 come with 8 GB of RAM, in the DDR4-3200 flavor, which is where notebooks need to be these days for an entry position, so it was nice to see them offer 8 GB on both the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 models. The company could have cut back to hit an even lower price point, especially on the Ryzen 5, but that would impact the performance too much to make it a worthwhile compromise. They’ve also started with a 256 GB SSD on the Ryzen 5 model, and bumped that up to 512 GB on the Ryzen 7 we have here, and still at just $649, which is fantastic value and should keep the target market happy for some time.

To see how the Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 7 4700U performs, we have run it through our laptop test suite and compared it to several other similar systems. If you'd like to compare the Acer Swift 3 to any other laptop we have tested, please check out our online Bench.

PCMark

UL’s PCMark suite offers some real-world test cases, and tests all aspects of the system, from CPU performance, to GPU, to even app-loading times and disk performance. The Acer Swift 3 performs very well here, especially in the digital content creation sub-tests, where the GPU gets to showcase some of its prowess.

Cinebench R20

AMD has been touting its Cinebench results for some time since their launch of Zen, and for good reason. As a compute-focused test, the Zen 2 cores perform very well here, and having eight physical cores in the multithreaded results really make the Ryzen 7 4700U stand out. SMT has been a great way to get more performance per-core, but there is still no substitute for actual cores.

x264

The x264 test transcodes a video using the CPU and has always enjoyed more CPU performance and more CPU cores, so it should not surprise anyone that the Ryzen 7 4700U wins the day here again. Eight cores make short work of this transcode.

Handbrake

Handbrake is arguably the most popular video transcode tool around, and it offers both software-based CPU transcoding, as well as GPU accelerated. On our last Picasso platform, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, Handbrake wasn’t able to leverage Vega’s Video Core Next hardware, however the Acer Swift 3 can, and in both software and hardware encoding, the Renoir based Acer Swift 3 finishes this task very quickly.

7-Zip

7-Zip is a very popular, free file compression and extraction tool, and it also offers a built-in benchmark. AMD’s Renoir SoC once again outperforms the rest of the 15-Watt systems here. Tests such as this and transcode do very well with the extra cores provided on the Ryzen 7 4700U.

Web Benchmarks

This will likely be our last review with the older web tests. Web benchmarks are as much about the browser’s scripting engine as they are about pure CPU performance, so for consistency we’ve tested in Microsoft Edge. Now that Edge is being moved to the new Chromium-based version, we’ll take this opportunity to replace some of our older tests.

Web tests also tend to be more sensitive to the CPU being able to ramp up its frequency quickly, and that is an area where AMD’s systems did not perform quite as well. Luckily for Renoir, those issues are behind AMD, and the Acer Swift 3 performs very well.

Storage

One of the best things about the Acer Swift 3 is how much storage it comes with considering its price point. The review unit offers 512 GB of SSD storage, and although you may expect slower, cheaper SATA storage here, that is not the case. The Acer Swift 3 ships with NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 storage, and in the case of the review unit, that means a Samsung PM991 SSD inside.

Performance is excellent. Despite this being a budget notebook, the storage options are very welcome. A base model offering 256 GB is a great start, but a proper NVMe SSD as well makes this laptop even more value.

System Performance Conclusion

Although AMD has really made inroads in the desktop space since the launch of Zen, in the laptop space where power is at a premium, what made the early Zen based APUs stand out was not the CPU but the GPU. Since then, Intel released Ice Lake, offering similar GPU performance but with much higher CPU performance. Now that AMD is on their third-generation of Zen-based laptop APUs, that performance lead has all but evaporated. In our SPEC results, Intel still has the single-threaded lead, but AMD more than makes up for that by offering eight CPU cores, compared to just four on Ice Lake. The Ryzen 7 4700U that Acer has fitted into this Swift 3 is likely to be one of the more popular options, and for good reason. Despite it not offering SMT, the performance is fantastic.

GPU Performance

Ever since the original Raven Ridge systems, AMD’s Zen-based APUs have set the bar for GPU performance in a 15-Watt package. Coupling AMD’s Vega GPU cores with their Zen CPU cores really changed the game in terms of integrated GPU performance. Their second-generation Picasso platform even bumped the compute unit count up to 11 with the Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition processor, which was once again based on Vega.

AMD’s philosophy has changed slightly for their third generation Zen-based APU, Renoir. Thanks to the move to TSMC’s 7 nm process, they decided to cut back the GPU cores, but provide more frequency headroom, and coupled with the CPU performance gains of Zen 2, AMD promised faster GPU performance despite the reduction in compute units. So, for the Ryzen 7 models, they are now offering either seven compute units on the Ryzen 7 4700U we have in our review unit, or eight compute units in the Ryzen 7 4800U, with maximum frequencies of 1600 Mhz and 1750 MHz respectively. That means that the unit we are testing today is down four compute units compared to the Ryzen 7 3780U found in the Surface Laptop 3, and although the maximum boost frequency is higher, it is only 200 MHz higher than the best Picasso APU available. We’ve seen AMD ramp up frequency before to get more performance out of their GPUs, and it has served them well, but in a laptop platform, there is far less thermal room to work with, so we shall see how the new philosophy works out for them.

Our testing philosophy for laptops with integrated GPUs has had to evolve very quickly. Laptops based on Intel’s Gen 9.5 graphics had such poor GPU performance that it was not even worth testing them against most 3D games, but both AMD’s Vega GPU on Ryzen, and Intel’s Iris graphics in their Ice Lake SoC have both moved the bar upwards, so more vigorous testing is now required. As with any new testing we bring, please give us some time to fill in the data as we test new devices.

3DMark

UL’s 3DMark suite offers a range of tests of varying complexity, from the high-end Fire Strike, down to Ice Storm Unlimited, which can be run on smartphones. The Acer Swift 3 is off to a great start with these DX11 based tests, easily outperforming the previous Picasso scores as well as Intel’s Ice Lake platform. The most interesting result is the Ice Storm Unlimited Physics results, where Renoir scores 2.7 times higher than Picasso. The Physics tests are really CPU bound tests, which clearly shows how CPU limited the previous AMD APUs had been.

GFXBench

Thanks to the new DX12 tests Kishonti introduced with version 5.0 of their GFXBench suite, this cross-platform benchmark is again relevant on Windows. The results from the Ryzen 7 4700U are interesting. AMD has often done well on DX12, likely thanks to their early efforts with low-level drivers, and their previous Picasso GPU did very well on this benchmark. The Renoir does surpass Picasso, but the margin of victory is small.

Tomb Raider

Although a bit long in the tooth, the original Tomb Raider reboot can still be taxing on notebooks, although the game is certainly playable on the modern integrated GPU if you turn down the settings. On our value settings the Acer Swift 3 was able to achieve over 100 frames per second, meaning there is quite a bit of room to increase the quality as long as you keep the resolution down. On both Ice Lake and Renoir, the game is unplayable with our Enthusiast settings at 1920x1080, despite its age.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The first sequel to Tomb Raider added DX12 support, and as usual that means our AMD APUs did well. Although the game would be barely playable on Picasso or Ice Lake, the Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 7 4700U looks like it just squeezes past the 30 FPS minimum you’d really want. This game is still at the limits of integrated GPUs.

Strange Brigade

The co-operative third person shooter Strange Brigade is a DX12 title that does well even on integrated GPUs. It also appears to be more CPU bound than some of the other DX12 titles in our list, so the extra performance offered by the Zen 2 cores in the Acer Swift 3 help propel it to the top, with far more performance than the previous generation AMD APU.

F1 2019

Codemaster’s F1 series is yet another game that can do well even on integrated graphics if you want to turn the settings down. The Acer Swift 3 does very well here, almost achieving an average of 60 frames per second.

Far Cry 5

Ubisoft’s Far Cry franchise is well known, but it’s also been impossible to play on most integrated GPUs. That is still the case with the Acer Swift 3, although it just manages over 30 frames per second in this test, outclassing all other integrated notebooks tested. We will get into this a bit later, but this game also showed some very severe thermal throttling, with major dropouts in framerate during the benchmarking.

GPU Results

Although AMD cut back on the size of the GPU in Renoir, they don’t seem to have hurt maximum performance, and the new Zen 2 cores really show that the previous Raven Ridge and Picasso APUs were very CPU bound on some titles. With 36% fewer compute units than the Ryzen 7 3780U found in the Surface Laptop 3, the Acer Swift 3 still manages to outperform it in all cases.

However, the Acer did run into thermal issues when running at maximum performance. Some of this will come down to the cooling system in this particular notebook, but the power management of the Renoir APU also did not seem to be able to cope very well. Rather than find a sweet spot where it can perform well without throttling, the frame rate in Far Cry 5 was like a roller coaster the longer you left the game running. AMD’s choice to cut back on the number of compute units and then increase frequency certainly won’t help here either, and it makes you wonder how well the GPU would have been able to perform on the new 7 nm process with more CUs but a lower maximum boost frequency. We will dig more into the thermals later in the review.

Display Analysis

Acer offers just a single display option on the 14-inch AMD based Swift 3, which is a 1920x1080 IPS display. Considering the price, this is the right option, although it is interesting that they are offering a 13.5-inch 3:2 Intel based Swift 3 in the SF313-52. The 3:2 works quite well for productivity, although less-so for gaming where 16:9 generally suffers from fewer issues.

There is no touch capability with this display, which is a bit of a shame, but also understandable with the other features offered. Acer did well to hit their target price range, and they made overall good decisions on where to invest. Touch is a nice to have, but not a necessity, although when you are used to having it, it is amazing how often you try to touch the screen.

To see how the display stacks up, the laptop was tested with Portrait Display’s CalMAN software suite. For brightness and contrast, the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter was used, and for color accuracy readings the X-Rite i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer was employed.

Brightness and Contrast

The Acer Swift 3 does not get off to a great start. In a budget notebook, displays tend to be one of the first things on the chopping block. Luckily, we’ve moved past the era where these types of notebooks would offer 1366x768 TN panels, but Acer’s 1920x1080 IPS choice doesn’t offer very good black levels, and their backlight is somewhat weak. It is an inauspicious start.

Grayscale

Portrait Display CalMAN

Grayscale measures the laptops ability to display white levels, from 0% (black) to 100% (white), and the Swift 3 performs quite poorly here. The blue levels are far too strong across most of the range. Gamma is also way off of the expected 2.2 level.

Gamut

Portrait Display CalMAN

Windows 10 is still an sRGB system first and foremost, so proper sRGB gamut support is required for proper color accuracy. The Acer Swift 3 unfortunately does not cover anywhere near the sRGB gamut, which means that the LED backlighting was likely another area where some money was saved. Although grayscale can be salvaged with some ICC profiles, without full sRGB backlighting this laptop would likely suffer further if an ICC was applied because it simply cannot cover the entire sRGB spectrum.

Saturation

Portrait Display CalMAN

The saturation test covers the primary and secondary colors, but unlike the gamut where they are just measured at 100% level, we test them on 4-bit steps from 0% to 100%. Since we’ve already determined the laptop can’t hit the full sRGB gamut, it is no surprise to see the saturation sweeps suffer.

Gretag Macbeth

Portrait Display CalMAN

The Gretag Macbeth tests colors off of the primary and secondary axis, including the important skin tones, but with a display that can’t reproduce the entire sRGB range, the Acer Swift 3 naturally performs quite poorly on this test.

Colorchecker

Portrait Display CalMAN

Finally, we have the colorchecker, where you can more easily visualize the color errors with this display. This is a relative test, since any errors in your own display will influence the result, but on the bottom of the swatches is the color requested, and the top shows the color produced by the display. It is not pretty.

Display Conclusion

Overall, despite the poor showing here, the display is in-line with expectations at this price point. Over the last couple of years, there has been a push for better displays, and laptop makers have made the jump to 1920x1080 IPS panels pretty much across the board; so even though this display is poor compared to better IPS-based laptops, it still does offer the good viewing angles an IPS panel enjoys, and 1920x1080 works very well on a 14-inch screen size.

The very poor backlighting really does hamper the capabilities of this notebook. If you wanted to use it for editing photos or video, the internal components like the CPU, memory, and GPU, really would help, but the included display with its lack of sRGB coverage would certainly hinder the work. For basic office tasks, or even gaming, most people who are looking at a laptop at this price point will likely not be too concerned about the display, but just be aware that this one is deficient in several areas.

Battery Life

While AMD’s rebirth in the notebook market brought with it some changes that have shaken up the laptop market, one area where AMD’s Ryzen APUs have suffered is in terms of battery life. Thanks to a high base power draw, both the AMD Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series could not match the competition in terms of outright battery life. With the new Ryzen 4000 series, AMD has not only moved to the Zen 2 CPU cores, but also to the 7 nm TSMC process, so they should have a chance to rectify their previous shortcomings.

Despite the 14-inch notebook size, the Acer Swift 3 ships with just a 48 Wh battery, which is much smaller than you would see as an average for this size of device. Of course battery capacity is only one side of the equation, with the other being power draw, so to test the overall battery life the notebook was run through our laptop battery suite, which consists of a low-impact web test, a high-impact web test, and movie playback from a local file. As always, the display is set to 200 nits of brightness to normalize display power across all of the notebooks.

Light Battery Life

The Acer Swift 3 does quite well in our lightest test, offering over ten hours of screen-on time. A great comparison is the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 15-inch, which had Picasso and a battery of similar capacity.

Web Battery Life

Our revamped web test is much more demanding on the CPU, and generally especially impacts thin and light designs where the base power draw is quite low. That is the case here, with almost 100 minutes less runtime than the light battery test. But the results are still encouraging, with almost nine hours of runtime.

Movie Playback

The Acer Swift 3 offers good battery life with the movie playback as well, closing in on ten hours straight with the display at 200 nits brightness. This is one area where the previous AMD APUs struggled, since it does mean offloading the video decode to the GPU. Intel has incredibly efficient hardware blocks dedicated to this, and the AMD APU can’t quite match that, but is still an improvement over Picasso.

In terms of overall movie playback time, the Acer Swift 3 would let you watch four complete sittings of The Avengers in a row, although you’d miss the end of the credits in the final loop.

Normalized Battery Life

Removing the battery size from the battery life equation lets us take a look at platform efficiency across the different notebooks. In our light test, there is a big jump in efficiency when comparing to the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 AMD edition, and as the light test is mostly an idle scenario, gives hope that Renoir has finally solved AMD’s extra power draw. The Web test is more demanding, meaning more CPU power is used, and only shows a small gain over the previous generation.

Platform Power Draw

To get an idea how much power draw there is on the new Renoir based platform, we turned to BatteryBar Pro to log the power draw. The results were impressive. AMD has more or less matched Intel in terms of idle power usage with their Ryzen 4000 series.

The first-generation Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 5 2500U drew around 2.55 watts at idle, but the new Ryzen 7 4700U Acer Swift 3 idled right around 1.0 Watts, matching the 10th generation Intel Ice Lake equipped Surface Laptop 3. This is a big step for AMD, and allows them to compete not just on performance, but battery life as well.

Battery Life Conclusion

Despite the smaller than average 48 Wh battery capacity, the updated Ryzen 7 4700U in the Acer Swift 3 manages to provide solid battery life. This is a big win for AMD, where battery life was one of the key drawbacks to their previous Ryzen APUs. With right around 1.0 Watts of idle power draw with the screen off, they are no longer playing catch-up to the competition. For light tasks, it should easily get through the day.

Charge Time

Acer includes a 65-Watt A/C adapter with the Swift 3, providing more than enough output to power this laptop. As previously mentioned though, the included connector is a barrel connector, which in itself is not a huge issue, except that Acer’s barrel connectors are very thin and would be prone to breaking. This has been a concern on their notebooks for some time. The good news is that the notebook also has a USB-C connector with power delivery, and you can charge the laptop over USB-C with no issues. Despite the convenience, USB-C is still an expensive standard, so some vendors have not made the switch on all of their devices yet.

As far as charge time, the 65-Watt charger makes short work of the battery, charging the laptop up to maximum in under two hours. The charge rate peaks around 30 Watts, and Acer claims you can charge four hours of battery usage in 30 minutes of charge time.

Wireless

Acer has fitted the Intel AX200 Wireless adapter in their Swift 3, and for good reason. Intel’s wireless networking adapters have been the cream of the crop in the PC space for some time, with rock solid stability, and excellent performance. The AX200 is the new Wi-Fi 6 adapter, adding 160 MHz channel support and higher QAM orders to provide much higher peak performance than Wi-Fi 5, while at the same time offering better congestion control as well.

The Acer Swift 3 has very good networking performance from the 2x2 networking solution, hitting over 1.1 Gbps transfer speeds on our TCP test. We are using the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 router, and if you’d like to check out more about the new Wi-Fi 6 testing, please check out our overview.

Audio

The Acer Swift 3 features DTS Audio with stereo front-facing speakers, and dual-microphones for Cortana support. Although the speakers are forward facing, they are on the bottom of the notebook, so can be obstructed depending on the surface the notebook is on.

Sound quality is quite good, with reasonable bottom end response for a notebook of this size. The speakers do not get overly loud, measuring 75 dB(A) one inch over the trackpad, but the sound was free from distortion.

Thermals

Thin, light, and performance. The holy trinity of laptop design. It is not always easy to achieve. Acer has a thin and light laptop, with a new 7 nm AMD Ryzen 7 4700U onboard which should help them out, but to see how the laptop responded it was run through an extended stress test of the CPU, with the GPU kicked in near the end.

As with most modern CPUs, the Ryzen 7 quickly ramps up well past its target thermal design power, hitting around 30 Watts draw at the start, but as the test goes on, that value falls back to around 18 Watts. But the power line shows several spots where it dropped back due to thermal capacity. A perfect result here would be a straight line for the CPU frequency but struggles to maintain its boosted frequency. The laptop does not seem to find a sweet spot where it can maintain temperatures either, it instead bounces from maximum power draw to minimum. The GPU also is not consistent when it is turned on around the 2300 second mark.

As this is a full stress test, it can be unfair since you are unlikely to run into a scenario where you use the system at 100% load for such an extended duration. To see how the laptop performs in a more real-world test, it was again tested using Far Cry 5 as a load source.

If anything, the results were even more disappointing. The laptop really struggled with its thermals, dropping the framerate into single digits often. The device attempted to run at around 18 Watts of power draw, slightly over the 15 Watt TDP, but in fact only averaged around 8 Watts during this run.

The laptop does not get overly loud during this load, only hitting around 45 dB(A), but clearly the included cooling system is inadequate for very heavy loads, such as gaming. Far Cry 5 is a demanding game, especially on CPU, so the SoC is even more taxed trying to balance the CPU and GPU, but overall this is a very poor result.

Software

Acer includes a few utilities which are useful, and a few that are not, such as some Norton Antivirus with a short trial period. But it is worth looking at a few pieces of software and included utilities.

The AMD Radeon Settings gives you control over the GPU settings, including disabling Vari-Bright, and seeing the system settings. It is a nice looking utility, but other than providing a few options to enable or disable, but it would be nice if you could use it to manage driver updates for the GPU rather than just copy the version numbers.

If you do want to update drivers, you can use the Acer Care Center, where you can also manage recovery media creation and support requests. This is now a standard feature on all notebooks, and Acer’s implementation is attractive and easy to use.

Acer includes a couple of links to e-tailers like Amazon and Booking.com, which are easily deleted, but also are a quick reminder that margins are thin when prices are this low.

Final Words

Although there are a few shortcomings on the new for 2020 Acer Swift 3, overall the company has done an excellent job on a lot of the key areas of this notebook. Considering the price of just $649, including 8 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD is very welcome, and having a processor that offers as much performance as the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U is the icing on the cake. The fact that everything is wrapped up in an attractive, sturdy aluminum shell really lets the Swift 3 punch above its weight.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700U is likely to be one of the more popular offerings in notebooks, and AMD has delivered. The new Zen 2 cores are much more competitive, and AMD has crammed eight cores onto this 15-Watt CPU. It is only in the last couple of generations that we saw quad-core processors in the 15-Watt range, but AMD has proven that they can make eight work in a limited power window. And while Intel appears to have a single-threaded performance advantage with their Sunny Cove CPU architecture, AMD’s Renoir simply overpowers Ice Lake with the number of full cores available.

The GPU performance is also excellent, and despite AMD cutting back on the numbers of compute units included in Renoir, they’ve made up for it not only with GPU frequency, but also with CPU performance helping feed the GPU. In all cases, the new 7 CU GPU in Renoir was able to outperform the 11 CU GPU in Picasso. Generally, a wider, slower GPU is going to offer better efficiency, but AMD has delivered the performance.

That performance does come at a cost though, and that is heat. The Acer Swift 3 could not keep up with the demands of the Renoir APU at full blast, and there was significant throttling when running at the Best Performance level in Windows 10. That is disappointing, because it prevents this notebook from being able to get the most out of the APU inside. If you were hoping to use the integrated Vega graphics for light gaming, be aware that you may run into heat issues.

It almost goes without saying that the display quality is also lacking. To hit this kind of a price point, certain areas were cut, and one of them was the display. The Acer Swift 3 does offer a 1920x1080 IPS panel, but the poor backlighting, lack of sRGB coverage, and poor color accuracy all make it a very mediocre display. It is not unexpected in this price range, but is one of the areas that reminds you why this laptop is priced where it is.

Despite the negatives, Acer has still delivered a winning combination with the Swift 3. It offers the same look, feel, and portability of a much more expensive design. The 83% screen to body ratio is not industry leading, but does offer the modern look of a thin-bezel design, and manages to make this 14-inch laptop feel much more compact than it is. It is also very light, at 2.65 lbs, making it very easy to travel with, if we ever get to travel again.

At a $649 MSRP, Acer has delivered a very solid value, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, 8 GB of DDR4-3200, and a 512 GB PCIe SSD. The Ryzen platform offers the same Modern Standby resume features as Intel now, so wakeup is instant. Battery life was very solid, and Acer has included features like an integrated fingerprint reader making sign-in a breeze.

Acer has been a great partner for AMD, and the new Swift 3 punches well above its weight. It is easy to be distracted by some of the top-end notebooks on the market, but if your budget is not quite there, you get a lot of the same qualities, but at a price that is very reasonable. The Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 is set to available in the early part of this month, so it should be available to purchase very soon.