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Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 14 Inch Laptop - (AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, 8GB, 512GB SSD, Full HD Display, Windows 10, Purple)

£354.995£709.99Clearance
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Acer Swift 3 (SF315-41) has comfortable viewing angles. Here are some image quality assurance photos. Acer Swift 3 (SF315-41) comes with a FullHD IPS panel, with a serial number BOE NV156FHM-N48. The size of the screen is 15.6 inches with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. With an aspect ratio of 16.9 and a pixel density of 142 pixels per inch, the screen becomes “Retina” from a distance of at least 60 cm. Taking the Swift 3’s keyboard onto 10fastfingers.com, I scored 68 words per minute, which is about my average when not using a mechanical keyboard. Still, while I didn’t perform better, my hands felt less strained after use than usual. As what may have been expected, the color production wasn’t great for the Acer Swift 3. According to our colorimeter, the Acer Swift 3 produced 62% of the sRGB color gamut, falling short of the Intel Swift 3’s 66%, and falling below the HP Envy 13’s 99%. It doesn’t even come close to the category average of 91%. Acer Swift 3 (AMD) review: Keyboard and touchpad Oh, how much we want an equal competitor to Intel – to have a choice of manufacturer, without losing performance, only because you don’t want to be mainstream. Behold! The Ryzen 7 2700U finally gives us an adequate comparison between a “red” and a “blue” equipped machinery. Acer Swift 3 (SF315-41) definitely provides a lot of horsepower to the user, be it a presenter or a multimedia geek, who needs the things to happen on the go.

The hottest part of the laptop is on the bottom rear of the machine by the battery, so the most likely time you'll notice any heat build-up will be if you're gaming or video-editing a project while sitting up in bed with the laptop on your legs. Even then, it won't get uncomfortably "hot" the way others might. As with many Acer laptops, the Swift 3 is not safe from the bloatware beast. This includes standard Windows pre-installs like Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, and Hearts Deluxe, but also extends to subscription-based programs like Cyberlink’s Photodirector and Powerdirector editing apps, ExpressVPN, Dropbox and Netflix, all of which only come with the same trials anyone could sign up for online. There’s also a suite of ad-supported, non-Windows Store games on the device, like Spades and Simple Solitaire. A little light gaming isn’t out of the question either. The Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark scored nearly 49fps at 1080p, which is really rather good for a Core i5 laptop using Intel’s integrated Xe graphics processor. Even the 2016 Doom reboot ran pretty smoothly at around 50fps although I did have to reduce the resolution to 1,280 x 720 and video detail settings to medium. High notes are where the Swift 3’s speakers performed best. Using a-ha’s Take On Me as a test, I was impressed by how similar it sounded to my Sennheiser headphones or Logitech speaker & subwoofer system. I didn’t notice any dropped notes, and even the song’s highest frequencies weren’t tinny at all. The AMD Acer Swift 3 flew by the Intel model (7:31), as well as the 7:56 category average. Meanwhile, the HP Envy 13 (11:11) just barely beat the Acer Swift 3 by two minutes. Acer Swift 3 (AMD) review: Webcam

Acer Swift 3 (SF315-41) technical specifications table

The Acer Swift 3 speakers, which are located on the bottom sides of the laptop, provides sound that is simply mediocre. While listening to “Hate Me” by Blue October, I noticed that guitars sounded clear and bold, including the bass that came through accurately. However, the vocals sounded so low, almost like someone was covering their mouth while trying to sing to me. Even with the volume at 100%, the speakers didn’t play any music very loud, which can be chalked up to the Swift 3 being designed with bottom-firing speakers. If you are running memory intensive programs, like large spreadsheets or editing videos, then there's no getting around the 8GB ceiling. However, for casual users, I don't see it as a problem. Except for the plastic bottom cover, the Swift 3 is made entirely from aluminium and feels very solid. It looks smart, too, thanks to the all-over matte effect silver finish, which seems to be impervious to fingerprints.

Anecdotally, this keyboard impresses. The touchpad, meanwhile, uses Windows precision drivers, and is smooth to the touch. Audio Color accuracy on the Swift 3, though, isn’t half bad. The display has a Delta-E color accuracy score of 0.2 (0 is ideal). This beats the category average (0.3), the Swift 3’s Intel model (0.29) and the HP Envy 13 (0.29). Acer Swift 3 audioThe key travel is rather shallow but that’s a criticism I could make of almost every laptop of this class and it never gets in the way of the speed or feel of typing. Given the compact dimensions of the Swift 3, it’s no surprise that the function and arrow keys are half-height affairs. Other than that the layout is both standard and fault free. 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). Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7 did better thanks to its AMD Ryzen 7 chipset but we will have to wait for Intel 12th-geneneration Alder Lake processors to filter down to the more affordable end of the market before we see those sorts of numbers from a Core i5 chip. Benchmark numbers to one side, however, for everyday computing needs and office productivity tasks, the Swift 3 has more than enough power. When taking a typing test on 10fastfingers.com, I managed to hit 48 words per minute, which is not far off from my 53 wpm average. But while it was easy to type on the laptop, the palm rest area was tiny, which led to my accidentally brushing against the touchpad. Our battery life test, where we loop a 1080p video, ran for 7 hours and 6 minutes, about the same as older models of the Swift 3, but on the PC Mark 10 battery test, the Swift 3 ran for 6 hours and 12 minutes on performance mode with a balanced power profile and made it a full eight hours on a modest battery saver mode and balanced power profile.

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