Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

Estimated reading time: 5 min, 15 sec.

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

Acer  introduced  the Swift Go laptop series at CES 2023, powered by both Intel and AMD CPUs. The AMD Ryzen-powered laptop was  launched  in March of this year in India, and today we'll be reviewing the base model of the Swift Go 14 . It is aimed at the urban youth who would want a stylish and premium looking laptop which is portable and powerful. Let's find out if the Swift Go 14 checks all the boxes. 

Acer Swift Go 14 price in India

The Acer Swift Go 14 is available in Prodigy Pink and Pure Silver colors. On the Acer India online store, the laptop starts at Rs. 59,999 and is the variant we'll be testing. This comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. For about Rs. 5,000 more, you can get the same configuration but with 16GB of RAM.

Acer Swift Go 14 design and features

The Acer Swift Go 14 features a metal chassis which is what gives it a premium look and feel. It's also quite compact and lightweight measuring just 15.9mm in thickness and 1.25kg in weight. The pink variant actually looks nice and grows on you after a while. You get a good variety of ports for a 14-inch laptop and these include two USB 3.2 (Gen1) Type-C ports for charging, HDMI, USB 3.2 (Gen1) Type-A port, USB 2.0 Type-A port, headphone jack , and a Kensington lock. There's no SD card reader of any kind, which I don't think is a total loss. The right side of the laptop also has two LEDs for the power and activity status.

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

The backlit keyboard on the Acer Swift Go 14 is nicely laid out, and the keys themselves are responsive and not noisy. There's a fingerprint sensor in the power button which wobbles when pressed, unlike the rest of the keys, but it works fine when it comes to authentication. The trackpad does a good job of tracking and you get a decent amount of room to rest your palms. The 14-inch display has a 16:9 aspect ratio, making it ideal for watching most video content. The Acer Swift Go 14 uses an IPS display panel with a full-HD (1920x1080) resolution and comes with a matte, anti-glare finish. The display has a rated maximum brightness of 300 nits which I found to be more than adequate. The 1080p webcam is quite inconspicuous and is located just above the display. The Acer Swift Go 14 ships with just a 65W USB Type-C charger in the box.

Acer Swift Go 14 specifications and software

The Acer Swift Go 14 features an AMD Ryzen 5 7530U CPU featuring six CPU cores. It's part of AMD's mobile CPU refresh which was announced during CES this year. However, this model is based on a refreshed Zen 3 architecture, unlike the 7040 series which uses the latest Zen 4 architecture. This is currently the only CPU configuration that Acer offers in India for the Swift Go 14 series. Storage is taken care of by a 512GB NVMe PCIe Gen3 SSD, and there's 8GB of RAM. The laptop also features Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.1, and a 3-cell 50WHr battery.  

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

The Acer Swift Go 14 ships with Windows 11 Home, along with the usual preinstalled programs such as Microsoft Office Home and Student, McAfee antivirus, and a bunch of software by Acer for system diagnostics and keeping drivers up to date.

Acer Swift Go 14 performance and battery life

General performance of the Acer Swift Go 14 is very good. It runs cool and the fans are not audible when performing simple tasks, but you can hear them faintly during gaming. I found the typing angle to be quite ergonomic as the base is propped up a bit when the lid is open. The keyboard backlighting is also soothing and the display gets sufficiently bright even for daytime outdoor use. Applications are quick to load and I never really felt any lack of power.

The stereo speakers get loud but don't sound all that great. Games run decently well with the onboard Radeon graphics. I was able to get smooth framerates in Fortnite with medium graphics and running at the display's native resolution. In synthetic gaming tests such as 3DMark, the Acer Swift Go 14 returned a score of 1,268 in the Time Spy test suite, and 13,570 in Night Raid. CPU and SSD performance was also very good. The laptop scored 566 and 3,664 points in Cinebench R20, and returned an average read speed of over 1.5GB/s for both sequential and random tests in SiSoft Sandra. Write speeds were lower coming in under 900MB/s.

Video rendering and encoding performance was also quite good. The Acer Swift Go 14 took 45 seconds to encode a 1.3GB AVI file to H.265 MKV, while the BMW test scene in Blender took 6 minutes, 18 seconds to render. These were lower (better) times compared to something like the Intel Core i5-1335U CPU which we recently tested in the Dell Inspiron 16 2-in-1 .   

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

Acer Swift Go 14 Review: Striking the Right Balance

Battery life is another highlight of the Acer Swift Go 14. Considering its size, it ran for an impressive 3 hours, 26 minutes in the Battery Eater Pro benchmark. With my daily workflow, I was able to get roughly 7-8 hours of non-stop use before the battery went below 10 percent. By these estimates, it should be possible to get even up to 10 hours of use on one charge (or more), if you don't use it non-stop. The laptop can be charged fairly quickly using the bundled charger. You get roughly a 70 percent charge in an hour.

Verdict

It's really hard to find fault with the Acer Swift Go 14 as it does everything you'd expect from a thin and light laptop, and this is before you even consider the price. At Rs. 59,999 (less during sales), you get a well-designed compact laptop with good performance and long battery life. The speakers are possibly the only thing that's a little underwhelming, and the wobbly power button feels a little out of place in an otherwise well put-together laptop (or it could just be our unit). The Swift Go 14 is definitely worth recommending if you're looking for a compact Windows laptop under Rs. 60,000 that doesn't compromise on battery life.