The Acer Swift 3 SF315-41 Review: Ryzen Meets Laptop
by Brett Howse on May 3, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Acer
- AMD
- Ryzen
- Ryzen Mobile
- Raven Ridge
Final Words
This review is really looking at two things. First, the Acer Swift 3, and second, the AMD Raven Ridge platform based on Ryzen mobile. Let’s start with the laptop.
Acer’s Swift lineup features models from the Swift 1 at the value end, to the Swift 7 at the top end. So, the Swift 3 is closer to the value end than Acer’s flagship models. But that’s somewhat deceptive because Acer’s Swift 3 is a nicely built device, with a great aluminum exterior, an IPS display, SSD storage, and even a fingerprint reader alongside the excellent trackpad.
It’s not all sunshine and roses for the Swift 3 though. The keyboard is not only cramped with the number pad squeezed in on the right, but the keys themselves are also very poor, with a slippery texture that makes it very easy to miss the key you’re looking for. It does feature backlighting, but the backlighting turns off quickly, and using the trackpad doesn’t light up the keys like it does on most laptops.
The small battery also cuts into the maximum life when not plugged in, and that’s purely a cost decision because there’s plenty of room inside a notebook this big for more battery. Plus, the high baseline power draw pulls down the battery life as well. Compared to a couple of years ago, the battery life is still quite good, but it’s definitely not all day by any means.
The display has great grayscale and white levels, but doesn’t even come close to covering the entire sRGB spectrum, which is something that most laptops do now. At 1920x1080, it does offer enough resolution at least, and of course it’s IPS which is a requirement at this point.
AMD’s Raven Ridge platform has done very well though. The CPU performance is much stronger than the outgoing Carrizo notebook platform, although it’s not quite up to the latest Kaby Lake in terms of absolute performance. But the addition of a real GPU onto the SoC is a welcome change, and allows actual 3D gaming even on a 15-Watt processor. The performance of the Vega GPU is so much better than the Intel integrated solution that really adds a lot of capability.
The combination of AMD’s Ryzen mobile, along with a good design, and excellent specifications for the price, really do make the Acer Swift 3 an appealing proposition. We’ve never tested a laptop at this price point with a 512 GB SSD before, and the 8 GB of DDR4 is very welcome as well at this price. If you can get over the poor quality keyboard, there’s a lot of laptop for the dollar here, and the ability to actually run real games is a welcome change.
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Flunk - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Or it hits a point where it can't fit the frame-buffer into the cache memory and has to draw it in main memory instead. I think that's pretty likely, there is only so much you can do with 128MB of memory, this is the same problem the Xbox One suffers from. Performance falls off a cliff once you overflow the eDRAM cache.IntelUser2000 - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Nope, which is why I talked about Notebookcheck's result.MamiyaOtaru - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
OK "IntelUser2000". It's great to have your objective input.IntelUser2000 - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Okay Mr. Objective.oynaz - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link
The Internet. The place where usernames like "FartsOnChickens" are more trustworthy than ones like "IntelUser"Krysto - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
Throttling maybe?DanNeely - Thursday, May 3, 2018 - link
those're certainly interesting configurations. The only way to get a 512GB SSD is AMD, the only way to get 16GB of ram is Intel. The latter's especially sad since the AMD configuration's more powerful GPU is capable of using more of the system memory for VRAM.I'll second the comment about the 3 column num-pad being an awful idea. If you're part of the majority of people who don't use one, it adds to the BOM and is guilty of putting the main keyboard and trackpad off center. If you do want a numpad, you probably touchtype it and the truncated layout means you're not able to on this one anyway.
The 15.6" laptop numpad needs to be limited to models that are either thick enough to do ports under the keyboard or that have so few ports that they can put them all in the hinge area and still run the keys out to the edge of the chassis. Or using oldschool inch thick chunky bezels I guess; but if you're making the chassis that large you might as put a slim bezel 17.3" screen in instead.
Targon - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link
And due to the nature of these things, a bad keyboard is going to keep people from buying a given laptop. This is all about Acer, and really the few companies that are releasing Ryzen based laptops not really being focused on sales. What are the deal breakers when it comes to laptops? You have keyboard, you have screen, and you have battery life. If you don't provide good choices for these things, people will not buy the laptop, even if the CPU is amazing.Some of this may have to do with the NVIDIA GPP and companies really trying not to get cut off by NVIDIA, or there is another reason.
LarryTempleton - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link
What is it then? Sheer incompetence? Why can’t a laptop PC maker ever get all the parts right at the same time? Is there an in-built insecurity to actually challenging Apple with a truly thought through design?Even when Apple really drops the ball (as they have with their current MacBook Pro) PC laptop makers still can’t even figure out a functional keyboard option... It’s embarrassing.
Jimster480 - Monday, May 28, 2018 - link
its called being paid by intel to make sure a specific set of components never ends up in a laptop. As the DIY market has shown.... everyone is choosing Ryzen over inferior Intel chips riddled with bugs, exploits, slowdowns and other nonsense. And Intel giving everyone the finger in terms of fixing these bugs..