The Acer Swift 3 SF314 Notebook Review: Swift Gets Swifter With Ryzen 4000
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on May 5, 2020 8:00 AM ESTFinal 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.
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neblogai - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
If you are interested in such things- check this video about the same laptop: https://youtu.be/awPI4RzKMvY?t=386 (use autotranslate). Basically- he put a thermal pads on the heatpipe so it transfers heat to the aluminum back cover. This allowed higher Cinebench result from cold and also higher and more consistent results in Cinebench loop. Before this modification- two of the 30 CB results were ~10% and 7% lower than others (4:40), while after the modding- all scores were higher, and without drops. Also- with this modification, bottom obviously got warmer, so this is not a solution for everyone.eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
Thanks, that is an interesting review and modification. As you stated, the reviewer mentioned (assuming I can trust Google translate of the captioning) that this simple addition of thermal pads reduced the erratic thermal throttling a lot, and how little it would add to the BOM costs. Too bad Acer hasn't taken him up on his suggestion! I would pay an extra $5 for that; it's well worth it.anonomouse - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
Any chance of memory latency and memory bandwidth comparison charts between the machines used in the SPEC2017 page? Would be interesting/useful to see these charts taking into account the performance on memory bound workloads, even if the Ice Lake part is using LPDDR4 and not DDR4 like the other two.wordlv - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
Xps 13 runs @25w. This is known fact!hanselltc - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
What the hell is the laptop doing with its thermal management? The SoC Temp FC5 just doesn't match up with the wattage it is drinking. Is the fan curve bad? Does the chip just flips out when it needs to balance CPU and iGPU powerdraw while it is hovering around the hard throttle temp limit?eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
I found that link posted by neblogai a few comments up really informative! Apparently, Acer left a lot of potential, yet straightforward heat dissipation on the table.Hulk - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
AMD is obviously on a roll but looking at these Ice Lake results I'd say Intel ain't dead yet. We have a fight on our hands!watzupken - Wednesday, May 6, 2020 - link
"AMD is obviously on a roll but looking at these Ice Lake results I'd say Intel ain't dead yet. We have a fight on our hands!"Firstly, I don't think it is a good comparison between a top end laptop running the top end Intel Ice Lake chip, and this low end Swift 3, running a mid high end Renoir chip. Top end laptops normally put in more care when it comes to cooling, and I believe this Dell model may be using a dual fan cooling solution despite its small and slim size. The cooling will certainly help improve sustained and burst performance, which in turn affect the benchmark scores. From my experience, Acer Swift 3 typically employs a single fan, single heatpipe cooling solution, which is woefully poor in cooling. If you look at some reviews out there on Ice Lake performance on lower end laptops, you noticed that the sustained clockspeed can go below 2Ghz, which will certainly hurt performance.
Secondly spec wise, the i7 and faster RAMs on the Dell will also give it an edge, against the Ryzen 7 4700U with slower RAM.
In this case, just as the review pointed out in the thermal section, I feel the Ryzen 7 4700U is actually very thermally limited to show its full potential. Hopefully we see other PC makers/ models that will provide better cooling.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Yes, if you limit the AMD chip to 8 watts:"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."
supdawgwtfd - Tuesday, May 5, 2020 - link
"channels if your router is has the correct capabilities."Wanted! Proof reader/editor.