Acer Swift 14 AI OLED (SF14-51) review: The king of balance

Acer’s Swift 14 range of laptops has long been a stalwart of the compact laptop market. They offer decent specifications for a price that won’t make you cry when the credit card bill arrives.

Acer’s product range has never been the easiest to navigate, though, a situation exacerbated by the fact you can now choose from three different chipsets. At the start of 2024, we reviewed the Swift Go 14 with Intel’s Meteor Lake silicon, and then along came a version called the Swift 14 AI with the Qualcomm Snapdragon-X chipset running Windows-on-ARM. Now, we have a new version of the Swift 14 AI but built around Intel’s latest Lunar Lake processors.

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Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: What you need to know

At the moment, you can buy a Swift 14 from Acer with either a Core Ultra 5 226V, Core Ultra 7 155H, Snapdragon X1P-64100, Core Ultra 9 185H or Core Ultra 7 258V processor. That’s one heck of a list before you even get onto the options for memory, display type and storage. Oh, to live in simpler times.

So, which chipset should you go for? In a nutshell, the Core Ultra 7 and 9 machines are the most powerful, the Snapdragon model has the best battery life.

The new Lunar Lake models offer a battery life between the two and good graphics performance thanks to Intel’s latest Arc 140v integrated GPU, but multi-core CPU can’t match the Meteor Lake and Snapdragon models.

Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 258V CPU, Intel Arc 140v iGPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 14in, 90Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 OLED display; Price when reviewed: £1,299

Somewhat confusingly, Acer’s current Swift 14 AI range includes machines running on both Series 1 and 2 Intel Core Ultra and Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon-X CPUs. You can read our thoughts on the latter model here, but that laptop doesn’t come with an OLED screen. What we’re reviewing here is, specifically, the top-of-the-pile Core Ultra 7 258V model with 32GB of RAM, which costs £1,299.

If you have this sort of money to spend on a compact laptop today, you have more choice than you’ve ever had; here’s our pick of the best:

• Without double the best value compact OLED laptop on the market, the Huawei MateBook 14 is on sale for just £850 at the time of writing. That’s peanuts for a machine with a Core Ultra 155H CPU, a sumptuous 2.8K 120Hz OLED screen and a 1TB SSD. The touchpad is sub-par and the battery life can’t match the competition, but at that price, it’s still a no-brainer
• The pick of the new Snapdragon-powered CoPilot+ Windows laptops, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is one of the most easily repairable and serviceable laptops on the market, has a great 2.5K IPS touchscreen and epic battery life. It’s good value at £1,223 for the 512GB 13.6in version
• The daddy of ultracompact laptops is the Apple MacBook Air 13.6-inch, which with 512GB of storage will set you back a surprisingly affordable £1,150. For that, you are getting a supremely desirable and capable laptop with great battery life that’s super-slim and super-light
• Easily the prettiest laptop on the market thanks to its gorgeous “ceraluminium” coating which feels as good as it looks, the Asus Zenbook S 14 has a superb 2.8K OLED display, great battery life and a potent Intel Core Ultra 9 288V processor. It is not cheap, at £1,750, but it is very desirable and very good.

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Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Design and key features

• Looks dull alongside the competition
• Good range of I/O ports including two USB-C 4.0 ports
• Limited upgrade opportunities post-purchase

Visually, the Lunar Lake Acer Swift 14 AI is still a rather anonymous affair, something I have said about several Acer laptops that I’ve tested recently. Only the Acer name and rather superfluous backlit AI icon on the touchpad and lid give it a visual lift.

Acer should be trying harder than it is when it comes to design: All the competitor machines listed above look and feel like more upmarket devices despite their similarities and, in the case of the Huawei MateBook, lower asking prices.

The basic build quality is good, though. The aluminium body and lid have a reassuring sense of solidity, and at 1.26kg, the Swift 14 AI compares well to the 1.23kg MacBook Air. Perhaps most importantly the matte dark grey finish doesn’t show up fingerprints.

There’s nothing wrong with the selection of ports arranged around the edges of the laptop, either. These run to two USB-C 4.0 and two 5Gbits/sec USB-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 video output, oddly a feature missing from the Snapdragon version, and a 3.5mm audio jack. There is no memory card reader.

Wireless communications are bang up to date with the Killer 1750i wireless card supporting 6GHz Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Getting inside the Swift 14 is easy enough but once in you’ll see that there’s no room for a second SSD. The RAM can’t be upgraded, either, as it’s integrated into the CPU package – a feature of all Intel’s Lunar Lake SoCs.

Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Good quality keyboard and touchpad
• AI indicator is a bit of a gimmick
• Excellent 1440p webcam with Windows Hello

I found little to fault with the keyboard: the keycap graphics are simple and clear, there’s a two-stage white backlight for use in dim or dark rooms and the typing action is sharp and precise thanks to a generous degree of travel and a solid end-stop. The keyboard deck is reasonably solid with just a little give in the centre under pressure.

The touchpad is covered with a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass, which makes for a very smooth feel. At 125 x 75mm, it’s large enough to support the most florid gestures, while the click action is firm, clean and quiet.

The pattern etched into the top right corner of the touchpad is Acer’s AI Lighting Effect icon, which lights up when the neural processor starts to work – every time you press the CoPilot key or run the Studio Effect webcam features, for example. This serves no real purpose other than looking good and it can be disabled in the Acer Sense control panel.

The Acer Swift 14 AI OLED’s webcam is the same 1,440p affair found in the Snapdragon model and it comes with the now-expected selection of AI features lumped together under the Windows’ Studio Effects banner.

Image quality is excellent, even in less-than-ideal light, and Windows Hello facial recognition is supported, too. On this topic, there’s also a fingerprint scanner, giving the Swift 14 AI a full house of biometric security options.

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Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Display and audio

• Sumptuous OLED 2.8K 90Hz OLED screen
• The display is bright and colour-accurate
• The speaker system still disappoints

Fitting a 14in a laptop with a 2,880 x 1,800, 242ppi OLED display is unlikely to be a recipe for disappointment but some of Acer’s OLED laptop displays, like that fitted to the Swift X 16, have proven to be a bit wayward in terms of colour accuracy in the past.

However, the panel on this new Swift 14 AI was spot on and registered a Delta E variance of just 0.59 against the DCI-P3 profile. This superb showing makes the Swift perfect for colour-critical work out of the box and makes it very easy on the eye. There are no other colour profiles to choose from, though, which means no sRGB lock.

Brightness levels were impressive, peaking at 518cd/m² in SD mode and 616cd/m² in HDR mode while the 90Hz refresh rate gave motion processing a smoothness that pays dividends when scrolling through long text lists or spreadsheets. The panel carries a DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification, which gives Vesa’s stamp of approval for its excellent HDR performance.

It’s difficult to get too excited about the Swift 14’s audio performance, however. The laptop’s 2 x 2W speaker system may boast DTS X Ultra branding and a healthy maximum volume output of 76.5dBA, but the soundscape is congested and brittle and there’s not much bass in evidence.

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Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Performance and battery life

• 16hrs 30mins runtime from a full charge
• Multi-core performance can’t match the Meteor Lake model
• Beats the M3 MacBook Air for performance and run-time

The big deal with Intel’s Lunar Lake chips is their efficiency, so it makes sense to start rather than end this section with battery life. In our standard battery life test the Swift 14 AI Lunar Lake lasted 16hrs 26mins.

For comparison, the Snapdragon-X Swift 14 AI managed 24hrs 2mins, while the Meteor Lake model ran for 9hrs 23mins. It’s worth pointing out that, while the Intel machines have 65Wh batteries the Qualcomm model packs a 75Wh battery.

Given that the new Lunar Lake machine can last longer on a charge than an M3 MacBook Air 13.6-inch it’s difficult to criticise too harshly it for not matching the epic endurance of the Snapdragon model but, at the end of the day, it does fall 7hrs 36mins short.

When it comes to performance the new Lunar Lake chips, they’re are lovers, not fighters: in our x64/86 4K multi-media benchmark the new model scored 272 points to the Core Ultra 155H (Meteor Lake) machines’ 356. That’s quite a difference. The same test doesn’t run on ARM Windows so we need to turn to the GeekBench 6 test to draw a comparison. Here, the Lunar Lake Swift 14 scored 11,075 in the multi-core test compared to the Meteor Lake model’s 12,815 and the Snapdragon machine’s 13,426.

Of course, these bare numbers don’t tell the whole story. Some Windows programs will only run on the Snapdragon platform under emulation, which can hinder performance, so the technically slower Lunar Lake model will feel faster in the real world than the technically faster Snapdragon model.

The arrival of more native ARM64 applications will start to eat away at Intel’s edge, here, though. Blender was one app that ran poorly under Microsoft’s Prism emulator due to problems with GPU identification, but a native ARM version has now arrived, and Google has at long last launched an ARM-native version of the Google Drive desktop sync app, albeit in Beta form.

In everyday use the Lunar Lake machine feels more than powerful enough to deal with any of the jobs you would expect a standard laptop to perform and, thanks to its Intel Arc 140v integrated GPU, the graphics performance is good. The SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark ran at over 26fps on the new Swift compared to 15fps on the Meteor Lake model.

To see if the new Swift 14 AI was good for a marathon as well as a sprint I maxed it out by running a CPU and GPU stress test at the same time. After about 15 minutes the CPU utilisation settled at 70% while the GPU continued to run flat out, which isn’t a bad showing for a compact laptop. More importantly, the cooling system remained impressively quiet while maintaining this level of performance.

This laptop’s Micron 1TB SSD wasn’t quite as fast as the Western Digital drive in the Snapdragon model but the differences are so slight as to be irrelevant. Sequential read and write speeds of 4,200MB/s and 4,205MB/s are more than respectable.

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Acer Swift 14 AI OLED review: Verdict

Although I’ve spent most of this review comparing the Intel Lunar Lake and Qualcomm Snapdragon versions of the Acer Swift 14, the comparison is perhaps moot since the Snapdragon machine can’t be had with an OLED display and that is surely one of the main selling points of this new model.

That makes the latest Acer Swift 14 AI great value, and while raw performance can’t match the Meteor Lake model, the balance between performance and battery life makes it a more fully rounded alternative. The absence of any performance issues related to application emulation makes it a safer bet than the Qualcomm model.

It’s great news for the consumer that you can now choose between the three platforms currently on offer in the Acer Swift 14 AI lineup. All three make a strong case for themselves, but the new Lunar Lake OLED model is the best, albeit by a small margin.