Looking for a great budget laptop for your work, education or even media consumption with long battery life? To get one is tough, but not now, AMD’s Ryzen 4000U processors have rocked the market with its super-efficient Zen 2 cores and have proved itself much better in performance and efficiency.
That’s the reason why in 2020 we saw a record-breaking sales of these AMD-powered notebooks, however, getting one was a tough job. With the launch of the next-gen Ryzen 5000 mobile processors, the prices of these 2020 laptops are more lucrative. That’s why we will explore why you should definitely look out for the Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 5 4500U inside it.
Specifications
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 4500U hexa-core processor with max turbo up to 4.0Ghz | RAM: 8 GB of onboard LPDDR4 system memory
- Display: 14″ display with IPS (In-Plane Switching) technology, Full HD 1920 x 1080, high-brightness Acer ComfyView LED-backlit TFT LCD
- Graphics: AMD Radeon Graphics
- Storage : 512 GB, PCIe Gen3 8 Gb/s up to 4 lanes, NVMe SSD
- OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit | Warranty: One-year International Travelers Warranty (ITW)
Design & Build
This is a thin and light laptop then look no further as this laptop weighs just 1.2 kg along with only 15.9 mm thickness. The laptop looks modern with slim bezels, and the silver colour looks classy, although it’s made out of some mixed plastic & metal, it still feels light yet premium.
Actually, for the price, being such light, you can’t ask anymore, overall the build quality is adequate for daily use. Also, a 180-degree hinge is a nice touch to stretch the display at the most it can.
Display
The Acer Swift 3 features a 14-inch IPS LED-backlit TFT LCD Full HD display with 1920 x 1080 resolution with 82.73% screen to body ratio. The show is very compact due to the thin bezels, but lacks colour accuracy, covering 56% of the sRGB colour gamut and comes with 250 nits of peak brightness.
The tone of the display is on the yellowish side, and with that amount of brightness, it is suitable for indoor usage only. You have to use the laptop in 70% brightness at least actually to work on it, and the good thing is that there’s no Backlight bleeding or PWM flickering. The viewing angles are also great for watching anything at any angle.
Overall, for daily usage, the Acer Swift 3 is a great laptop and I enjoyed watching Netflix or YouTube at night without any hiccups but at 100% brightness. So, you can use the laptop for media consumption as well but you cannot do any professional task due to the lack of color accuracy, however, for normal usage the display is adequate.
Performance
It features the 6 core and 6 threaded AMD Ryzen 5 4500U APU with 2.3GHz base clock speed and up to 4.0 GHz boost clock speeds. It is an ideal APU for light to medium end workloads and can well be used for professional works like coding, video editing, and other tasks as well.
Mostly for daily usage or even work, the Ryzen 5 4500U is adequate enough and is really cool most of the times. Its so efficient that you hardly hear the fans spinning and draws very less TDP as per your workloads, giving you a really good battery life.
In Geekbench, the Ryzen 5 4500U inside the Swift 3 puts up a healthy single-core score of 1080 points and 4099 points in multi-core. This makes the laptop 16 faster than the Intel Core i7-10510U in multi-core, which is found in laptops in this range and when compared to a newer Core i5-1135G7, the scores seem very close.
In Cinebench R20, the 4500U comes with a score of 1850 points in multi-core and 448 points in multi-core.
In Cinebench R23, the 4500U again scores a good score of 4030 points in multi-core and 1151 points in single-core.
In PCMark 10, you have a healthy score of 4195 points, which is good enough for a budget laptop that is meant for daily work and normal usage.
In CPU-Z benchmark also the Ryzen 5 4500U puts up a score of 453.1 points in single-core and 3108 points in multi-core, adequate for basic work and light productivity.
Acer has optimized the laptop to be used mostly for basic work and save battery life, even at 25W with performance mode on. The laptop hardly reaches or sustains the peak clock speeds, which is a disadvantage of Renoir but that hardly matters if you are not pushing the APU to its peak everyday.
With the integrated Vega 6 iGPU clocked at 1500 MHz, you can handle most of the graphical with ease, better than an MX230 dedicated GPU, also can handle casual 1080p gaming at low settings. The laptop also features a faster 8GB LDRR4 RAM which is great for a Ryzen system with integrated Vega graphics.
Also, it comes with fast 512 GB PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD for faster boot speeds and overall performance. The Hynix SSD inside does have some good speeds, not the fastest, but at this price, the NVMe SSD inside it goes up to 2278 MB/s while read and 1061 MB/s during write.
Upgradability and Cooling
Talking of RAM, the 8GB LDRR4 RAM is slaughtered onto the motherboard and you cannot upgrade it. However, you do have an extra NVMe slot for a future storage upgrade and as you see, Acer has put in a lot of effort to keep the laptop cool and quiet, ideal for everyday use.
Connectivity
For connectivity, it’s great to see Acer including Wi-Fi 6 AX200 support and Bluetooth 5.0. The Wi-Fi 6 on the laptop too performs really well to handle heavy downloads at consistent speeds and stays connected to the Wi-Fi always and switches between network intelligently.
The Bluetooth 5.0 on this laptop works well, you can connect multiple devices easily to the laptop be it headphones, Bluetooth keyboards or mouse. Using earbuds paired with laptop is a great experience while answering calls and video conferences.
For ports, we have an HDMI port, 1x USB Type-C port with DC-in, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 port with power-off charging, 1x USB 2.0 port.
Gaming
Obviously, this is not a gaming laptop but as we know, the integrated Vega graphics can help you to do basic gaming. So, you can easily play any title on it with 720p graphics, and the graphics performance can be improved when you upgrade your RAM.
In games like FIFA 21, CS GO, GTA V, you get 50-60FPS at 1080p, which is great for casual gaming on-the-go. eSports titles are great as you get good framerates and you can play any new triple-A title at lowest 720p settings.
Audio & Webcam
You have stereo speakers with Acer’s proprietary software that is fairly loud, not very loud, but listening to songs or watching movies is adequate. The headphone jack also provides a good quality output and can be further tuned with DTS Audio Processing software.
The 720p webcam, however, is not the best that you can expect for its price and it could have been a bit better, it is just ok for video calls.
Battery Life
The Swift 3 features a 48 Wh 3-cell Li-ion battery on the battery front, which, according to Acer, shall last up to 12 hours, which might surprise you, but yes, these AMD Zen 2 based APUs are very efficient. The 7nm goodness is reflected in both its performance and power consumption.
In real-world, the laptop gives a good battery life of an average of over 8 hours and sometimes you can stretch to even 10+ hours. This kind of battery life is just unimaginable at this price, even the Asus VivoBook Flip 14 with Ryzen 7 4700U doesn’t give this kind of battery life, kudos to AMD for making such efficient chips.
Keyboard & Trackpad
The Acer Swift 3 comes with full-size FineTip backlit keyboard, and at this price, many manufacturers skip the backlighting. The strength of the light is great, but there’s no option to control it, which is why when you keep it on at night, it drains a lot of battery. There’s a Fingerprint Reader for security, and it works most of the time perfectly.
The keyboard has a fair amount of key travel, and I like the clicky feel of it, a great keyboard overall to type upon. The trackpad is not the largest but still accurate enough for daily usage or work, but it is better to use a dedicated mouse.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Great overall performance with Ryzen 4000 APUs
- Very thin and lightweight
- Great battery life with fast charging
- Good connectivity & Audio
- Stays quiet & easy to carry
- Decent trackpad and keyboard
- Comes with a lot of good software licenses for free
Cons:
- Poor webcam
- Peak brightness is low
- Not very colour accurate display
- No upgradeable RAM slot
- You get a few useless applications pre-installed
Verdict
The Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 5 4500U has not aged though its a 2020 laptop and whether it is work or normal day-to-day usage, at ₹ 60k, this is a great one. With 6 Zen 2 cores inside it, you get superior performance along with superb efficiency, and the battery life is indeed the best at this price range.
Obviously, everything has its good and bad, so even though it has some bloatware installed, you have Office Home and Student 2019 license along with 100GB Dropbox storage for a year. On the connectivity front, you have Wi-Fi 6 and all the necessary ports.
Also, Acer Swift 3 is a right choice for travellers who need a thin and light laptop without worrying about the battery life, mostly with one full charge you are suitable for the day, or even a half an hour charge gives 4 hours of battery life.
Overall this is a great mid-range laptop with the powerful AMD Ryzen 5 4500U, decent display, and long battery life. This laptop can do the job for many people who want a good budget laptop, and it’s much better than the Core i5 options in this price range.
Buy from here: https://amzn.to/3gZvPof, Note: The laptop gets discounted to ₹ 56k on Amazon during sales and at that price, you cannot ask for better.
