Acer’s Swift X is an interesting laptop. From the outside, it doesn’t look like much — a simple, thin notebook with some fun lid colours. But glance at the specs sheet and suddenly the Swift X could be a do-it-all laptop you’d be happy to spend money on.
I say that because the Swift X, despite weighing only 3.1 pounds (about as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro), can be equipped with a 12-core Intel 12th Gen CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, two PCIe slots for up to 1TB of storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics card. Provided it doesn’t overheat, that’s enough power to run most demanding programs and even play modern games (at lower graphics settings) at decent frame rates.
While the aluminium-built Swift X is lightweight, it isn’t exactly thin at 0.7 inches. Also, Acer also didn’t give us any battery life ratings, which has me worried given its discrete GPU and high-res 14-inch, 2240 x 1400-pixel 16:10 display.
Things get even more interesting with the new 16-inch version, which is powered by 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs and discrete Intel Arc graphics. Intel hasn’t said much about its high-end discrete graphics since teasing them last year. We’ve reached out to find out more, but for now, all we know is that the graphics will support mesh shading, variable-rate shading, video upscaling, real-time ray tracing, and an AI-accelerated super sampling technique similar to Nvidia’s DLSS.
Otherwise, the 16-inch model shares the same specs as its smaller sibling, down to display resolution and the rather limited 16GB of RAM. At 0.7 inches and 2 kg, the Swift X 16 remains relatively portable, though we’ll need to see how the 59Wh battery — the same used in the 14-inch version — holds up when you’re away from the outlet.
Acer didn’t provide pricing or availability for the Swift X, and I assume the laptop maker is waiting on Intel to publically announce the availability of its upcoming discrete graphics solutions before doing so.