Acer Swift 7: an efficient ultraportable

Construction

The design of the Swift 7 is very "premium" and displays an entirely aluminum chassis very well finished and bi-color: an entirely black upper part and an area around the keyboard much more golden or "champagne". The mixture is quite successful and the whole remains ultimately quite discreet. We regret, however, the very visible gap between the screen and the lower part of the chassis as well as the imposing frame around the screen which affects the design of the whole. On this point, Acer still has efforts to provide to reach the level of competition (HP Specter X360, Asus Zenbook 3 and Dell XPS 13, in particular).

The keyboard offers keys well spaced, maybe even a little too much, especially since their format is quite small. If the strike remains pleasant, thanks in particular to a fairly long race, it takes time to adapt to avoid mistakes. Another notable defect: the absence of backlighting, which is clearly a stain on an ultraportable that wants to be high-end.

The touchpad is very wide and looks very similar to that of the HP Specter 13, so much so that we find the same silver border all around. But no matter the lack of inspiration, since it is very pleasant to use and remarkably precise.

On the connection side, like many of its little comrades already mentioned in this text, the Swift 7 is sleek: two USB Type-C ports, a combo jack, and that's it. Charging is therefore done by USB, but the laptop is sold accompanied by a USB Type-C to USB 3 adapter, which is always good to take.

We note the very good heat management of the chassis, since it does not exceed 41.2 ° C at the front and 44.2 ° C below (by running the Unigine Heaven benchmark for about 1 hour). The total absence of noise - the processor does not have a fan - is also very significant.

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Screen

The Swift 7 offers a brilliant 13.3-inch IPS screen in Full HD (1920 x 1080) and protected by Gorilla Glass. It is a very pleasant format, both for work and for entertainment.

Once our traditional probe is applied to this slab, we obtain particularly good results. The maximum brightness is 370 cd / m² and the contrast ratio rises to 960: 1. Quite high figures for this type of screen, which allow to enjoy an excellent readability.

delta color E = 4 gamma 2.3 temperature 6860 K

The colorimetry is very well controlled: there is a Delta E (difference between the actual colors and the colors displayed, considered to be very good below 3) close to excellence, since it does not exceed 4, thus that a color temperature which rises to 6860 K. The rendering is therefore faithful and balanced (close to the standard located at 6500 K). Finally, the gamma curve is stable, but it tends to drop slightly at the end of the race, a sign of a fairly well defined gray gradient, but with very slightly burnt white.

Despite these few small faults, the screen of the Swift 7 surprises us very pleasantly. Acer offers here a very well calibrated, bright and well contrasted panel.

The configuration tested:

The configuration received in test includes an Intel Core i5-7Y54 processor, 8 GB of RAM in LPDDR3, an Intel Graphics HD 615 chipset and a 256 GB SSD.

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Performances

End of 2016 requires, an Intel processor Kaby Lake generation that equips this Swift 7. It is more precisely a Core i5-7Y54, CPU very low consumption and devoid of ventilation system, equipped with two cores and displaying frequencies between 1.2 and 3.2 GHz in Turbo mode. This new processor takes over from the Core m5 of the Skylake generation.

Our performance index, based on a series of benchmarks (file compression, audio and video conversion, photo editing, etc.) is quite high and very similar to a laptop with a Core i5 -6200U of previous generation. The gap with the Core m5 Skylake is also widening.

In practice, the Swift 7 is therefore a very versatile machine and gives access to a wide variety of uses in excellent conditions. You may find it a bit difficult to edit video, but it will do just fine as a portable production tool.

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Games

This kind of ultraportable PC has never really been gifted for video games and this is not about to change with the Swift 7. It is equipped with an iGPU Intel HD Graphics 615, which remains far too limited run 3D games that are a bit greedy. It is however more comfortable on titles in 2D or running with a much older 3D engine.

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Mobility / Autonomy

With its 9.98 mm thickness and its weight of 1.13 kg, the Swift 7 is one of the thinnest and lightest ultraportables on the market and is positioned as a competitor to the MacBook, Asus ZenBook 3 and HP Specter 13. It is therefore very transportable.

Autonomy side, the balance sheet is a little less exciting and the Swift 7 has a hard time competing with the notebooks mentioned above. Our reading test under Netflix (Chrome, brightness at 200 cd / m², headphones plugged in) thus ran for 4:20, while the best ultraportables easily go up to 7 or 8 hours. In practice, it is still possible to use it for 6 good hours as part of a more versatile use and playing on the brightness and energy saving.

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Audio

The audio part is, as very often on this type of laptop, of very variable quality depending on whether you use the headphone output or the speakers. The headphone output is thus of fairly good quality, with a low distortion rate (0.01%) and good output power (150 mVrms). The entire sound spectrum is very well reproduced.

The speakers deliver a fairly limited power and largely ignore the bass and treble (graphic above). These are the mediums and highs that are best represented, with a good emphasis on the voice.

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Conclusion

By giving in to the fashion of "ultra-ultra-portability", Acer is classic and efficient, but struggles a little to stand out from the competition. The Swift 7 is indeed very light and very thin, offers a very good screen, a satisfactory finish as well as a latest generation low-consumption processor. But it sins by a somewhat tight autonomy, as well as a non-backlit keyboard with keys that are too small. There is still an attractive laptop, with an attractive price / quality ratio.

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