Swift 5 i5 Swift 5 i7 In summary The Swift 5 is Acer’s first laptop with Intel Tiger Lake processor and it shows excellent performance especially during moderate use. With long-term load, a CPU with more cores is faster. The housing is made of sturdy metal and yet very light, weighing about one kilogram. The battery life is about fourteen hours while browsing, but with a heavy load it only remains about four hours. The screen has good brightness and contrast, but it could be better calibrated and we also miss a card reader. The Swift 5 is one of the first laptops with a Tiger Lake processor, but you seem to be paying for that too, as the price has gone up compared to its predecessor.

In summary The Swift 5 is Acer’s first laptop with Intel Tiger Lake processor and it shows excellent performance especially during moderate use. With long-term load, a CPU with more cores is faster. The housing is made of sturdy metal and yet very light, weighing about one kilogram. The battery life is about fourteen hours while browsing, but with a heavy load it only remains about four hours. The screen has good brightness and contrast, but could be better calibrated and we also miss a card reader.

When Intel launched its new 15 W-chips for laptops, we actually already knew a lot about it. Some specifications and benchmarks had already been leaked and already in June Acer announced its new Swift 5 series with an ‘Intel processor of the next generation’. That could really only be one, and now Acer is one of the first manufacturers to have a laptop with Intel’s Core processor of the eleventh generation, also known as Tiger Lake, on the shelves. How big is the step from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake and should AMD start to worry? In this review, we take a look at the Swift 5 with Core i5 – 1135 G7- and i7 – 1165 G7 processor.

So the laptop in question is an Acer Swift 5 and the Swift series includes the lighter and thinner alternatives to the brand’s well-known Aspire model range. The Swift 5 is characterized, among other things, because the laptop weighs no more than a kilogram. The latest Swift 5 can be recognized by the ’55’ code in the type name and is therefore the successor to the ’54 ‘. The key features of the 55 are its low weight, Intel Evo certification and anti-microbial display, according to Acer. Let’s start with that screen and the antimicrobial coating. That sounds very interesting during a pandemic and it is to some extent. The coating contains silver ions, which can kill microbes, including bacteria. That is not a new technique, by the way; Samsung used the same coating on its NC 10 – netbook in 2008. With the Swift 5, that coating is on the touchscreen, and certainly if different users use the laptop, you spread fewer microbes than on a normal touchscreen. However, SARS-CoV-2 is a virus and not a microbe. Although there are indications that the silver ions are also effective against virus particles, Corning and Acer do not give any guarantees that they will also work against the corona virus and that does not make the touchscreen a ‘corona killer’.

With the versions that are delivered at the time of writing, it stops there, but there is also a Swift 5 with type number 55 TA, where the entire case, keyboard and touchpad have the antimicrobial coating. It is not yet clear whether this version will also be sold in the Netherlands and Belgium.

The antimicrobial glass plate on the screen is made by Corning , known for its sturdy Gorilla Glass, and that is also applied to this laptop. That is not unique either, because manufacturers such as HP, Dell and Lenovo also use the firmer glass on their laptops and tablets. Whether it is due to the Gorilla Glass or not, the screen construction of the Swift 5 feels quite sturdy and we sometimes see that differently with laptops with narrow screen edges. At the top of the screen is the webcam, with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, without facial recognition. Biometric login is possible, but with a fingerprint scanner, which is located under the keyboard.

The back of the screen and the rest of the housing are made of an alloy of aluminum, lithium and magnesium. Acer already used these metals in earlier Swift 5 models. The advantage of this is that it is very light and the Swift 5 weighs just over a kilogram on our scales. In addition, the housing feels sturdy, which is not the case with every laptop. If you really hammer hard on the keys, you will see the housing bounce, but in normal practice that will not happen. The housing of the Swift 5 is incidentally ‘mist green’, which is a subtle color green. In low light, the case appears gray, but in the right light it turns green and while taste is indisputable, we think green looks good on the Swift. The combination with the yellow-orange print of the keys is less successful, but it is nice that Acer tries a different color on the housing.

There is also an Intel Evo sticker on the case, which means that the Swift 5 meets a number of Intel requirements. Currently Evo certification is only for laptops with an Intel 11th generation processor, with at least 8GB of memory and one 256 GB -ssd. Intel also sets requirements for battery life, the speed with which the laptop comes out of standby, the quality of the microphone and even the connections. An Evo laptop must have Thunderbolt 4, and that connector is on the left side of the Swift 5 enclosure. In addition, there is a regular USB-A connection at 5Gbit / s and an HDMI 2.0 connection. You can charge the laptop via USB-C, but Acer supplies a standard charger with the connection next to the HDMI port. On the right side is a second USB-A connection that also works at 5Gbit / s, with a jack connection for headphones next to it. Acer already omitted the card reader on the previous generation Swift 5 and unfortunately it has not been returned to the latest version.

Keyboard and touchpad The Swift 5’s keys are made of flat plastic and have a backlight with two modes: on and off . Yet that lighting is not easily too bright in a dark environment, so you do not miss a less bright setting. In terms of typing comfort, the keyboard is not the kind that provides for a lot of travel, although we sometimes see it worse on thin laptops.

Compared to other 14 “- laptops, the actuation point of the stop is approximately in the same place and we arrive at a total key travel of 1.3mm To get an idea of ​​the key travel: the most travel we have measured so far was on the ThinkPad E 490, while the least travel was measured on the MacBook Pro with Butterfly keyboard, so the Swift 5 is somewhere in between and is therefore quite average in that respect.

The touchpad does its job well on its own, but feels somewhat cheap. The surface appears to be made of plastic rather than glass, as on more expensive laptops, and the mouse button feels like Acer had the same switch used as in Aspire laptops from 300 euro.