Acer Swift X 16 OLED (2024) Review

Verdict

Fast, with a very good OLED screen and a price that undercuts the big creative names, the Acer is an ideal alternative – but be aware of its shortcomings too.

Introduction

As the name suggests, the Acer Swift X 16 OLED (SFX16-61G) tries to excel in two areas: speed and display, and with a high-end AMD CPU and OLED panel, it initially impresses but it takes more than that to convince creatives and power users in 2024, especially when the laptop has several strong rivals.

The Huawei MateBook D16 2024 deploys a high-end Intel Core i9-13900H processor for a three-figure price, and the Acer Swift Go 16 hovers around $1000/£1000 for a Core i7 model.

In contrast, the Acer Swift X 16 OLED costs $1,599/£1,499, with prices frequently dipping to $1,199/£1,199 in sales. Even at the discounted price, this notebook needs to impress.

Design and keyboard

• Good connectivity and build quality
• Underwhelming aesthetic and mediocre dimensions
• The keyboard is comfortable but soft

This is one area where form doesn’t really match function. There’s undoubtedly impressive tech inside the Swift, but you wouldn’t know that from the outside.

It’s not ugly, and the build quality is excellent, but it also doesn’t do much to stand out. The aluminium body looks like a hundred other laptops, with its tapered edging, small screen bezels and dotted speaker grille.

If you want a subtle machine, the Acer ticks the box, but the design does nothing to excite, and while the Swift is not bulky or heavy, its 17.9mm body and 1.9kg weight mean it’s a bit bigger than its rivals.

Connectivity is reasonable. On the left side, there are two USB-C 4 ports and a headphone jack, and on the right you’ll find two full-size USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, an HDMI output and a microSD slot. Internally there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

Half-way down the left-hand side, there’s a power connector. While that positioning is irritating, it does mean you don’t have to charge using one of the USB-C ports.

There are some other negatives: AMD internals mean no Thunderbolt, and while the power button includes a fingerprint reader there’s no biometric option on the 1080p webcam. The speakers are fine but a bit quiet and tinny, and only suitable for casual situations.

The Acer Swift does have Thunderbolt and is equal elsewhere, but one of those USB-C ports is needed for charging. The Huawei falls behind with only one USB-C port, a slower USB 2.0 connection and no card slot.

The keyboard has a numberpad, white backlight and sizeable keys. It’s quiet, consistent and comfortable, too. With that said, its typing action is soft and a bit spongy, so anyone who yearns for the crisper typing of a Dell XPS or Apple MacBook won’t be sated.

The trackpad meanwhile is vast, accurate and supports gestures, so no issues there.

Screen

• The OLED panel is big, bright and bold with excellent colours
• It’s capable of tackling almost every creative task, and it makes media look brilliant
• The most demanding creatives will have to spend more elsewhere

If the design fades into the background, then the display does the opposite. The 3200 x 1600 resolution means pin-sharp imagery, the 16in width ensures plenty of space, and that 16:10 aspect ratio adds vertical real estate.

That’s not all. The 120Hz refresh rate guarantees smooth movement in apps and games, and the OLED technology underneath means perfect black levels and contrast.

On paper then, that’s great and in practice it’s good – but that’s it.

The panel’s brightness level of 406 nits is acceptable for most situations, but sunlight could prove tricky, and while HDR raises that level to 572 nits, that’s not impressive for HDR.

The OLED renders 100% of the sRGB gamut at 170% volume and produces 98.9% of the DCI-P3 colour space and 95.1% of the Adobe RGB space. Those figures are good and combine with the OLED screen to create bold, bright colours.

However, that 95.1% figure in the Adobe RGB space isn’t quite good enough to sate the most demanding creatives, who need perfect Adobe reproduction, and the Delta E of 3.12 is suitable for everyday creative workloads but not entirely accurate enough for high-end professional workloads. There are also no options to switch to alternative colour profiles.

This is not a bad screen at all – it’s bold and punchy and has excellent contrast and colours. It’s great for most creative workloads and miles better than the panels inside either rival but while it’s easily good enough for most creative situations, it doesn’t quite have the brightness or accuracy to handle every colour-based task you could throw at it.

Performance

• The AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS is a creative powerhouse
• A discreet GPU adds encoding, rendering and gaming ability
• US buyers get an even faster CPU

Creative work needs ample horsepower, and the Swift doesn’t disappoint. The AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor has eight multi-threaded cores that top out at 5.1GHz and it sits alongside 16GB of dual-channel memory and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

Most interestingly, there’s also an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU running at its full power allocation of 100W. It may be the entry-level core in this range, but it’ll outpace any integrated chip.

In Geekbench 6’s single- and multi-core runs it scored 2,478 and 12,177 points: the former is better than any rival, and the latter is about 33% better than the alternative Acer and Asus machines I’ve mentioned. The Core i9-13900H in the Huawei is faster, but not by much.

The AMD chip inside the Swift beats the Huawei’s Intel CPU in PC Mark 10 by about 8%, and the Ryzen processor is a little faster in both Cinebench R23 runs.

It’s a great start, and the GPU doesn’t falter: its Time Spy score of 7657 is twice as quick as any Intel integrated chip. The SSD’s read and write speeds of 6,581MB/s and 4,348MB/s are great for keeping pace with tough apps.

The Acer will blitz through any everyday workloads without complaint, it’ll handle photo- and video-editing, and you can do design and encoding work alongside some esports or light gaming. While fan noise is present if you push the internals, it’s never too loud.

The only negative here is the underside, which gets too hot through prolonged, demanding usage, and the only reason to look elsewhere is if the Intel CPU in the Huawei laptop is a better option for the specific apps you need to run.

If you’re buying in the US then you’re in luck: the Acer’s $1,599 price actually includes a Ryzen 9 7940HS processor with a slight speed boost.

Software

• An uninspiring array of extra apps
• Nothing to excite creatives

The AcerSense app collates Windows’ own power, performance, and update options, and there are a couple of other Acer apps that handle documents, registrations, and audio.

Elsewhere, the taskbar includes pre-installed shortcuts for Booking.com and Dropbox, and McAfee antivirus comes installed and pops up every so often with annoying windows.

Scroll down the app list and you’ll find additions like Evernote, ExpressVPN and games like Forge of Empires.

The Swift’s software loadout is not bad or intrusive, but there’s nothing of particular interest to creatives.

Battery

• Eight and a half hours with undemanding workloads
• You’re unlikely to get half a day of use if you push the internals

In an everyday media playback test with the panel at half brightness, the Acer lasted for eight hours and 33 minutes, but in a PC Mark 10 work test, with the brightness at maximum, the Swift only managed three hours and 28 minutes – a significant drop.

That media figure is about level with the Acer and Asus, but hours short of the Huawei’s twelve-hour lifespan. While the Acer Swift regained a solid 37% of its battery with a thirty-minute charge, you’re only going to get a full day of work from this notebook if you’re sparing with the internals.

If you want to push the hardware with challenging creative work, you’ll be lucky to make it to lunchtime. If you want a full day of creative working with a discreet GPU without plugging in, you’ll have to spend more on a creative powerhouse from the likes of Apple.

Latest deals