Acer Swift 3X i7
Intel is taking on Nvidia with its own discrete Iris Xe Max mobile GPU processor, but is it just pulling a swift one on Acer’s debut Ultrabook?
The headline feature of Acer’s new Swift 3x is undoubtedly the fact that it features Intel’s new discrete GPU – the Iris Xe Max Graphics – which can supposedly work in conjunction with the integrated GPU to deliver even better graphical performance. Intel has stressed that the discrete Xe Max Graphics was not designed for gaming, but is instead optimised for things like image rendering, AI processing and media encoding.
Despite this performance focus, there only seems to be Swift 3x configurations available with 8GB of RAM, which seems like a bit of a strange decision for a device looking to appeal to people wanting more bandwidth for creative tasks.
The Swift 3x is available exclusively through Harvey Norman as either an i7 with a 1T SSD, or a Core i5 model, with a 512GB SSD. The i5 goes for $1,199 and the i7 is usually priced at a hundred dollars more, but we saw the i7 Swift 3x on sale for just $1,098, at the time of writing. Whether it was on sale or not, the i7 is much better value than the i5 version, but if you can get it on sale the i7 is amazing value .
The 14-inch screen is 1080p and covers the full sRGB spectrum, so it’s perfectly fine for this kind of device, but it’s worth noting that it won’t offer the vibrancy or clarity of Ultrabooks with OLED panels, HDR screens or higher resolution displays. The lack of a wider colour gamut is another perplexing omission for something pitching itself as a device for creatives.
The keyboard and trackpad don’t have any obvious downfalls and while the interface options could be considered a little dated these days, with relics like a dedicated power slot, there is at least one Thunderbolt port and the HDMI cable will appeal to those who aren’t already committed to the USB Type-C revolution.
Considering our reservations about the under-gunned RAM allocation, we were forced to eat our words after looking at the performance of this device, particularly in rendering and encoding. The cynic in us initially thought that Intel designed the Iris Xe Max for ‘benchmark beating’, but it seems to be versatile enough to mean this power is seen in real world uses.
In media encoding and image rendering the Swift 3x was between 20 percent and 86 percent better than the average of all the 11th generation Intel Evo laptops we have on file and was 17.6 percent faster than the fastest Evo device we’ve tested. And while it was on par with the average Evo device in lighter games, it scored up to 30 percent better framerates in more demanding games like Metro: Exodus, netting 43fps on Low 1080p settings.
The only real downside of the Swift 3x was battery life, which lasted only three hours and 27 minutes in PCMark 10 Home office Battery benchmarks and even less in 1080p movie playback. Clearly there’s some GPU power optimisation kinks that need to be ironed out by Intel, but since it’s such a new processor that’ll hopefully be fixed soon through software updates.
An interesting new configuration for creative professionals on a tight budget.