hey everybody get slaw inside but we’re taking a look today at another value packed laptop this one from Acer this is their Swift 3 it’s a pretty lightweight 14-inch laptop with a 10th generation Intel chip inside an i5 and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this came in on loan from Acer so we’re done with this it goes back to them all of the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about so the price point on this one is $6.99 pretty reasonable for what you’ll be seeing here so let’s dive into the hardware now we’ve got an i-5 1035 g1 it has 8 gigabytes of ddr4 ram in dual channel configuration but note the RAM is not upgradeable unfortunately so you’re locked in at 8 for life it’s all soldered on the board and there’s no expansion capabilities it does though have a good amount of storage of 512 gigabyte nvm II that is upgradable if you ever need to swap that out not too hard to do you just have to unscrew the bottom here to get at it we’ve got a 14 inch display it’s a 1080p display looks pretty nice but like many mid to low end laptops it’s not all that bright in bright environments I’ve got it turned up all the way right now looks okay but again there are brighter laptops out there I do like though that the hinge on the Acer like many other Acer’s that we’ve looked at goes flat to the desk so if you have an overeager kid or something they’re not going to snap the display off of it the build quality is really nice on this it is a magnesium alloy and as such it is super lightweight 2.6 to pounds or 1.2 kilograms I was surprised by how lightweight this was because we’ve looked at other Swift threes in the past that were plastic and heavier this one really is a step in the right direction there even have all the thin bezel on the display too which looks nice this area here is plastic but the rest of it is all metal there is a little 720p webcam up here nothing spectacular but you do have that kind of hidden up there at the top so that’s good and the keyboard on the new Acer here feels pretty good to me typically with Acer keyboards I’ve found
that their keys are smaller than the competitions are these keys are not much bigger than prior Acer devices but I think they’re spaced apart better so I’m finding it’s easier to type on it and as such I didn’t have to really get used to the keyboard at all so that was good to see as you can also see here it is a backlit keyboard and you have some degree of control over how bright the keyboard is with this key right here so you have a couple of levels of brightness I wasn’t crazy about the trackpad though it feels a little on the cheap side to me especially given how nice the laptop feels overall this one component it wasn’t doing much for me it tracks okay it seems to work just fine but it just doesn’t feel as premium as the rest of the package does it’s a little spongy to me but otherwise the input on the device is definitely an improvement over prior ones by the way this is not a touch display so you’ll be using that trackpad quite a bit now for ports we’ve got a surprise on this one you’ve got your power on here of course and your HDMI out a full size USB 3 but you also have a Thunderbolt 3 port here on the left hand side this of course is also compatible with USB C devices this is a full service port so you can power the laptop through it as well get video out and of course connect up data devices and Thunderbolt 3 devices to it as well so if you wanted to connect up an external GPU you could plug it right into the port there and be off and running with it so I was really pleased to see that on a sub $1000 laptop and if you have a dock or something you can run everything off a single cable and just leave the power cord in your bag for travel if you wanted to do that on the other side we’ve got a full headphone jack oddly a USB 2.0 port here which is funny to see on a modern laptop
and we’ve got a Kensington lock here for locking it down on a desk the speakers are downward firing they sound ok for downward firings speakers nothing spectacular but of course it has Bluetooth and the headphone jack so you can plug in better quality speakers this is not a fan ‘less laptop because it is running with a regular I 5 chip the fan though isn’t all that noisy and we’ll talk about some of the thermal performance that we tested on the laptop in a little bit here so all together a pretty nice package I think for the price point it’s really nice to see that Thunderbolt port on there let’s take a look now and see how it performs so let’s kick things off with some web browsing and see how it does with the basics we’ve got Chrome here running and let’s go over to the NASA gov homepage which is a very multimedia rich site as expected this seems to be working pretty nicely here we’re connected to my AC wireless network but this supports Wi-Fi 6 as well which is great one annoyance is that it does have Norton AntiVirus on here that keeps popping up asking you to install things and I’m sure the subscription stuff is gonna pop up soon as well so you might want to take a few minutes just to uninstall some of the bloatware that they put on here sometimes when you pay a reasonable price for a laptop you get hit with pre-installed software that you may not want a little bit earlier we also tested its youtube performance we like to play some of the high frame rate video on it to see how it performs there we were seeing no dropped frames with a 1080p 60 frames per second video running from YouTube so I think all of the Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the other things you might want to watch on here should work fine so a pretty decent web browsing device and a good multimedia device too and on the browser bench or expand
ometer test we got a score of 193 point 3 on version 1.0 of that test and 110 on version 2.0 that puts it very close to a pair of laptops we’ve looked at recently with the i7 variant of this 10th generation intel chip so altogether it’s performing as we expected it to at least with the basics now battery life on this one isn’t the best it’s about 6 to 7 hours and our testing doing the basics like the web browsing we just talked about if you are stressing the processor more with video editing or gaming or something along those lines you will see less battery life and speaking of gaming let’s check out how games run on this thing so let’s begin with fortnight and there we are seeing frame rates between 20 and 40 frames per second at low settings 1080p not spectacular but playable we then booted up rocket League 1080p lowest settings about 45 to 60 frames per second half-life 2 which is an older game that came in at 1080p at a hundred plus frames per second so no problems with the older stuff as is usually the case with these Intel based graphics chipsets and then GTA 5 we were able to boot up I was only though really playable at 720p and there we were getting frame rates between 27 and 50 frames per second depending on what was going on in the scene typically we didn’t see frame rates higher than 40 frames per second while driving and on the 3dmark cloud gate benchmark test we got a score of nine thousand six hundred and sixty-three and that is an improvement over the prior generation I five chips that we’ve looked at but as you’ll see here the current generation i7s do much better and the reason is is that the i7 chips have a better graphics
system built into them than the i5s do there’s actually a real difference now in graphics performance between the two chips in the past we didn’t see that as much now it’s a very big difference so if you are looking to play games on a relatively compact laptop you might want to look at the i7 s over the i-5 because they will perform better but nonetheless we are still seeing an improvement over the prior generation just not as much as what you’ll see going from the prior gen I 7 to a current gen i7 so just keep all that in mind when you’re out shopping and on the 3d mark stress test which measures how well the laptop does under heavy sustained loads we got a score of 97.2% that is a passing grade which means that the laptop is not likely to throttle itself all that much when it’s placed under sustained loads for long periods of time so that’s good for gaming it’s good for video editing you’ll just want to make sure that you keep the events on this clear so it can get good airflow the fan noise wasn’t offensive on this it’ll sir we be there although we’re not finding the fan kicking on all that often it’s really coming on when you are playing games and doing things that are a little bit more strenuous than the basics let’s take a look now and see if it can run Linux alright so we’ve gotten boo to running here on the laptop everything was detected properly including Wi-Fi audio Bluetooth all the basics here seemed to be working just fine and it feels just as snappy here
on Linux as it does on the windows side we’ve been seeing some of these newer Intel based devices do much better with umbuntu and other Linux distributions so I think if you’re looking to play around with Linux you can probably get it done here without too many problems and altogether I think it’s a pretty solid value for what it is reasonably priced nice build quality good performance decent display battery life is so-so but that’s really the only thing I’ve got to complain about on this one and I really like the fact that we’ve got Thunderbolt 3 at this segment of the market now and that’s certainly going to provide a lot of fun things that you can do with these low-cost laptops namely adding that external GPU for better gaming performance for examples so great value definitely worth checking out if you are in the market for a mid-range laptop and that’s going to do it for now until next time this is Lian Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcasts Tom Albrecht Rick astute Oh Chris Allegretto in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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