Acer Swift 3: What Real Users Say About Build Quality

Have they improved their screens at all beyond the 250nit max brightness the past several have been limited to?

As someone who owns an acer swift: it's as terrible as it sounds. Glossy ips and low max brightness aren't a good combo. I will never buy another laptop with 250 nit peak brightness again.

Don't forget that most of those panels are also only 60% sRGB so even if they're calibrated they're utterly useless for any creative work.

Buying a new laptop in 2025 with 8gb of ram is basically like throwing money away. That i5 is never gonna be used to its full potential.

Acer has better specs and most likely better performance. Asus has the nicer screen technology. Either one should be fine but do a fresh install of windows! Bought a laptop from Costco a year ago and the out of the box experience is trash.

Most people don't want to lug around a five pound laptop that gets three hours of battery life and sounds like a jet engine just to go to the café.

More storage and 16 gb ram. 8gb would have been enough a few years ago but I'm always hitting 10gb of ram on my current 12gb laptop.

Baffles me how 8gb of non-upgradable ram on brand new laptops is still acceptable in this day and age. And to pair it with a half-decent cpu no less, what were they smoking when they came up with this?

Acer quality is very spotty. You're better served buying a business-class machine. The build quality is better because they're sold with lengthy warranties, meaning shitty quality would cost the manufacturer money.

Decent smaller laptop for work/school. Unfortunately the RAM is soldered, so you can't upgrade it. The CPU is more than sufficient for those workloads, and is also capable of gaming in 720p/1080p low.

As someone who owns a gaming laptop, I can say they aren't great. They're too heavy/poor battery life to use without being attached to use as a portable all-day laptop.

Machines like the ones on this post are kind of in a limbo where they're lacking for more heavy workloads, yet expensive for a basic machine for browsing the web and such.

Note that this is the i5, whose GPU has 80 Iris Xe cores instead of 96. Apparently it hurts framerate quite a bit, so this is basically a '720p eSports' laptop.

I bought this laptop 2 years ago. The hinge broke just after 14 months. It's held in place by a thin strip of epoxy. No screws or anything like that. Plus you have hot exhaust blowing on it all the time. Please don't buy this.

If your primary use is gaming the AMD one is better. GPU makes more difference than other components for games. If it's a general-purpose machine the Intel one is better IMO — the 16:10 display is far better for productivity.

8GB memory is simply not enough for PC. Probably it's ok for office work but not music production. Save some money and get better CPU and more important more RAM. At least 16Gb.

I have the E15 gen 3 (which is basically the same thing but bigger chassis) — ThinkPad will have better quality, better keyboard, and better battery.

Google says it does not even have a spare sodimm slot to add another stick of ram. You are stuck with the soldered 8gb. Good grief the last time I bought a x86 laptop with 8gb was >10 yrs ago.

Acer's quality is very hit or miss. Even between units of the same model it can be completely different. I had two aspire laptops in the past year and I had to return both of them because they each had their own set of defects.

Good luck, I had almost the exact same laptop (4700U) and it failed right after the warranty expired. Absolutely nothing I could do except buy a new (non-Acer) laptop.

Laptop is really good imo. Can do light gaming. Very good for productivity. Battery life is a downside imo — should bring a power bank alongside the laptop. Keyboard is decent. Would recommend to upgrade ram to 16gb which I plan to do.

These aren't bad machines per se, but for the price, and considering what you have now, I'm quite certain they would be unfitting. The screens will probably be a shock too, not in a good way.

I have the 2021 version of this laptop with the 5800U and 3050 Ti. Can't say enough good things about it. Definitely put 2mm pads on the heatpipe — it will bring down your temps significantly.

I've got 8gb and it technically works, but if you are buying something new please get more. I'm constantly freezing tracks etc.

I didn't use either of them but have tried some Acer keyboards and they were literally trash. You even didn't feel you're typing.

Thinkpad is far superior, build, keyboard and a bit more performance.

Even if they improved the screen, there is no way to know which panel you are getting because most likely it will have multiple panel options. Acer is the worst of them — you don't know what you are getting.

Nope. I ended up getting an Acer Swift X instead. Though I did have the same option to get an i5-1240p or an i7-1260p and went with the i5 variant.

Mrs owns a swift and I have to say I think the quality and performance are both excellent. Maybe not apple levels, but if you want windows you can do far worse than the swift, just make sure you spec it with enough ram as can't be upgraded.

If I've learned something from my 20 years of experience in IT is run away from Acer! They have a nasty habit of breaking right after warranty period… I guess they have a knack for that…

Get what you pay for and use it for its intended purpose and they usually last quite awhile. I've got several acers at clients offices that are used professionally and have been alive for 4+ years. Overheating will destroy them just like any other brand.

Well that's the bad part 8gig single channel soldered to mobo and no empty slot — acer's justification for this weight.

Holy shit, that's a brilliant spec. Though I suggest you upgrade your ram to 16gb. Congratulations!!

Aren't those notebooks like soldered in ram. Why only 8 gigs of ram but Ryzen 7. Whatever congrats I hope you have fun using it. It's a great budget device for having aluminium chassis.

Congrats and enjoy! I had the Swift 3 2018 version and it was great.

My laptop has held up great in the 2 years I've owned it. The RAM usually isn't upgradeable so I'd try to go with 16gb ram.

As an Acer Swift laptop user, my jaw dropped when I saw that price. It's seriously a scam. Acer Swift series laptop has seriously poor quality overall comparing to other brands on the market.

Screen, keyboard, and battery life are all better on the ZenBook than the Swift.

I had an old chonky laptop by Acer that I gave to my mom, it still works like new to this day. I'm convinced that Acer still makes great laptops like that, but I don't have any faith in their mid to high end ones.

It's a newer version of my laptop! I have the 2020 version with a Ryzen 5 4500U, good laptop but I might upgrade to a beefier machine.