Acer Swift 3 SF316 Review – A 16 inch ‘Ultrabook’

By Faryad On Nov 14, 2021

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Acer offers a kind of 16″ Ultrabook for 850 euros. With 1645 grams, it is a relatively light laptop that is equipped with a 35W Intel processor. This makes the Swift smoother than most Intel chips in Ultrabooks with a 15W TDP However, there are AMD laptops that are a lot smoother, and that applies to more parts in the Swift 3. The screen and battery life are not bad, but also not special and the laptop does not distinguish itself by, for example, extensive upgrade options. relatively lightweight with the tdp makes this laptop distinctive, but we wonder if that’s enough to attract buyers.

Pros

Relatively low weight
35W Intel processor

Cons

Tight numeric keypad
Speakers are quite weak
No card reader

You may have never noticed, but laptops with an ‘inefficient’ processor without an external video card are rare. A fast processor, that includes a fast video card, people seem to think. Laptops with a fast processor are therefore automatically heavy. That extra video card doesn’t even add that much weight, but the whole thing has to be cooled and extra aluminum and copper is needed for that. It can of course also be different, especially now that the internal GPU of the Intel processors in particular is no longer inferior to the slower individual Nvidia cards. Acer is a manufacturer that does things differently, with the Swift 3 SF316, which is equipped with an 11th-generation Core i5 processor with a TDP of 35 watts.

Acer has been selling the Swift 3 series in various guises for years and those laptops usually have screen diagonals of 13.3 and 14″. The Swift laptops differ from Acer’s ‘regular’ Aspire laptops by their relatively thin and light housing and with the SF316 – it’s in the name – makes Acer a foray into 16″. For a laptop with such a screen diagonal, the SF316 is quite compact and the weight of 1645 grams is also not that bad. The SF316, therefore, seems to be a kind of faster and larger Ultrabook and in this review we see whether it really is.

If we want to put the SF316 along the Ultrabook bar, we start with looking at the outside of the laptop. You can expect a sturdy housing from an Ultrabook and the Swift 3 largely lives up to that. Only the B-cover, so the part that frames the screen, is made of plastic and the rest is a metal housing. It feels quite sturdy, as you would expect from a laptop of 850 euros. You can press parts of the housing, for example above the F8 key, but that is not dramatic and you clearly notice the difference with a laptop of roughly 500 euros.

You also see that pressing the housing somewhat happens when you work on the keyboard and that is a shame. The keyboard has a numeric keypad on the right, which has rather narrow buttons. As far as we’re concerned, Acer would have been better off choosing to mount a real keypad, with normal-sized buttons, or omit the block. Then perhaps speakers could have been mounted on either side of the keyboard, because they are now at the bottom and produce relatively little sound; enough in a quiet room, but not when there is a lot of noise.

Acer supplies a regular charger with the SF316, but the laptop can also be charged via USB-C. That port also has support for Thunderbolt 4 and can therefore be used to connect external screens. That is also possible on the HDMI 2.0 connection, which is next to it. Furthermore, USB-A connections have been placed on both sides and that’s it. We would have liked to have seen a card reader, but it is missing.

Benchmarks

We run some benchmarks to see how fast the 11300H processor in the Swift 3 is. We do this to start with using Cinebench, which only looks at the speed of the cpu, and with 3DMark, which looks at cpu and gpu.

You can view the performance in Cinebench Multi in two ways. On the one hand, they are better than those of the LG Gram 16 and Acer Swift 5. Just like the SF316, these laptops have a quad-core Intel Tiger Lake processor, but with a TDP of 15 watts. In this relatively short benchmark, the SF316 is already fifteen percent faster. In Cinebench Single, the SF316 also stands out above other laptops with AMD processors, because the performance on a single core in Cinebench is good. However, the AMD processor-powered laptops have more cores, six for the 5600U and eight for the 5800H, giving them a significant advantage in situations where more than four cores can be used. The Intel processor in the ASUS FX506 also has eight cores and is therefore also faster than the quad-core in the Acer in many situations. That processor does have a higher TDP of 45 watts. Perhaps the cooling of the Acer is not up to it and that is why the 35W Intel processor was chosen.

Graphically, the Intel Xe GPU in the 11300H is not bad. With 80 execution units, it is of course somewhat slower than other Intel Xe GPUs with 96 execution units, but smoother than the AMD Vega alternatives. The speed of the Intel Xe is nowhere near that of a separate video card, such as a GTX 1650. We understand that Acer has not opted for that, because that also makes the laptop heavier and the nice thing about the SF316 is its low weight.

In Cinebench and 3DMark we were not yet impressed by the performance of the 11300H processor. Because the processor is made to sustain its consumption of 35W for a long time, we expect to see that the processor makes the difference in longer-lasting benchmarks such as Blender and Da Vinci.

In Blender, we already see that the processor does not throttle much under prolonged load. We didn’t expect that either, because Acer seems to have done the cooling well. The CPU is cooled by means of two fans and a wide grille on the screen side of the laptop ensures that the warm air can be discharged. The i5 processor in Resolve is therefore faster than a number of other Tiger Lake chips with TDPs of 15W. At the same time, the laptop is slower than AMD Ryzen laptops with 15W processors with six and eight cores. Although there is little throttling and the CPU continues to run at a high clock speed for a long time thanks to its high TDP, you can’t really keep up with four cores these days, even if you consider the relatively low price of the Swift 3. The 14″ IdeaPad 5 Pro costs the same.

Image quality

Acer has opted for a 16″ panel with the Swift 3, and we see this unusual size more and more often. Usually it concerns 16:10 panels with a high resolution, such as 2560×1600 pixels, but Acer has not opted for that. The Swift 3 has an old-fashioned 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, the screen has a matte finish and, as you would expect in this price range, uses an IPS panel.

The screen looks good at first glance, but when measured with our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and Calman software, you can see that the maximum brightness does not match the toppers we tested before. Indoors, the 300cd/m² is enough, but there shouldn’t be too much ambient light. Fortunately, the screen can display the full sRGB color space. In this price range of 850 euros, that is not obvious.

The calibration of the screen is quite good. The average color temperature is 6492 Kelvin, close to the perfect 6504 Kelvin, so the gray balance seems fine. However, the color green, which is not included in the color temperature, remains a bit behind. As a result, for example, faces can be displayed a bit ‘pinker’ than intended and that results in an ΔE deviation of 5.6. We prefer to see that number below 3 and the connoisseurs will get this screen below that by means of calibration. If we look purely at the representation of the primary and secondary colors, the deviation is low enough. In short, it is certainly not a bad screen, but there are also no points that make it special, such as a high resolution or brightness.

Battery life

So the screen is not special and if we look at the battery life, we get the same feeling. The battery has a capacity of 56Wh and is therefore the same size as the battery in the 14″ Swift 5. In the 16″ housing 3 there is enough space for a larger battery, but Acer has not opted for that, perhaps because of costs or save weight.

This means that the battery life of ten and a half hours while browsing is not bad at all. LG demonstrates with the battery life of the Gram 16, however, what you can get if you opt for a larger battery. The LG also shows a longer battery life in the PCMark test, in which the load is a lot heavier than in the browse test. The Swift 3 is a lot smoother in that battery test, judging by the higher score.

Finally, we open the laptop to see if there is anything to upgrade. Although there is still a lot of space to the left of the battery, it is not used for a second M.2 slot. The Lpddr4x memory is not replaceable or upgradeable and the only thing you can change about the hardware is the ssd, which is placed to the right of the battery.

Conclusion

It looked good on paper: a fast processor in a relatively thin and light laptop with 16″ screen. Ideal for those who travel a lot, and want more speed and a larger screen than the standard 13″ and 14″ laptops In practice, the 16″ Swift 3 doesn’t seem to excel at anything. The processor is quite smooth and is faster than 15W Tiger Lake laptops due to its higher TDP, but is slower than AMD processors with more cores, even if those AMD chips have a lower TDP of 15W.

The screen is nice and large with a diagonal of 16 “, although it does not feel bulky, thanks to the narrow screen edges. It is a ‘normal’ full-HD panel and the image quality is okay, but it also doesn’t excel at anything. battery life is fine for a 16″ laptop, but not exceptional either. As far as upgrades are concerned, there is also nothing special to report. As with many Ultrabooks, you can upgrade the SSD, but there’s no such thing as removable memory or space for a second SSD.

So the 16″ Swift 3 is ‘just good’, but there is a lot of competition. For example, if you spend five bucks more, you already have a 16” with smoother hardware and a higher screen resolution in the form of the IdeaPad 5 pro . If you really want a low weight, then the 1.2-kilogram LG Gram 16 is more interesting, although that laptop is much more expensive. The Swift 3 distinguishes itself by its weight of 1645 grams, making it the lightest 16 “laptop under 1500 euros. We wonder whether that is decisive for purchasing this laptop.