Desire a good, massive laptop computer at an obtainable value? The Acer Swift Edge 16 doesn’t test off all of the bins, nevertheless it has sufficient going for it to earn a cautious advice for many customers available in the market for one thing extra spacious and highly effective than the standard ultralight Windows laptop.
Whereas Acer hasn’t at all times been a design chief, the chassis right here seems nice—a black monolith that’s simply 18 millimeters thick (with ft) and weighs 2.7 kilos. Nevertheless it’s the display that’s the standout, or a minimum of it’s presupposed to be: 16 inches—no touchscreen, take observe—with an expansive 3,200 x 2,000-pixel decision. That’s a 16:10 facet ratio in case you’re not good at math. The ultra-glossy OLED display is perhaps divisive—it’s so shiny that it could actually successfully double as a mirror whether or not it’s off or on—however its brightness rests on the excessive facet (not eye-searingly brilliant), and it received’t draw any complaints.
{Photograph}: Acer
That 16-inch measurement means the chassis has sufficient room for a keyboard that includes a barely squished numeric keypad in addition to a spacious, responsive touchpad. The keyboard motion is sadly somewhat mushy. Sustained touch-typing simply doesn’t really feel all that nice.
On the efficiency entrance, you’re getting a barely combined bag, however principally an excellent deal throughout the board. Powered by a 3.3-GHz AMD Ryzen 7 7840U CPU and its companion Radeon 780M built-in graphics with 16 GB of RAM, benchmark scores aren’t blow-the-doors-off nice, however they’re adequate to place it inside putting distance of higher-end machines.
Usually apps, scores are virtually on par with laptops just like the Lenovo Slim Pro 9i, and whereas graphics-related efficiency is predictably a lot much less spectacular than on machines with a discrete graphics card, there’s sufficient of a lift over lower-end units to be noticeable. It is attainable to take pleasure in some mild gaming, although it is not at all times a panoramic expertise. Surprisingly, I achieved robust scores on the Cinebench benchmark, a rendering-based take a look at that tends to emphasize GPUs fairly arduous. I by no means encountered any points with stability, although sometimes there was some odd, severe lag that lasted a number of seconds earlier than apps launched.
Battery life is strong, providing greater than eight and a half hours of run time on a full-screen YouTube playback take a look at. When plugged in, I discovered that the Swift’s fan tends to run fairly a bit throughout even reasonable masses, however the fan is quiet, so it’s not a lot of a nuisance. On the flip facet, the Swift’s audio system are mushy and in determined want of a lift. Even at max quantity, I may barely make out the dialog in a film with the laptop computer sitting simply 3 ft away.
{Photograph}: Acer
Enlargement ports are pretty commonplace, together with two full-size USB-A ports, two USB-C ports (each assist USB 4; one is used for charging), an HDMI out, and a microSD card slot. The facility button additionally features a built-in fingerprint sensor.
This can be a well-rounded machine that makes an attempt to string the needle in balancing efficiency and value, and for probably the most half, it does so effectively. A superb level of comparability with this machine is the LG Gram SuperSlim, which I reviewed a couple of months in the past. The LG has an analogous design and thickness however has usually beefier specs. It’s half a pound lighter than the Acer however virtually twice the value—a minimum of whereas the Acer is on its present sale of $250 off its regular $1,300 MSRP. Neither is an ideal PC, however each are value contemplating in case you want a bigger display however nonetheless need to decrease the general load in your bag.
