Acer Swift Go 14 review

Acer’s Swift Go 14 is an Intel Evo-certified, ultraportable laptop with high-end features and some beefy power under the bonnet. Over the years, we’ve seen impressive laptops in this range and some somewhat-mediocre variants. Our Acer Swift Go 14 review will tell you whether this particular model is marvelous or meh.

Related: Check out our Acer Swift Go 16 review

Specs

Screen	14-inch, glossy, 90Hz, 2,800 x 1,800, OLED display
Processor	3.7-5.0GHz Intel i7-13700H CPU
Memory	16GB LPDDR5 RAM
Graphics	1.5GHz Intel Xe
Hard drive	500GB PCIe NVMe
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2 2 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 2 x Thunderbolt 4 1 x HDMI 2.1 1 x MicroSD slot 1 x 3.5mm audio
Speakers	Twin (unspecified)
Extra Security	N/A
Webcam	UHD 1440p
Battery	65Wh
Dimensions	313 x 218 x 15mm
Weight	1.33 KG
SKU	NX.KF1SA.002-RW0-ASC

Features, Ergonomics and Design

The Acer Swift Go 14 looks good with its aluminium lid and solid, colour-matched, plastic body. The shiny, metallic Acer logo is discreet and opening it up inclines the keyboard to both improve the typing position and ventilation.

The hinge is high quality and the contrasting black bezel, surrounding the screen, is thin at the sides and a little thicker at the top. It looks good and will both easily fit into a corporate environment and look elegant when used out and about.

The Scrabble-tile keyboard is well-weighted and very comfortable and accurate to type upon for extended periods. The glass-coated trackpad is silky smooth, very accurate and has well-weighted buttons.

Our variant had an OLED screen with a UHD 2,800 x 1,800 resolution. It’s very bright and sharp and any designers will also like that it supports 100 per cent of the difficult DCI-P3 colour gamut. Colours are vibrant and contrast impressive with details being visible in both light and dark scenes. There’s some light banding in some colourful transitions which can get a bit worse in monochromatic equivalents, but performance in this regard is still way above average. Acer doesn’t publish its brightness rating but it gets very bright.

It also has a 90Hz refresh rate which marries with a reasonably fast pixel response time to keep fast-moving objects looking noticeably more-clear than rivals. It’s not quite a gaming screen, but then, this isn’t a gaming laptop. The screen is glossy, but it doesn’t quite transform into a black mirror that other OLEDs can become when displaying dark content.

Acer doesn’t specify the specs of the speakers beyond saying there are two of them. They get loud but there’s no bass to speak of and, at top volume, the treble can crackle a bit. However, they too, are still better than many rivals.

The webcam has an impressive, UHD, 1440p resolution and it’s capable of banishing grain in low light conference calls. The microphone array is particularly impressive at cancelling out noisy background, er, noise. However, if you’re recording audio, ensure it’s in Power Efficiency mode to avoid the fans ramping up in the background.

Ultimately, the Acer Swift Go 14 is generally very good to use and is a great productivity tool that radiates quality.

Performance

Inside the Acer Swift Go 14 is a speedy, 13^th-Gen Intel 3.7 – 5.0GHz i7-13700H processor with 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores. It’s backed-up by 16GB of low-power, LPDDR5 RAM and a fast (albeit small) 512GB NVMe hard drive.

These combined to score 6,055 in the general-computing PCMark 10 test. That’s bang-on average for any current-generation laptop, but impressive for any ultraportable of this stature.

In the Cinebench processor-based rendering tests, it scored 2,305 in the drag-race R15 test and 12,843 in the longer R23 test. These, again, are middling in the current world of laptops but that’s including massive, high-powered gaming beasts. For a thin-and-light laptop, it represents impressive power.

3D Performance is limited because it’s provided by integrated Intel Xe GPU. However, this does have a 1.5GHz core speed which is less-slow than most other Intel-only laptops with slow 3D graphics.

It wouldn’t run the difficult, 3DMark ray-tracing tests, but it did run the AAA-gaming tests, Time Spy and Fire Strike Extreme in which it scored 2,049 (average 11fps) and 2,747 (average 12.1fps) respectively. These scores underscore the fact it’s not a gaming laptop.

However, in the casual-and-competitive-gaming-a-like 3DMark Night Raid test, it scored 20,148 which is an average of 115fps. This, married, with the 90Hz screen means that the Acer Swift Go 14 is not completely devoid of gaming prowess at a casual-and-competitive level.

We also ran our old CS:GO test which stresses the whole system. This averaged 40fps throughout the test but dropped to just 5fps for the slowest one per cent of frames (the 1% Low test). Consequently, it’s more-suited to casual games than competitive shooters.

The Acer Swift Go 14 has an ‘upgraded’ Acer cooling system with ‘TwinAir’ dual, copper heat pipes, a single fan, plus an air intake system that utilises gaps in the keyboard. The upshot of this is that it can get lukewarm when simply acting like a general computer. It’s also not uncommon for the fans to ramp-up to a minor whoosh when in anything other than Power Efficiency mode, but it’s still quiet for a thin and relatively powerful computer.

Connectivity

Inside there’s Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. It’s an impressive complement.

Portability

The Acer Swift Go 14 is very well built with minimal flex in any part of the lid or chassis and so it should easily survive life on the road. It only weighs 1.33KG and the power supply and cables only add an extra 369g. In a world full of laptops, we’ve been using it as our ultraportable workhorse for some time now.

It has a 65Wh battery and this ran the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test for an impressive 11 hours and 19 minutes.

Price and Availability

The Acer Swift Go 14 is available now for $1,799 which makes it one of the best-value laptops we’ve tested.

Alternatives to the Acer Swift Go 14

Razer Blade 14 – It’s a lot more expensive, but it’s better at everything and looks amazing. The Ferrari to Acer’s Camry.

Asus Zenbook 14 OLED – Asus’ rival offers many similar features and, while it’s not as fast, it’s even cheaper.

HP Envy X360 – HP’s convertible is a fantastic, feature-packed ultraportable. It’s got much-better battery life but it’s not as powerful. It’s much cheaper, though.

Dell XPS 13 – Dell’s classic ultraportable is even thinner and lighter and even more portable. However, it’s not nearly as powerful.

MSI Prestige 14 – MSI’s Prestige is a high-quality, potentially good-looking alternative that costs a little more. However, some SKUs are much better than others.

Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 – Lenovo’s portable all-rounder is another attractive alternative with similar strengths but at an inch smaller.

Asus Expertbook B5 – Asus’ B5 is very light despite packing 16-inches. It’s got a few foibles but is worth checking out if you need a bigger OLED screen.

Conclusion: Should you buy the Acer Swift Go 14?

The Acer Swift Go 14 is a great, portable workhorse computer. It’s great to interact with, it’s got enough power to perform non-trivial tasks, the OLED screen makes all media look great and its robust, lightweight chassis (and long battery life) mean its highly portable too. There are few foibles and it’s what many people will be looking for in a general-purpose laptop. At this price, we’re happy to recommend it.

Awards

Pros

Highly portable
Relatively powerful
Good value

Cons

Slightly-noisy fans
Runs warm
Average speakers

Results