If you’re looking for an affordable laptop with the latest and greatest specs, then this laptop should be on your list. This laptop is priced at less than RM5k, and yet it comes with the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 258V? How’s that possible?
Well, it’s actually a reality now. This is the Acer Swift 14 AI with the SKU model number SF14-51-716M. With an unbelievable price tag for its specs, is this laptop actually good?
Let’s take a look at the design first. At first glance, there’s really nothing out of the ordinary here. It’s a very sleek-looking laptop, thin, and also has an aluminium chassis. One interesting design choice is the inclusion of this logo at the top left corner of the lid. What’s this for? We’ll talk about it in a while.
Opening up the lid – and it goes 180 degrees flat – reveals a 14-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels at 60Hz. This screen is just beautiful. It covers 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts, while also having a low ΔE number. That maximum is definitely an outlier since the average is so low.
The maximum brightness is at 400 nits in SDR mode, and goes up to around 650 nits when HDR is turned on. Pretty good overall. There is also a chamfered edge all around the edge of the screen, and the top of the screen has a slight bulge so that we can open up the laptop easily, and it houses the webcam there too. There is a privacy slider so that we can close the webcam entirely so we don’t have to use those ugly sticky notes on our laptops!
The keyboard has a good travel distance but the keys do feel a bit soft to type on. Still, it’s a good typing experience.
The trackpad has great tracking and palm rejection, so no issues here – and what’s this? Another icon with this weird shape? Aha, if you remember, there is another weird shape at the lid that somewhat has the same motif too.
This is Acer’s way of celebrating the ascension to the AI space. As the name suggests, this laptop is called the Acer Swift 14 AI – and that icon on the lid signifies that this is an AI laptop. And this icon on the trackpad actually lights up when we’re using Copilot or any of the Acer AI apps that are included.
There are a few AI apps that Acer has included – like the VisionArt and LiveArt, AlterView, PurifiedView, and PurifiedVoice. When we use any of those apps, that icon on the trackpad lights up to tell us that it is doing something related to AI. Essentially, it’s an AI activity indicator. It’s a unique implementation of a feature.
We can also disable it on the Acer Sense utility if we choose to do so.
And speaking of the Acer Sense utility, I think this is a new interface? It’s very clean and tells us what we need to know at a glance. We have the system status on one side, then we can change the power profile between silent, normal, and performance mode – or hit the Fn+F keys to toggle it quickly, change how the battery is charger, and also to check if there are any updates available.
There is a checkup tab, a personal settings tab where we can change a lot of the system settings, and also an app center where we can launch apps directly or pin them to the side of the Acer Sense software.
Now, let’s talk about the performance. This particular unit of the Acer Swift 14 AI comes with the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 258V with the Intel Arc 140V integrated GPU, and also 32GB of RAM running at 8533MT/s with about half of it allocated to become the VRAM for the integrated GPU. It also comes with a 500GB SSD as well.
Now, the performance from this laptop is as expected – we can get great frame rates in games like Black Myth: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077. We can get through the entire game from start to finish on this laptop – with some help on the upscaling tech, of course.
This laptop is a bit more conservative in terms of the maximum package power even though I have already selected performance mode in the Acer Sense utility. I’m okay with it though, as the temperatures are also very tame. The maximum we observed was only around 75°C.
Other online games like Zenless Zone Zero also runs very well on this laptop – and combined with the magnificent OLED screen, the game just looks so much more vibrant and lively.
One offputting aspect of this laptop is that the speaker just sounds very teeny. I expect that this shouldn’t be a problem since many people are using headphones or earphones nowadays.
And yet the battery life of this laptop does not disappoint either. As stated in our test regarding the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, the SoC wattage can dip to about an average of 1-2W. For this laptop with its 65Wh battery, we can get around 19 hours of battery life via the PCMark Modern Office battery life test with its brightness locked at 100 nits. Seriously, this can last you throughout a full day’s usage with no problems at all.
The ports on this laptop is not bad either. Those two Thunderbolt 4 ports are definitely great as we can connect a dock or a KVM monitor to it and get 90W charging with keyboard and mouse and display via that one single cable only. Plus, we can also use utilities like Thunderbolt Share too – more info on that in the description below.
As for upgradability – this is something that I can’t test out since there is a warranty sticker covering one of the screws, but I suspect that the only thing we can change is the M.2 2280 SSD and everything else is soldered onto the motherboard. I am confident that this is the case because every other laptop of this caliber is the same.
Should you buy the Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51-716M)?
So, at the end of the day, if you want the latest and greatest from Intel – and I do mean great because of its efficiency and performance – then consider getting the Acer Swift 14 AI. For the price of just RM4,999, it’s a great laptop for that price.
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