Read Mashable’s full review of Acer Swift X 14 (2024).
Last year’s Acer Swift X 14 has a harbor that is fast and rich, and I’m the best choice for students who need a Windows laptop, even the successor to AI-powered. This is ideal if you prefer Windows over Mac, or for compatibility reasons.
It is worth noting that it has a dedicated NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4060 graphics card for some engineering plans. This also makes PC gaming much better than MacBooks (although you often play to guarantee an actual gaming laptop, I’ll give this a separate suggestion later).
While this 14.5-inch creator laptop isn’t the latest or most stylish PC on the market, it’s certainly one of the most practical PCs-it doesn’t require an uncovered budget. Its Geekbench 6 multi-core score for last year’s Intel Core Ultra 7 155h processor is 13,386, surpassing all the current proxy Intel laptops we’ve tried, except for the $2,119 Lenovo model. It does tend to run loudly, but considering that it’s more zippered than 81% of the models in our current database, it feels like a fair trade-off.
This CPU is accompanied by the NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 40 series GPUs, which enables the Swift X 14 to run dedicated software and games. We got eight hours and 32 minutes of usage from the RTX 4070 test unit, which is lower than the median battery life of all Windows laptops, but is suitable for one with discrete graphics. This exact model is out of stock at the time of writing, but the RTX 4050 and 4060 variants are priced at $1,299.99 and $1,499.99, respectively. The 4050 base configuration has 512GB of storage, which is perfectly enough for most students. If you’re more like a power user, choose the 4060 with the full Terabyte.
Swift X 14 may be a bit also Mashable’s Gedeon said that for some people, it’s a very ordinary grey device – but its build quality is “awesome”. It comes with a very elastic keyboard, a larger soft touchpad and a 120Hz OLED display, which is vibrant and buttery smooth. Gedeon called the latter a “visual enjoyment” in his comments. When it comes to connectivity, you can blend modern and legacy ports together, including HDMI ports and microSD card slots.
Acer sells a new version of the Swift X 14 (Swift 14 AI), which is slightly cheaper, but it is powered by Arm Prokessors that college students should avoid. It also does not have a dedicated GPU.
