Acer unveiled today a pair of laptops powered by AMD processors.
The Nitro 5 gaming laptop and Swift 3 ultrabook will come with the latest second-gen AMD Ryzen CPUs and Radeon graphics. Acer didn't provide pricing or availability for either model, but we expect to hear more details soon.
The announcement comes just days before Computex, an annual computer expo held in Taiwan where major laptop makers will be showing off new products. We'll go hands-on with the new Swift 3 and Nitro 5 at the expo next week. Until then, we'll have to go by the specs Acer provided in a press release.
Acer Nitro 5
Credit: Acer
The new Nitro 5 has a 15-inch, 1080p display and will be powered by a 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen 7 3750H CPU coupled with Radeon RX 560X graphics. That mid-range discrete GPU should provide similar performance to the Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti, which means the Nitro 5 should be able to run most modern games at low-to-medium settings. On the CPU front, the quad-core Ryzen 7 3750H is comparable to Intel's Core i5-8300H CPU, so expect strong overall performance.
Credit: Acer
Apart from the AMD components, the Nitro 5 is pretty much identical to the Intel model. In our review, we praised the previous model for its attractive black-and-red chassis and wide assortment of ports but took issue with the dull, dim display. We'll be crossing our fingers that Acer upgraded the panel on the AMD version. While we don't know official pricing, the Intel model started at $749. We expect the new AMD version to be around the same price.
Acer Swift 3
For students or frequent travelers on a budget, the Acer Swift 3 is a portable mid-range laptop with an attractive design. Coming to the new model are up to a 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen 7 3700U CPU and Radeon Vega Graphics. Customers will have the option to upgrade to a discrete Radeon 540X CPU if they want a bit more power for casual gaming or running GPU-demanding software, like Adobe Photoshop.
The Swift 3's 14-inch display will be bordered by razor-thin bezels, and can rotate 180-degrees to fold flat. At 0.7 inches thick and 3.2 pounds, the aluminum Swift 3 should make for a good travel companion. However, Acer didn't provide battery life ratings so we won't know real-world endurance until we put it through our testing.
The previous model with Intel chips lasted a below-average 7 hours and 15 minutes on our battery test, despite having an extremely dim 1080p display. We'll find out if Acer fixed these problems later this year when we put the Swift 3 through our full review.
Stay tuned for Laptop Mag's full coverage of Computex 2019 (May 28 to June 1).
