Acer Swift X is a content creation dream machine — starts at half the price of a MacBook Pro 16
Acer's Swift X 16 has leveled up for 2023
The new Acer Swift X spec list sounds like a content creator's wish list come to life. From the 16-inch 3.2K 120Hz OLED display to the Ryzen 7000 series CPU and Nvidia 40-Series GPU, you've got everything you need to craft videos, 3D renders, and more.
Sure, but we've seen what's going on with RTX 40 series laptop prices — it's probably $3,000. Not so! The Acer Swift X starts at $1,249, just half the price of the MacBook Pro 16, makes it an impressively affordable content creation station.
However, it takes more than a few eye-catching specs to win us over, so let's take a deeper dive into what Acer has done to improve the Swift X for 2023.
Bigger and better
We got our hands-on the Swift X 14 last year, and it featured a 14-inch (2240 x 1400) laptop with an Intel Core i7-1260p CPU and an Nvidia GeForce 3050 Ti GPU. The Acer Swift X 16 in 2023 has bulked up. It made the jump to a 16-inch (3200 x 2000) OLED display, up to an AMD Ryzen 9 7940H CPU, up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU, 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to a 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD, and a 76Wh battery — all while staying reasonably thin-and-light at 14 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches and 4.2 pounds.
AI Boost
Beyond the performance enhancements from the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPU and Nvidia 40-series, the Acer Swift X joins the rest of the tech world in leaning on AI to squeeze even more out of this hardware.
Some of that comes from a suite of AI technologies created by Acer itself to enhance specific features like the video quality from the 1080p FHD webcam and applying AI noise reduction to your audio. Others come from Nvidia, with the RTX 4050 GPU giving you access to Nvidia Studio Drivers and tools like Nvidia Omniverse, Nvidia Broadcast, and Nvidia Canvas that blew us away at CES 2023.
Acer listened
Our biggest complaint with the previous generation was the virtually non-existent bottom-firing speakers. Acer stepped up its game here with a pair of front-facing stereo speakers with DTS-X Ultra Audio. Our other concern was the shallow keyboard, so we'll have to wait until we have the laptop in for testing before we know if Acer's fixed everything.
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The Acer Swift X 16 will be shipping starting in July and again starts at $1,249. If you're a content creator that prefers Windows to macOS, this sounds like it could be a candidate for our best video editing laptops when it arrives this summer, so check back for our full review.
Sean Riley has been covering tech professionally for over a decade now. Most of that time was as a freelancer covering varied topics including phones, wearables, tablets, smart home devices, laptops, AR, VR, mobile payments, fintech, and more. Sean is the resident mobile expert at Laptop Mag, specializing in phones and wearables, you'll find plenty of news, reviews, how-to, and opinion pieces on these subjects from him here. But Laptop Mag has also proven a perfect fit for that broad range of interests with reviews and news on the latest laptops, VR games, and computer accessories along with coverage on everything from NFTs to cybersecurity and more.