Acer refreshes its best laptop of 2021 with 12th gen Intel CPUs and better displays

If you’ve read our review of the Acer Swift X, you’d know that I am a huge fan of it. For below RM5,000, you’re getting some of the best silicon found in a laptop that’s portable, powerful and can fit use cases of everyone from students and content creators to even the casual gamer. It’s not perfect though, with the display on the Acer Swift X perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks of what was a great package.

Luckily then Acer will be refreshing the Acer Swift X this year with not one, but two new versions of the Acer Swift X. There will now be a 14-inch and 16-inch version of the Swift X, with upgraded silicon under the hood as well. The Taiwanese giant has not revealed pricing and availability of the two new Swift X models however. And judging from how it took them until October last year to make the Swift X available in Malaysia despite announcing it back in May, it could be awhile before they appear on the market.

Acer Swift X 14 specs

The current Swift X’s biggest downside is arguably its display. It’s fairly dim and feels awkward with its 16:9 display in a world filled with 16:10 and 4:3 laptop screens these days. The next Swift X 14 will hopefully rectify this, with its 14-inch, 16:10 IPS display pushing a 2240 x 1400p resolution. It will cover 100% of the sRGB colour gamut and has a higher brightness than the current Swift X, maxing out at 400nits.

Under the hood, Acer will be swapping out the AMD processors with the new 12th generation Intel Core processors, based on Team Blue’s new Alder Lake architecture. The next Acer Swift X 14 will also still stick with the very solid NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics card. As for memory and storage, you’re looking at up to 16GB of onboard LPDDR5 RAM and up to 2TB of NVME storage split between two PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 slots.

Other features of note include a 59Whr battery, an FHD front camera with Windows Hello as well as support for WiFi 6E. It will also retain its great I/O selection, with a HDMI port, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. Overall, the Swift X 14 will weigh about 1.4kg and measures 17.95mm thin in its aluminum chassis. It’ll come in two colourways, namely red and green.

Acer Swift X 16 specs

Those of who who’d prefer a slightly larger display will be pleased to hear that there’s going to be an Acer Swift X 16 as well. As its name implies, it will have a 16-inch, 16:10 IPS display pushing a WQXGA 2560 x 1600p resolution. It will cover 100% of the sRGB colour gamut and has a brightness of 400nits.

The display size isn’t the only big difference between the Acer Swift X 14 and Swift X 16 though. Acer will also be using the upcoming Intel Arc graphics cards for the Swift X 16, instead of the RTX3050 Ti; it’ll be interesting to see just how it performs using Intel’s GPU. It will also run a 12th generation Intel Core CPU mated to up to 16GB of onboard LPDDR5 memory and up to 2TB of NVME storage split between two PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 slots.

Despite its larger size though it still gets the same 59Whr battery, FHD camera with Windows Hello support and WiFi 6E support. The Swift X 16 also has the same HDMI port, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack for I/O. It’s a little heavier, weighing in at 1.7kg in its aluminum chassis but is the same thickness as its smaller sibling.