Acer Swift X 14 AI – Review

Just because a laptop is outfitted with the latest processors and graphics cards doesn’t mean it’s solely built for gaming. Yes, running modern AAA games requires heaps of processing power, but the same can be said for a content creator’s arsenal of tools – the applications that push a computer’s hardware to its limits in their own right.

That’s very much the case when it comes to Acer’s new addition to its Swift line-up of creator-centric laptops, the Acer Swift X 14 AI (61G-R09E), a lightweight yet beefy system designed for creative work on the move. As a productivity laptop, it does a decent job of balancing performance, longevity and a suitably low-profile style to help fit its needs in a professional setting, but some awkward design choices and a steep asking price prevent it from truly standing out amongst the competitive laptop space.

Weighing 1.57kg and measuring 32.2 x 22.7 x 1.7cm, the laptop features a thin and sleek chassis decked out in a smooth gun-metal finish, with a minimalist style throughout, apart from a tiny engraved logo on the top right of its outer lid. Once opened, this low-profile design extends to its keypad as well, featuring black back-lit keys and another small logo tastefully tucked into the left side of its hinge. Cooling vents are also kept to a minimum, with only a single set of three horizontal vents flushed to the rear of the device and partially obscured by its hinge.

As a productivity laptop meant to be taken on the go, the laptop boasts a decent spread of ports. On its left lies a bulk of them, comprising one mini-HDMI port, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 port and two USB4 Type-Cs, with all three USB ports also supporting power delivery. A single USB 3.2 port, a MicroSD card reader and an AUX cord sit on its right side, aptly flushed against the rear of the device so it doesn’t get in the way when using peripherals such as a wired mouse.

The device does have a peculiar omission – a dedicated AC power port, which means that at least one of its three left-hand ports will be taken up when it’s connected to power, which does limit the options available for more external devices that require a non-wireless connection. Furthermore, the power delivery ports are awkwardly placed near the centre of its left side, which might pose an issue for those using left-handed mice, or when trying to charge and use the laptop in particularly cramped areas.

Fortunately, the typing experience doesn’t offer any awkwardness at all, with its keys spaced out sufficiently for a natural feel that doesn’t require much adjustment for those more familiar with traditional PC keyboards. Key travel distance is also evenly balanced, providing just enough resistance to prevent accidental mistypes, while not having that overly clicky feel that helps to reduce fatigue after hours of prolonged work.

Located below the keyboard lies an enlarged haptic touchpad, with a size that does take some getting used to, but serves the device’s purpose as a creative device, with ample room for gestures and support for a separately sold MPP 2.0 Styluses. Despite its larger nature, the touchpad’s window for right-click detection is extremely precise, so users shouldn’t face any issues with accidental mispresses.

With a heavy emphasis on creative use, the Swift X 14 AI touts a 14.5-inch 120Hz 3K (2,880 x 1,800 resolution) OLED touchscreen, more than capable of delivering eye-popping visuals that are equal parts vibrant and crisp, which does serve its purpose well, especially when editing images or videos. Colour accuracy is impressive too, with its 100 per cent DCI-P3 colour coverage, 340nits of brightness, and HDR support.

With its main display featuring touchscreen support, the material and size of the screen become even more important for seamless editing experiences. To this end, the laptop’s display does feature an almost edge-to-edge design, with minimal horizontal bezels paired with slightly larger vertical ones to account for its webcam setup, with its surface decked out in Corning Gorilla Glass that feels smooth to the touch, alongside reducing smudges and fingerprints, although those with particularly sweaty palms might still need to clean the screen rather frequently.

Furthermore, the laptop also features a 180-degree lie-flat hinge, allowing it to sit practically horizontally on surfaces with minimal gaps, allowing for a seamless drawing experience for those who wish to use it in this way. Those looking to use their styluses on the main display, however, might be disappointed, as the screen only features support for finger touch, meaning stylus support is limited to the aforementioned touchpad, which is a rather perplexing design choice, that while it was probably made to protect the screen from unintentional damage, might still be a deal-breaker for those intending to do more precise editing and design work.

In order to run such editing software, however, a device needs to be sufficiently powered, as such tasks can prove taxing on a system, especially when complex rendering is involved. The Swift X 14 AI comes in various configurations, with our review unit housing an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor with up to 50 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) of NPU AI performance, alongside an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU with 798 AI TOPS, and 32GB of RAM. Apart from this, various builds with different processors and GPU options are available, including ones with Intel CPUs and RTX 5050 GPU variants.

When crunching the numbers of laptop performance using various benchmarking software such as PCMark10 and Geekbench 6, the laptop produced the following results:

• PCMark10: 7,348 (Overall), 9,984 (Essentials), 10,032 (Productivity), 10,751 (Digital Content Creation)
• Geekbench 6: 2,787 (Single-Core CPU), 1,4070 (Multi-Core CPU), 54,107 (OpenCL GPU), 44,136 (Vulkan GPU)
• Cinebench 2024: 109 (Single-Core CPU), 735 (Multi-Core CPU)

Despite not being touted as a device for gaming, the raw power of its RTX 5070 GPU means that the Swift X 14 AI can handle gaming pretty smoothly too, running even recently released AAA titles like Doom: The Dark Ages at stable framerates above 60fps at its Ultra Nightmare graphical settings, using AI performance upscalers like DLSS 4 and Multi Frame generation. One thing to note, however, is that the laptop’s internal heat management was not designed for intense gaming sessions, with its fans kicking into overdrive as it struggles to cool the system down, resulting in uncomfortable levels of noise and heat that are far from ideal.

Day-to-day tasks, on the other hand, present a much more silent and comfortable experience, with the device barely getting warm even after hours of continued general use. Things only start to heat up slightly during rendering or while installing large apps, with the laptops’ fans also spooling up to compensate for the sudden rise in GPU and disk usage.

With a 76Wh Li-Ion battery, the Swift X 14 AI does struggle slightly when trying to power through a day of typical work usage. Based on real-world testing for average day-to-day use, the laptop’s battery dropped around 30 per cent after two hours of mixed use, comprising typing up documents, simple photo editing and installing software, all while a YouTube video was being played throughout in the background, meaning it should be able to last a full day on a single charge with some additional tweaking of settings, including switching off the keyboard backlights and adjusting power efficiency modes.

On the flipside, running intense tasks does drain the system’s power rather quickly, as when performing a continuous graphical benchmark, 3DMark’s Fire Strike Ultra, for example, on battery power, the laptop dropped a whopping 80 per cent after one hour, meaning those who are intending to use the device for complex rendering and 3D design are better off plugging it in.

As a Copilot+ PC, the Swift X 14 AI comes with all the bells and whistles common for the average AI-enhanced laptop, including staples like real-time subtitles, Cocreator image generation and the Recall feature for quickly bringing up previously viewed content. The laptop also comes with several Acer-specific AI features, such as its PurifiedVoice 2.0 noise cancellation for cleaner sounding calls with the use of an external mic, and LiveArt, which can remove the backgrounds of images to create custom stickers for use in photo editing and artwork design.

The device’s AI features are further streamlined through the use of AcerSense, a hub that can be accessed easily via a dedicated button on the top right-hand side of the keyboard. Via this hub, users can fine-tune various aspects of the laptop, including adjusting the system’s usage modes, changing its GPU operation modes, editing battery and screen settings and viewing system metrics like CPU, GPU and RAM usage, alongside current system temperatures. Features like the aforementioned LiveArt and PurifiedVoice can also be easily accessed from this hub, resulting in a more user-friendly experience without the need for complex settings navigation.

At S$2,999 for our review unit configuration, the Acer Swift X 14 AI does fall on the pricier side, considering that it’s a 14-inch laptop, but its crisp display and respectable performance do help to justify its cost slightly, although glaring feature omissions, such as its main screen lacking support for styluses, and its less than ideal battery life does prevent the device from truly living up to its premium pricepoint.

Kevin Low

Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.