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The thin and light Swift Edge range has been refreshed for 2024 with the chip maker ‘s 13th Gen Core processors that deliver more power to a slimmer body but the companys signature portability and longer battery life. This reason call for me to spend a week using the Swift Edge 16 as my work and leisure machine to test its capabilities. Read on for the full review.
Design and Build
The Swift Edge 16 continues this tradition with an ultrathin magnesium-aluminum alloy engraving that adds a quality to the touch. The Midnight Black review unit we used has a subtle brushed metal finish on the lid and deck, which also doesn’t attract fingerprints too much. The Swift Edge 16 is a very mobile 16-inch laptop at just 0.55 inches thin and weighing 2.65 pounds. I had zero problems fitting it into my backpack or taking it to town or work and moving around with it.
The frame that edges the screen is thin, making the screen to body ratio 82% you are instantly transported to whatever is on the bright 16-inch 2560 x 1600 IPS touchscreen. That resolution and 16:Do 16:9 and 10 aspect ratio give you more ‘heights’ compared to displays with 1080p? The screen covered 114 percent of the sRGB gamut during testing and had excellent color accuracy once calibrated and can thus be relied on for photography and videography. It has a maximum brightness of 425 nits, which means it is well suited for use indoors. Touch screen is fantastic and can be used for faster vertical movements or highlighting any item rather than moving the whole hand to the track pad.
However, Acer has not cut back on the ports – there are two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C, two USB 3.2 Gen 2, HDMI 2.1, and a microSD card slot. That means you can sit all your peripherals and other displays right next to your PC, without the need for having some dongles on you.
Keyboard and Trackpad
This really is a thin laptop, but Acer managed to cramp in a comfortable backlit keyboard that has decent travel distance. Key presses have a very clicky feel but there is enough tension to the keys such that they do not depress too softly. The layout is large, big enough letter, number and arrow keys for the fingers to maneuver easily on. My typing speeds were in tune to what I can get on my mechanical keying system. The mid-size precision touchpad is just as good, with gliding and gestures. Clicks also provide just the right level of feedback as in single click to select items and two clicks to get the right click option. In the productivity works, the Swift Edge 16 stands tall between the keyboard and the trackpad.
Performance
The Swift Edge 16 we received for review has Intel’s Core i7-13700H processor, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, 1 TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, and Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti dedicated graphics. This is a splendid hardware pair for all kinds of productivity, content generation, and, indeed, gaming. Whether it was handling dozens of Chrome tabs for research with video streaming alongside, image as well as video clips’ editing, or playing video games – AAA titles at that, at Medium quality – the Swift Edge 16 performed terrifically. The 13th Gen Intel offers both high-performance P-cores, which include eight of them, and efficient E-cores, which also include eight. High single-core frequencies for low-intensity tasks such as web-browsing – 5GHz turbo boost and hearty multi-core performance for intensive tasks.
As with many budget laptops, the RTX 3050 Ti GPU is not the strongest mobile graphics solution, however when coupled with the 13700H, the game play on titles like Cyberpunk 2077, God of War at medium settings at the native 1600p resolution was in the 40 – 60 fps range. This amount of tribute makes the Swift Edge 16 feasible for esports games as well as fully immersive games. It’s a good thing though just don’t expect to run newer releases on Ultra. Of course, the dedicated graphics also speed up creative applications now from video and photo modifications to 3D modeling and CAD. In general, the Swift Edge 16 produces impressive computing power from the CPU and graphics card that cannot be provided by the integrated chipset alone.
Battery Life
Cramming all of these elements under the hood, the Swift Edge 16 packs in a decent 68Wh battery to counterbalance it all. What’s more, one doesn’t expect to get over 7 and a half hours of real world battery life from a laptop this thin. I tried to use the Swift Edge laptop on its battery for a single workday to browse websites, watch videos, type into Google Docs, and use Slack. The battery after a full 8 hours work was still at 15% which shows my camera battery longevity in my work schedule. This was done with the screen brightness set at half, and all tests were performed using the onboard Intel graphics to conserve power.
But if you do manage to employ the dedicated RTX graphics, you’re going to shave off some battery hours. Incidentally, still having some time playing games after work, I was able to complete most of an 8 hour workday plus a couple of hours on games. Charging is more infrequent however if required is possible with the 135W USB-C power adapter – getting the battery from zero to 50% is under an hour. Thus, you could top it up when you run short of money in the middle of the day. Thanks to the efficiency cores of the 13700H, Standby battery life is excellent – the battery does not discharge when idle at night.
Software
In the Swift Edge 16, Acer puts some useful software tools before it ships: Acer Care Center, which helps to inspect overall system status; Power Manager for changing power profiles and battery options; and Quick Access, which provides a convenient, one-stop access to frequently changed settings. Some of this is helpful, but perhaps the most useful is the fact that Power Manager has a built in Battery Saver Mode. And whilst they are useful for an out-of-the-box experience, fans might desire to do a fresh Windows install to have a super snappy system without any trial software slowing down operations. Either way, Windows 11 Home performs perfectly well on the Swift Edge 16 boosting up the response across the OS.
Final Verdict
The new Acer Swift Edge 16 then brings the line up to date for 2024 with such elements as the 13th Gen Intel Core and Nvidia RTX dedicated graphics joining the thin-and-light party. Performance gets a significant boost on last year’s version while at the same time delivering longer battery life durations with the help of Intel’s new generation of efficiency cores. All in a highly portable and virtually indestructible sub-0.6 inch thick magnesium-aluminum allow body.
The HP Spectre x360 starts from $1199 for configs with Core i5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD. Still, for an extra $400 to this model, you get improved performance from the 13700H and a more substantial 1TB SSD in the $1,599 Core i7 review unit we’ve also tested here. What this offers is a very good mix of efficiency and content generation potential with some game wisdom thrown in for good measure in one of the most transportable packages out there today. Specifically, the Swift Edge 16 goes up against Dell’s XPS 15 and Razer Blade 15 for thin-and-light high-performance 15 to 16-inch notebooks. As for what you get in terms of power and portability for the price, there’s no doubt that the new Swift Edge 16 should be near the top of your shopping list.
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