Acer Swift 14 AI (AMD) review: speed and battery life in equal strides

Sometimes, I get two laptops to review that are similar in design and differ mostly in the chipsets that power them. I reviewed the Acer Swift 14 AI built around the Intel Lunar Lake chipset and lauded it for its great battery life, and now Acer has sent me the AMD version that promises faster performance from the AMD Ryzen AI 9 chipset.

They’re not identical, but they’re close to the same price and roughly the same size. Choosing between them comes down to which is more important to you: battery life or performance. The AMD version of the Swift 14 AI is going to please those who want the faster machine, while still offering surprisingly good longevity.

Specs and configuration

Acer offers two versions of the Swift 14 AI. Both are built around the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 chipset and a 14.0-inch FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS display. For $1,200 (currently on sale for $1,000), there’s 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Upgrading to 32GB of RAM brings the price to $1,300.

That places the Swift 14 AI just on the edge of premium territory today. You can get some good laptops for less than $1,000, particularly those built around the Qualcomm Snapdragon X. Depending on sales, you can also get other laptops with the same AMD chipsets for around the same price, such as the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 that’s currently $900 on sale with a 512GB SSD but a higher-res 2.2K IPS display.

Design

It’s rare that I review a laptop today that doesn’t share the same kind of minimalist design. The Swift 14 AI has an all-metal silver chassis with no bling. It’s attractive enough, with a sweeping edge along the side of the chassis with a blockier rear edge, but it won’t stand out. It’s not the best-looking laptop I’ve reviewed, but I won’t fault its aesthetic. The OmniBook Ultra 14 looks better, as does the MacBook Air M3, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

The Swift 14 AI is solidly built as well. There’s just a little bending in the lid under a lot of pressure, but that’s true of the MacBook Air as well. The keyboard deck and chassis are robust, and I worry about the laptop falling apart.

In terms of its size, the display bezels are thin enough that the laptop’s width and depth are okay. Acer borrowed the reverse notch housing the webcam and other electronics from Lenovo, which helps keep the top bezel as thin as possible. The AMD version is thicker than the Intel version, probably to provide more airflow given the hotter-running chipset. At 3.0 pounds, the Swift 14 AI is about average among 14-inch laptops.

Keyboard and touchpad

The AMD version’s keyboard is slightly different from the Intel version’s. This one is a standard island keyboard, but the keycaps are slightly smaller and there’s more spacing in between keys. I liked the other one better, in part due to the switches that were lighter and snappier than this one. It’s okay, but I’d rank it a few rungs behind the best, such as Apple’s Magic Keyboard and the keyboard HP uses on its OmniBook lineup.

The touchpad is a mechanical version and it works fine. Its button clicks are confident and reasonably quiet. It has an unusual LED symbol in the upper-right quadrant that’s supposed to light up when AI features are enabled, but I didn’t see it in action. The display is touch-enabled, which I prefer.

Connectivity and webcam

There’s plenty of connectivity, with a mix of modern and legacy ports. This is an AMD laptop, so there’s USB4 rather than Intel’s Thunderbolt 4 standard, but that’s fine. You’ll get most of the same benefits. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date.

The webcam is higher resolution than the new standard of 1080p, coming in at 1440p, and backed by a very fast Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that runs at 45 tera operations per second (TOPS) and exceeds the Microsoft Copilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS. That’s where the Ryzen AI 9 gets its name, and the Swift 14 AI fully supports all current AI features with faster and more efficient on-device processing. Those features remain of questionable value, in my opinion, but if that’s important to you, the Swift 14 AI has you covered.

Performance

The Ryzen AI 9 365 is a 10-core/20-thread chipset running at a default 28 watts and ramping up to 54 watts TDP. It’s aimed at multicore performance, using an AMD Zen 5 architecture that has all performance cores. Generally, those cores aren’t as fast individually as more recent chipsets like the Qualcomm Snapdragon X and Intel Core Ultra Series 2. But, their multicore performance tends to be very good.

This is exactly what you’ll find in the comparison group. The Acer Swift AI 14 is very fast in each of our multi-core benchmarks, including the Handbrake test that shows off CPU performance. But, it doesn’t stand out in its single-core performance. The Radeon 880M integrated graphics are slower than the graphics on almost every competitive chipset.

The Acer Swift AI 14 is a fast laptop that will make the most demanding productivity users happy. Gamers and creators will want to look elsewhere, which is the case with every laptop that doesn’t have a discrete GPU.

Battery life

The Ryzen AI 9 chipset is aimed more at performance than efficiency, although AMD’s laptop chipsets have always been relatively efficient. But, the AMD version of the Swift AI 14 has a larger battery than the Lunar Lake version at 75 watt-hours compared to 65 watt-hours. And, both of the laptops I reviewed had FHD+ IPS displays. So, Acer did some work to balance the AMD version’s longevity against its higher performance.

And, indeed, the Swift 14 AI did well this time around. It managed over 14 hours and our web browsing test and 18.5 hours in our video looping test. That’s much better than previous-generation AMD and Intel chipsets and is competitive with the new round of Windows laptops generally. These results are good enough to likely provide all-day battery life running typical productivity tasks.

Display and audio

There’s just one display option with the Swift 14 AI, a 14.0-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS panel running at 60Hz. I like sharp text, so the resolution is a little low for me, but most users will find it to be good enough. The refresh rate is becoming a bit pedestrian when 120Hz and faster displays are becoming more common, but again, it likely won’t matter all that much to anyone looking for a productivity laptop. For such a user, this display is pretty good.

According to my colorimeter, this is a pretty high-quality IPS panel. It’s very bright at 445 nits and the contrast is excellent at 1,700:1. Our standards have been nits and 1,000:1, but most laptop displays today are much better. Colors are more average at 100% of sRGB, 76% of AdobeRGB, and 77% of DCI-P3. Some IPS displays are better, but that’s less common, and for the best colors, OLED is the best option. Color accuracy was good at a DeltaE of 1.58 (less than 2.0 is good for productivity use).

This is a good display that all but creators will enjoy. Audio is okay, with dual speakers that put out audio that’s loud enough and good enough for system sounds and YouTube video. You’ll want headphones for anything else.

Faster and still long-lasting

The Intel version of the Swift 14 AI has better battery life, in keeping with the primary focus of the Lunar Lake chipset. But, the AMD version is significantly faster and it still gets great battery life. For anyone who wants to split the difference, this version of the Swift 14 AI is a great choice.

It’s well-built, reasonably attractive, and doesn’t have any major flaws that stand out against the competition. If you get it on sale, then it’s a solid choice among the 14-inch laptop competition. At its list price, it’s not quite as much of a bargain, but it’s still easy enough to recommend.