[Review] Acer Swift 3 SF314-43-R2YY: This Is Your Next Laptop

Hence why we get so excited when we find a mid-range laptop that not only comes with a solid set of internals but also presents an attractive and innovative design that implements extra features such as a fingerprint reader, user-controlled fans, and a truly immersive display that takes up 85% of the panel instead of your standard 80%.

We're talking about the Acer Swift 3 SF314-43-R2YY of course. Acer's newest flagship laptop for the mid-range sector that's poised to take over the market with its stunning design, high-end features, and ridiculously competitive price point. But, is this the right notebook for you? That's what we're here to help you figure out!

Acer Swift 3 SF314-43-R2YY Review of a Killer Laptop

Design, Display & Keyboard

The Acer Swift 3 SF314-43-R2YY laptop is an incredibly good-looking piece of hardware. It sports a metallic chassis with a gunmetal grey finish that looks and feels premium, especially given the price point. The design is also very minimalistic and sleek which is perfect for students or professionals who are looking for something that doesn't stand out in a negative way.

Weight has also been accounted for and the SF314-43-R2YY weighs a meager 2.65 pounds, substantially below most of its competitors, which when coupled with its substantial battery life make it a truly portable laptop.

As we mentioned when we started out this review, the screen has not been an afterthought as it often is in mid-range devices. Instead, Acer provided its new flagship with a 14-inch Full HD IPS display with a 300 nits brightness and anti-glare technology to be able to use it under harder lighting conditions - though we don't recommend using it under direct sunlight either -.

For comparison's sake, most mid-range laptops will offer 200-250 nits and if you've ever seen a MacBook Air, that laptop features up to 400 nits of brightness, meaning that Acer's signature student notebook only falls short of that by 100 nits.

However, when it comes to screen quality you don't need to take our word for it, many customers have talked about the screen quality in this notebook.

Finally, with regards to the keyboard, it's your standard chiclet keyboard for a 14-inch notebook. As in, there's no dedicated numeric pad on the side. You've also got a backlight which is something you'd think would be standard by now yet many mid-range laptops still lack in this department, such as the HP 15-eg0025nr.

The keyboard also provides a couple of additional features worth pointing out such as a fingerprint reader located on the palm rest right below the arrow keys and a user-controlled fan function whereby the user can select the speed at which fans function by pressing the function key (fn) and the f key, switching from low, moderate to high speed.

Let's talk about performance

After covering the design it's time to tackle the performance of the Acer Swift 3 SF314-43-R2YY.

Specifically, this laptop comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U octa-core processor that clocks in at a base speed of 1.8 GHz and can go up to 4.3 GHz when needed.

Combined with 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and a 512 GB SSD, this notebook is set up to take on whatever you might need it to.

In terms of graphics, the AMD Radeon Graphics card is nothing to sneeze at and provides a good experience for most users looking to do some light photoshop retouches or video editing, though gamers and graphic professionals should probably refrain from this laptop as they'll want something that opts for a dedicated graphics card instead.

Overall, with this set of key specs, you can expect Acer's newest flagship to be able to tackle just about anything you can throw at it that doesn't require a dedicated graphics card.

That means you can use this laptop for programming (back end and front end), editing documents, working with virtual machines, running numerous programs at a time, streaming high-definition video, rendering spreadsheets, and just about anything you can think of. This truly is a powerhouse device.

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