Acer Swift 3 OLED review: an OLED laptop under $1,000

Acer Swift 3 OLED

MSRP $1,230.00

“The Acer Swift 3 OLED comes with a spectacular display and impressive performance.”

pros

• Solid mid-range build

• Spectacular OLED display

• Excellent productivity performance

• Good keyboard

• 1080p cam

cons

• Touchpad is too small

• Below average battery life

Acer has been slow to jump on the OLED laptop bandwagon. But finally, the company has brought an OLED panel to its popular midrange 14-inch laptop, the Swift 3.

This is more than just the Default Acer Swift 3 with a better 90Hz OLED screen swapped in. This laptop is also thicker to handle its 45-watt 12th-gen processor, so you should expect some better performance out of this 14-inch laptop. Price is important though, and although the base configuration comes in under $1,000, my review unit landed at $1,230. Fortunately for Acer, there’s enough to justify a slightly higher price, making the Acer Swift 3 OLED a solid upgrade over the original.

specs

OLED, yes, but at what cost?

OLED used to be reserved for the cream of the crop, but lately, it has dropped into some affordable laptops. For example, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 also offers a 90Hz OLED display for just $800 with equivalent specs to the high-end Acer (except for a smaller 256GB SSD). That’s just one configuration, mind you, and if you use HP’s custom configurator, the price is higher.

the Asus VivoBook S 14X is another midrange laptop with an OLED display, this one running at 120Hz, that’s $1,100 for the same Core i7 CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. The Asus is also available at around $900 when configured identically to the $930 Swift 3 OLED.

Point is — the Acer Swift 3 OLED is right in the same ballpark as many of its close rivals, but it needs to offer something unique to rise above.

To start with, the Swift 3 OLED’s 14-inch 16:10 display is excellent and competes well against both midrange and premium alternatives. You can tell from the table below that, outside of color accuracy that’s slightly behind the best, the Acer’s panel is bright, colorful, and offers the usual OLED inky blacks. It’s a display that will please just about everyone, including creatives and content creators.

It’s a great display for Netflix binges too, though the Acer Swift 3 OLED’s audio doesn’t quite match it.

The speakers are good enough, with sufficient volume for a small office and clear mids and highs that are fine for system sounds and the occasional YouTube video. But if you want to watch a movie, you’ll want more bass than the two upward-firing speakers provide, so a pair of headphones or external speakers are likely to be appreciated.

Sometimes faster does mean faster

As we can see from the table below, the Swift 3 OLED performs more in line with the 14-core/20-thread Core i7-12700H in the larger and thicker Dell XPS 15 across all our benchmarks. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 and Asus Vivobook S 14X are closer to the Core i7-1260P in Geekbench 5 and our Handbrake test while running faster in Cinebench R23.

One test where the Swift 3 OLED fell behind was PCMark 10 Complete, which tests a mix of productivity, multimedia, and creative tasks. Note that I’ve listed both balanced and performance mode results, achieved by using each manufacturer’s utility for dialing in CPU frequencies and fan speeds.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

All these laptops throttled to one extent or another, but the Swift 3 OLED managed to maintain its performance more consistently. Because it’s limited to Intel’s Iris Xe graphics, it will not break any records with applications that use the GPU to speed up certain tasks, like Adobe’s Creative suite. But, for demanding productivity workflows and CPU-intensive creative apps, the Swift 3 OLED is a strong performer.

The Swift 3 OLED’s gaming performance was surprisingly poor, even by integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics standards. I’m not sure why the laptop was so slow, hitting just 11 frames per second in Fortnite at 1200p and epic graphics, but it’s definitely not a gaming machine. I only include these results to stress the point.

A cost in longevity

Everything else is ho-hum

Connectivity remains a strength, with Thunderbolt 4 and the latest wireless standards on hand. The 14-inch laptop typically has advantages over 13-inch machines when it comes to plugging in, and the Swift 3 OLED maintains that trend.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

The Swift 3 OLED’s keyboard seems to be the same as on the other model, with light and snappy switches and plenty of key spacing. The keycaps are large enough, although the silver keys are hard to read with the backlighting turned on with any ambient lighting. On the other hand, the touchpad is also the same as the previous model, which is a shame — given the taller display, there’s more room on the palm rest for a larger touchpad. It works well enough with quiet and precise buttons, but it’s just too small. The display isn’t touch-enabled, which I always miss.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

The webcam is a 1080p version, which is welcome, and it provided a bright image with Acer’s Temporal Noise Reduction technology helping out in low-light conditions. It’s a good webcam for video conferencing.

Finally, Windows 11 Hello passwordless login support is provided by a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button, which is precisely the right spot. It worked quickly and reliably during my testing.

A decent first go to an OLED machine