Post reply

Name
Email
Subject
Message icon

Other options

Return to this topic
Don't use smileys

Verification:

Please leave this box empty:

Shortcuts: ALT+S post or ALT+P preview

Topic summary

Posted by Law

- Yesterday at 23:12:05

Back in 2018 when I made the purchase of this unit I was hopeful that it would replace my 2014 E15-521-66SN unit. I was a little disappointing in the specs this swift had . First of all only 4 gigs of ram Soldered on board and EEMc hardrive But with expandable SSD hard drive to add on storage. Well again a failure to not be able to switch from the EEMc drive to the SSD and the bios could not see it so who knows what the heck was going on ... It did come with Windows 10 and I had issues with that as well SO I wiped it completely and put Linux mint on it and Success, Its my new laptop with a touch of Mint.
The Battery is not bad in the unit and is a bit shorter in life because of Linux but thats the trade off. As long as you are not playing video's in to many tabs the ram can handle it pretty good / Two tabs at most then the ram starts to run out and Swap takes over to help but that really slows down to load video on you tube... Simple things like E-mail and sites to research things to buy are what this unit can handle best.. The Internet has become to over burdening with all this AI garbage and is really going to mess things up - and computers with minimal ram won't be able to cope ... In this day and age you need minimum of DDR4 to DDR5 ram and So-dim type where you can upgrade when needed and a 8core processor minimum. It's a shame that the Swift1 fails in this regard - Acer had a good thing going with this design but blew it miserably with a toy like type build. If they would Stop copying apple and make there units better then Acer would have a winner here but get a D rating for trying and need massive improvement / Lenovo E595 is my replacement of Acer and I'm afraid Acer gets a failing recommendation because of being to cheap. Plastic frames are another problem with Acer's newer units as I have a 2023 Aspire 3 and not even a year went by and a crack formed on the upper casing just outside of the USB type A port...Linux Mint is the only thing that saved this little Acer Swift1 from the trash bin ...

Posted by RandomBolt

- November 07, 2025, 16:46:54

I have purchased one of these and it is pretty high quality. Very good keyboard and overall construction, which is now the norm of the Acer Swift 1 models.

Main issues with my is the color accuracy of the screen (reds are quite bad) and dirty effect from one of the worst anti glare coatings that I have seen.
Still opted to keep it since it was sub 200€ and anti-glare screen is still much better for work than anything I might have come across.

What I find strange on the review is the performance of the CPU. Mine is the same N6000, at the same 7/20W setting but it also throttles to 5W. There is a "MMIO" power setting I couldn't find proper documentation for, which is set at that lower level.

This means that when Windows updates or some other task is running, the chip will be at the base 1.1GHz. It goes to 1.5GHz or so if forced the MMIO power to be 7W but it is still rather low. Temperatures seem to be in check (in the range of 70ºC) if using 7W, so I don't understand why Acer did this. Even more recent BIOS are still like this.

So CPU is overall good for Single threaded workloads or light tasks but will throttle to N3450/N4200 in multi threaded loads that exceed the power window time setting.
Can't really say it is Acer's fault or that AMD is doing better, as I came from an AMD 3020e with identical issues on a Lenovo device.

I will close by saying we have two old Acer devices with N3350, one is SF113-31 that is set at a lower power level than the SP111-31. Performance is worse, of course. It is possible whoever designs this models prefers stock wattage instead of tuning the power higher and using heatpipes like on the SP111-31.

Posted by allanfran2

- December 20, 2021, 21:09:55

Quote from: Stihy on December 19, 2021, 08:04:00
It's better to buy second hand 2 years old Lenovo ThinkPad for the price than this crappy unit.
Acer is well known for poor durability. That case and hinges cannot handle usage outside 1y warranty period.

My eBay searches show cheapest/refurbished thinkpad 2 years old with warranty is about €600.

Also does the old thinkpad may not have 10 hours battery life / 1.2 kg / wifi 6/ fanless for about €240 new. I do have some old thinkpads/latitudes are work horse (or server) but this is different use case.

Posted by Jochen1

- December 19, 2021, 20:17:29

I am writing this on my Acer Swift 1 (2017) with an N4100 processor. It's been a brilliant laptop for me - completely silent, magnificent build quality, 100% sRGB and good battery time. That said, I would never buy a computer of any kind that displays only slightly more than half of the colours, so I will not be upgrading to this one.

Posted by Milkah Jr.

- December 19, 2021, 09:22:25

Correction: memory is 2x2 GB LPDDR4x in this unit. 2 out of 4 channels are soldered. Your 8 GB unit solders 4 out 4.
Swift 1 and up don't use "single-channel" memory due to how SDRAM economics are right now.

Posted by Stihy

- December 19, 2021, 08:04:00

It's better to buy second hand 2 years old Lenovo ThinkPad for the price than this crappy unit.
Acer is well known for poor durability. That case and hinges cannot handle usage outside 1y warranty period.

Posted by Redaktion

- December 19, 2021, 04:28:53

Acer's 14-inch laptop scores some major points thanks to its great battery life, silent operation, keyboard backlight and matte IPS screen. The quad-core Pentium Silver N6000 performs about as well as a Skylate chip. Windows is not included. The whole package cost 279 Euros (~$315).

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Swift-1-SF114-34-Review-Silent-long-lasting-14-inch-laptop.586141.0.html