Acer Swift 1 SF114-34 Review: Silent, long-lasting 14-inch laptop

[Redaktion]

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

[Stihy]

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.

[Milkah Jr.]

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.

[Jochen1]

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.

[allanfran2]

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.

[RandomBolt]

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.