With all that out of the way, the Acer Swift Edge 16 is an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a fast, productivity laptop with a beautiful 16-inch OLED display. It’s thin, light, and powerful, with the only drawback being its poor battery life. While we don’t have an India pricing for this laptop since it unfortunately isn’t available here, a direct conversion suggests that this laptop would also be a great value for money purchase were it to ever sell here.
The Acer Swift Edge 16 is a thin and lightweight premium laptop offering from Acer which features the new and elusive AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor, part of AMD’s mythical Phoenix lineup of CPUs.
The AMD Ryzen Phoenix chips, part of the Ryzen 7040 series, represent AMD’s latest line of HS-class CPUs designed for ultrathin laptops. These processors, built on a 4nm process and based on the Zen 4 architecture, stand out with their inclusion of a dedicated AI engine called “Ryzen AI.” This AI integration, influenced by AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx, is a significant leap in modern CPU technology, offering AI acceleration for tasks like video conferencing enhancements and AI-based computing. With up to eight Zen 4 cores and AMD’s latest RDNA 3 graphics, the Ryzen 7040 series chips promise improved performance for creators and AI workloads, challenging even Apple’s latest M2 chips.
Unfortunately, the Acer Swift Edge 16 is not officially available in India, but we did get to take the laptop on a test drive and put the new CPU to the test.
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (8 Cores | 16 Threads)
Max Boost Speed: 5.1 GHz
RAM: 16GB-5200 LPDDR5
Storage: 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD
Display: 16-inch, 3.2K (16:10 WQXGA+) OLED Display, 120Hz Refresh Rate
Price: $1299 (No India pricing)
The Acer Swift Edge 16 has a deceptively large display; you wouldn’t think it was a 16-inch display if the laptop was right in front of you. It’s surprisingly light and compact, weighing just 1.23Kg while being close to 13mm thick. Considering the performance we got out of this laptop during our testing, that’s incredibly impressive. They weren’t kidding when they said they were taking on the new 15-inch Apple MacBook Air M2 (review), which is still slightly lighter and thinner than this laptop. However, keep in mind that the Swift Edge 16 does offer a bigger display.
The Swift Edge 16 uses a magnesium-aluminium alloy for its lid and chassis which is lighter than aluminium only builds, but also not as sturdy. As a result, there’s quite a bit of flex on the display when opening and closing the machine. This applies to the laptop base and keyboard deck as well, which can twist and flex quite easily under pressure. However, this in no way implies that the laptop is not premium. It definitely looks and feels the part.
As far as aesthetics are concerned, the laptop features a fairly subtle aesthetic, which looks classy and doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. There are certainly more attractive looking laptops out there.
You’ve got a full-sized keyboard on the Swift Edge 16, which we found quite pleasant to type on. The arrow keys have been scrunched up to make room for the numpad and that can get a bit confusing at times, but the spacing between keys is otherwise great. The touchpad is precise and feels accurate; doesn’t get in the way while typing. This is a non-issue if you use a secondary mouse, however, considering this is a thin and light to be used on the go, some might have preferred a slightly larger touchpad, giving the amount of space available on palm rest.
The Swift Edge 16 has a good selection of ports for a thin and light laptop, including two USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port and a microSD card reader. There’s no Thunderbolt 4 port, which while unfortunate is understandable given this is an AMD chip. Other than that you have the latest WiFi 7 and Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
Coming to the webcam, the Acer Swift Edge 16 one-ups the MacBook Air by featuring a 1440p webcam. It however does not feature infrared for Windows Hello, but the laptop does come with a fingerprint sensor in the power button.
The Swift Edge 16 has a fantastic display. The 16-inch 3.2K WQXGA+ OLED display is beautiful and comes with a refresh rate of 120Hz. Out of the box, the visuals looked crisp with vibrant colours and dark blacks. It didn’t come as a surprise when the laptop scored 100 percent sRGB coverage and 99.3 percent DCI-P3 coverage during our display testing making it the best premium thin and light display we’ve tested to date.
While the Acer Swift Edge 16 may not be a powerhouse in terms of hardware specs, it certainly has the display for creative workloads. Especially if you consider the size and resolution of the screen.
With that, we come to the performance. We finally get to see how well the new Phoenix lineup AMD Ryzen 7 7840U compares to its competitors. In this case, we’re comparing the Acer Swift Edge 16 to the new 15-inch Apple MacBook Air M2 where we can, and the Lenovo Yoga 9i (review) which features a 13th gen Intel Core i7-1360P processor. We start things off with productivity, via the PCMark 10 benchmark.
The Acer Swift Edge 16 pulls ahead with a higher overall score than the Lenovo Yoga 9, but the scores are otherwise very close. The Acer Swift Edge 16 is cheaper, but the Yoga 9 is a 2-in-1. Still, we’d say the price-to-performance ratio leans slightly in the favour of the Swift Edge 16.
Next we come to processor benchmarks. We’ve used both Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6 to test the Ryzen 7 7840U.
The Ryzen 7 7840U comes out on top in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23. In R23, while the R7 7840U is slightly behind in single-thread performance, it far surpasses both the Intel Core i7-1360P and the M2 in terms of multi-thread performance.
The same continues in Geekbench 6 as well, with the single-core score being almost identical between the three laptops, but the Acer Swift Edge 16 pulling ahead in multi-core performance.
Finally, we used 3DMark to test the integrated GPU on the new AMD Ryzen 7 7840U.
From the scores, we can see that the new iGPU, the AMD Radeon 780M, is optimised for newer technologies, but falls behind on older benchmarks. The Intel Iris Xe performs far better in Firestrike and Wildlife. However, DirectX 12 performance (Time Spy and Night Raid for mobile platforms) surpasses the Intel Iris Xe. That said, overall performance between the two is very close.
The Acer Swift Edge 16 is a bit of an outlier, in that for an AMD laptop it has fairly terrible battery life. It lasted just 4.2 hours during the PCMark 10 battery test, which is very low for laptops in this category. It’s easy to see north of 6-7 hours of battery life, and even 12 hours in some cases from premium thin and lights depending on the use case, and the Acer Swift Edge 16 is nowhere near the bottomline. This essentially means that on a working day, you would probably need to charge this laptop at least once to keep it going the whole day.
With all that out of the way, the Acer Swift Edge 16 is an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a fast, productivity laptop with a beautiful 16-inch OLED display. It’s thin, light, and powerful, with the only drawback being its poor battery life. While we don’t have an India pricing for this laptop since it unfortunately isn’t available here, a direct conversion suggests that this laptop would also be a great value for money purchase were it to ever sell here.
