Acer Swift 3 SF315 (15.6-inch, 2018)

Ultrabook-beating performance; Affordable; Understated design

Display quality is mixed; Low battery life

It may be a basic laptop in some respects, but thanks to its AMD Ryzen processor, the Swift 3 is enticingly powerful.

The combination of AMD’s Ryzen mobile, along with a good design, and excellent specifications for the price, really do make the Acer Swift 3 an appealing proposition. We’ve never tested a laptop at this price point with a 512 GB SSD before, and the 8...

Stays cool ; Dim, reflective screen; Overpriced; Middling performance; Tons of bloatware ; The Ryzen CPU-based Acer Swift 3 is a 15.6-inch laptop that's nothing to brag about.

Dim, reflective screen; Overpriced; Middling performance; Tons of bloatware ; The Ryzen CPU-based Acer Swift 3 is a 15.6-inch laptop that's nothing to brag about.

The Ryzen CPU-based Acer Swift 3 is a 15.6-inch laptop that's nothing to brag about.

matte IPS display ; Full-HD resolution ; NVMe-SSD ; thin, light, compact

reflective display ; slow card reader ; gaming performance below GeForce MX150

Acer's multimedia allrounder comes with an AMD Raven-Ridge APU that offers more than enough computing power for all standard use cases. The dedicated GPU enables gaming in a limited capacity. However, resolution and quality settings have to be selected...

competes well with Kaby Lake R CPUs ; Vega 10 GPU bests Intel iGPUs by wide margin ; relatively compact and portable ; ports are well-positioned and offer wide variety ; fingerprint reader is nice addition ; fans are well-tuned and quiet ; heat output...

relatively short battery life compared to Kaby Lake R devices ; no Thunderbolt 3 ; slow card reader ; inconsistent PCIe SSD ; screen is far too dim ; screen is far too reflective ; screen has low color space coverage ; sound is thin ; keyboard is...

Ryzen 7 is here, but not in full force. Acer's Swift 3 is one of the first machines to use AMD's new APU, but it may not be the best picture of what the chip can do. While performance is slightly improved from the Ryzen 5 2500U in most cases, it still...

strong performance at Kaby Lake Refresh level ; Vega 8 IGP beats Intel UHD Graphics significantly ; thin, light and compact ; properly processed ; ports are well positioned ; TPM 2.0, fingerprint-reader ; very nice ClickPad ; very good contrast ratio ;...

short runtimes ; no Thunderbolt 3 ; cf. slow PCIe-SSD ; slow card reader ; narrow number pad ; screen too dark ; low color-space coverage ; unsatisfactory sound

With Ryzen 5 Mobile, AMD clearly sees itself ahead of Intel's Kaby Lake Refresh chips, a statement that we can agree with if we remove "clearly" from it. In the case of the 2500U, the general computing power is at eye level with the Core i5-8250U or...

IPS display ; SSD + HDD ; runs quietly ; remains cool ; very good battery life

dark display ; slow memory card reader

Update 07/25/2018: We loved the 4K SKU of the Acer Swift 3 SF-315. The matte panel was very bright, and was thus even usable outdoors. Its 100 % sRGB color space coverage means it’s ideal for professional photo editing, and we were able to all but...