Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) Review – Let AI Be Known

The premium laptops welcome Intel’s new processors – the Acer Swift 14 AI now comes with the new Core Ultra 7 258V SoC for the third, Intel-powered variant, which is quite a different chip compared to its predecessor. With Meteor Lake proving that x86’s demise is greatly exaggerated, can Lunar Lake keep the momentum going?

Unboxing

It should be no surprise that when the laptop name already has the buzzword ‘AI’ attached to it, you will be seeing some kind of AI branding in the packaging too. Ignoring that, opening the box you’ll be greeted with the laptop hidden beneath the carton board, with the charger compartment printed with the upcycling instructions to re-use it as a laptop stand.

You don’t get a whole lot in the package, and here’s a quick list:
– Type G (UK) socket adapter
– 65W USB-C charger
– Laptop setup guide
– Warranty leaflet
– International warranty leaflet
– The Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) laptop

Walkaround

The design of the new Swift 14 AI can be best described as “subtle”, though amongst the subtlety you can still see references to the laptop’s “AI PC” nature. The display is a FHD+ OLED panel with 60Hz refresh rate – perfectly serviceable – and an array of webcam and sensors with a mechanical privacy shutter to disable the webcam if needed.

Looking at the keyboard and touchpad, it’s all fairly standard affair. There is an abstract shape located at the top-right of the touchpad, and this is the AI activity indicator as Acer puts it, which illuminates when the NPU (neural processing unit) onboard is running. Under the laptop we can see a decently-sized exhaust fan hidden under the intake grille, which expels the heat away through the exhaust port.

The hinge of the Swift 14 AI allows the display to be opened flat, though not perfectly flat as the image demonstrates. It’s a few degrees off, but more than enough if you ever need to lay the display flat. From the rear view, you can also see the exhaust angled downward so it’s mostly hidden from view.

In terms of I/O, it’s pretty standard for an ultrathin laptop these days – this means a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports with one located on either side (left side can be used for charging other devices), an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. Charging is done through either of the two Thunderbolt ports with its included 65W USB-C charger.

A few extras worth mentioning: the Swift 14 AI also comes with a fingerprint sensor on the power button itself for instant login, and there’s also a dedicated key for the laptop’s AcerSense app (which allows you to adjust settings like charging limits). Finally, the aforementioned AI activity indicator illuminates when the NPU onboard the Core Ultra chip is running – in this case, we turned on the webcam effects which does use NPU for post-processing.

Specifications

Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51-716M)

CPU	Intel Core Ultra 7 258V (4P+4LPE – 8 cores, 8 threads)
RAM	32GB LPDDR5X-8533 (on-package)
GPU	Integrated: Intel Arc Graphics 140V (8 Xe Cores)
NPU	Intel AI Boost NPU (47 TOPS INT8)
Storage	Kingston 512GB SSD (OM8PGP4512Q-AA – PCIe 4.0, M.2 2280)
Display	14″ FHD+ 16:10 OLED 1920×1200@60Hz 100% DCI-P3, 10-bit (1.07B colors) 400 nits SDR / 500 nits HDR max brightness Glossy non-touch panel VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification Eyesafe Certified 2.0
Audio	Downward-firing stereo speakers DTS:X Ultra Support
Webcam	1440p IR camera Mechanical webcam shutter
Biometrics	Fingerprint Facial recognition
I/O	Left: 1x HDMI 2.1 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Typr-A with power-off charging support 2x Thunderbolt 4 (DisplayPort, 65W USB PD) Right: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type-A 1x 3.5mm combo jack
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 (Intel Killer BE1750i / Intel BE201NGW)
Battery	65Wh Li-ion
Power Supply	65W, USB-C charger
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 24H2 (Copilot+ PC)
Dimensions	312.4 x 221.2 x 9.7 mm
Weight	1.28kg

Performance

Note: All benchmark data are tested on Standard or equivalent power profiles unless otherwise stated. Some tests are unavailable on laptops with Qualcomm SoCs due to instruction set incompatibility, which will be represented as 0 points in the charts.

Storage

The SSD used here is the OEM-exclusive model from Kingston, which has no consumer equivalents as far as we can tell. This PCIe 4.0 SSD is a mid-range model with a pretty decent random I/O performance, especially in low queue depth workloads.

CPU

Starting with the CPU tests, and it’s not looking particularly good if multi-core performance is what you’re looking for. Granted, while Intel is putting more focus on the feature set and battery life more than performance, the lack of core count in the Core Ultra 7 258V (with 4 P-cores and 4 LPE-cores) does hamper its performance – especially when its main rival, the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, has nearly doubled its performance thanks to all of its 12 cores.

AMD’s top Ryzen AI chip leads the R20 test, which represent the best in x86-native applications; and even its predecessor, the Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 7 155H has 6+8+2 cores to work with, far outperforms the Lunar Lake silicon. That being said, the CU7 258V mostly keeps up and outright leads in single-threaded tests, which better reflects the daily performance overall – and based on our usage during testing we have not observed any hiccups, so that’s a good news at least.

GPU

The graphics tests show some interesting results – the Arc 140V onboard the CU7 258V processor has largely leads all tests across the board, short for Steel Nomad Light and Time Spy Extreme, where itself and its competitors are pretty much in the same ballpark. The new Battlemage architecture seems to do wonders for Intel, though we might add that the Lunar Lake’s super-fast LPDDR5X-8533 on-package memory certainly alleviates some of the memory bottlenecks commonly found in onboard GPUs.

System

Novabench shows the Core Ultra 7 258V trailing behind all of its competition, with the Acer laptop barely leading the ASUS counterpart, the Zenbook S 14. The major culprit of this comes down to the CPU performance – specifically, multi-core performance. Performance mode does improve scores, but only by a slight bit as there is not much performance left to extract.

On the flip side, the Acer Swift 14 AI managed to lead the charts in the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, particularly thanks to its excellent Productivity score and Digital Content Creation score, which can be credited to the new Arc 140V GPU. Note that the Productivity scores does fluctuate more than the other two metrics, though the takeaway here is that regardless of power modes chosen, the performance are largely identical.

Battery

Here’s the most impressive part of the Acer Swift 14 AI: its battery life. We recorded the highest-ever runtime from an x86-powered Windows laptop with a staggering 18 hours and 51 minutes on a single charge – if there is one concrete evidence that x86 CPU architecture is not inherently bad on power efficiency all by itself, Acer has presented the strongest case thus far.

The Good

Let’s start with the good aspect of the new Acer Swift 14 AI: the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor powering the laptop is extremely efficient, and heat is never an issue even running at full tilt. We measured temperatures in the mid-80s under heavy load, which is great showing for Acer despite the laptop using a single-fan configuration that is often less effective than dual-fan setups.

Even when you’re running something demanding, the fan noise is doesn’t produce any high-pitched whines, which is a big plus. GPU performance is solid as well, and it’s definitely capable of delivering decent framerates in modern AAA games (assuming drivers matured far enough to not cause issues, as Arc is still relatively new compared to, say, Radeon).

For the keyboard and touchpad, I’d give it a ‘B’ – not a standout, but perfectly serviceable if you aren’t particular about the tactility of the keys of the surface area of the touchpad. Webcam is a plus too, providing high resolution and generally solid image quality, plus some additional features like auto framing enabled by the NPU onboard.

The laptop’s battery life is easily the number one selling point of this laptop based on our results – nearly 19 hours on a single charge is unheard of just two years ago in a Windows PC, and you can easily last through a day with how power-efficient it is running on battery. Charging is easy too, since USB-C port is ubiquitous these days – you can just grab your smartphone’s charger if they can supply enough juice, which saves even more clutter from your bag for your daily routines.

The Bad

There is one major downside for the Core Ultra chip that resides within the new Swift 14 AI: its multi-core performance is just underwhelming. Granted, there is very little that OEMs like Acer can do to squeeze more performance out of it simply because it lacked the cores, but if you intend to look for a laptop that can crunch through some heavy compute, this won’t be the one.

Speakers is another one that’s worth pointing out – while loud, it lacks in bass; EQ tuning is not enough to compensate for it. That’s a pretty common corner cut in cheaper laptops, but we’ve seen that cheaper laptops are beginning to improve on the audio department, so hopefully Acer can improve this on the next iteration.

Finally, as much as AI is the hottest thing in the tech industry right now, do we really need dedicated LED embedded on the touchpad to show that the NPU activity? Plain gimmick, if you ask me – but your judgement is as good as mine on this one.

Verdict

At RM4,999, the Intel variant of Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) is excellent on battery, great in daily work, decent overall, but anything that demands lots of compute will not be this laptop’s forte. Still, it’s more than serviceable if all you’re looking for is something that gets the job done, and you won’t have to worry about the battery holding you back while you’re on the go.

Special thanks to Acer Malaysia for providing us with the Swift 14 AI laptop for this review.