Acer Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-01) Review – A Reasonably-Priced Snapdragon-Powered Laptop

Unboxing

Meet the new Acer Swift Go 14 AI laptop, specifically the SFG14-01 variant that carries the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset representing one of the new Arm-powered Copilot+ PCs introduced to the market just earlier this year. Acer, as usual, adopted a recyclable packaging that also includes some upcycling elements to make the most out of the materials used.

The items you’ll get from the box package includes:
– Type G (UK) socket adapter
– 65W USB-C charger
– USB-C to HDMI adapter
– Laptop setup guide
– Warranty leaflet
– International warranty leaflet
– The Acer Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-01) laptop

Walkaround

Like its big brother, the Acer Swift 14 AI we reviewed recently – the new Acer Swift Go 14 AI shares mostly identical designs both outside and inside, though there are some differences. For one, the display is an IPS anti-glare panel that is rather dim by today’s standards.

More specifically, it is a 300-nit panel that should do fine in most indoor situations, but since we’re taking photos under bright studio lights, it’s bright enough to overpower the display’s brightness. Up top we get the same QHD webcam array with IR sensors to enable Windows Hello facial recognition support.

It’s all pretty standard as far as keyboard and touchpad are concerned, short for the small shape on the top-right corner of the touchpad that illuminates when any AI activity is detected. Pressing the Copilot button also lights the button, though we don’t think that involved using NPU since Microsoft’s current implementation simply opens a web app that can be run on any PC. The exhaust is directly facing towards the bottom bezel of the display, a design common in ultra-light laptops to obscure the cutouts for cleaner looks.

The laptop keyboard also include a fingerprint sensor directly embedded into the power button, plus an AcerSense key for direct access of the app.

On the surface, the hinge design looks identical to the Swift 14 AI, but there’s a crucial difference: the Swift Go 14 AI retains the lift-hinge mechanism popular in ultra-light laptops several years ago, but that design has since died down as laptop makers opted to solve the intake clearance problem by simply making rubber feet taller. That’s why you can see the small piece of rubber embedded on the display side to avoid scratching the chassis itself.

For I/O, it’s bare bones: you get a pair of USB4 ports, a pair of USB-A ports on either sides of the laptop, and a headphone jack. We’re not sure why the HDMI port is not included here given that there is clearly space for it (check our review of the Swift 14 AI for comparison), but Acer has opted to provide you a USB-C to HDMI dongle should you need to connect to devices like projectors.

Specifications

Acer Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-01-X49U)

Chipset / CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 (8 cores, 8 threads)
RAM	16GB LPDDR5X-8533 (on-package)
GPU	Integrated: Qualcomm Adreno X1 GPU (1.7 TFLOPS)
NPU	Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (45 TOPS)
Storage	Western Digital SN5000S 1TB SSD (SDEQNSJ-1T00-1014 – PCIe 4.0, M.2 2280)
Display	TCL CSOT T9 MNE507QS2-2 14.5″ IPS, anti-glare non-touch 1920×1200 (FHD+ 16:10) 120Hz refresh rate / 3ms response time 100% sRGB, 8-bit (16.7M colors) 300 nits max brightness
Audio	Downward-firing stereo speakers DTS:X Ultra Support
Webcam	1440p IR camera Windows Hello support Mechanical webcam shutter
Biometrics	Fingerprint (power button) Facial recognition (webcam + IR)
I/O	Left: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type-A with power-off charging support 2x USB4 (40Gbps) (DisplayPort, 65W USB PD, 15W output charging) Right: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) Type-A 1x 3.5mm combo jack
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 (Qualcomm FastConnect 7800)
Battery	75Wh 3-cell Li-ion
Power Supply	65W, USB-C charger
Operating System	Windows 11 Home 24H2 for ARM64 (Copilot+ PC)
Dimensions	322.6 x 225.95 x 10 mm
Weight	1.32kg

Performance

Storage

The SSD we have here powering the Swift 14 Go AI is the Western Digital SN5000S 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD that puts out pretty respectable performance, hitting a sequential read speed of nearly 6.4GB/s and write speed of 5.5GB/s. Random I/O performance is pretty solid as well, and overall it’s a fairly performant SSD as far as OEM models go.

CPU

We’re comparing the laptop’s Snapdragon chip in two scenarios: Cinebench 2024 represent native performance, while Cinebench R20 represents performance for applications that doesn’t natively support Arm-based processors. In the former, the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 chip manages to outperform Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V (which features 4P+4E cores), though it loses out slightly in single-threaded workloads; as for non-native performance, the chip naturally gets knocked down a notch, but not far behind Intel’s current-gen offering, as far as multi-core performance is concerned.

GPU

Oddly, while we managed to run 3DMark Time Spy in the X Elite chips, the application somehow couldn’t work with the X Plus chip for its standard Time Spy benchmark. Still, the Extreme variant worked fine, which made this rather baffling to say the least. In any case, benchmark numbers shows that the Adreno GPU onboard the X Plus chip to be significantly underpowered compared to contemporaries, and at one point we even observed graphical glitches during the benchmark process. Still a long way to go for Qualcomm to make games work on these chips, for sure.

System

Here’s an interesting observation: Qualcomm is actually lagging behind Intel in CPU scores, despite the chip itself managed to outperform the Lunar Lake silicon in multi-core performance. That’s likely due to the other functions of the chip that Intel fared better at, given that Novabench’s CPU tests don’t purely look at plain multi-core grunt – besides that, the lack of GPU performance is once again dragging the scores down. (We also included the x86 emulation performance, for comparison.)

Battery

Since we can’t use PCMark 10 for battery testing due to compatibility reasons, we opted for the Procyon test which focuses solely on video playback runtime, though it can be less representative of a laptop’s overall endurance in general. Still, the numbers do tell us that this laptop can last nearly 15 hours on a single charge with 200 nits of brightness (good enough in a well-lit indoor environment), which is pretty good overall – it remains one of the strengths of these Snapdragon-powered laptops.

The Good

Just like all Snapdragon X-powered laptops we’ve tested thus far, the Acer Swift Go 14 AI has two major positives: the CPU performance, and the battery life. For the applications that are natively supported, the X Plus chip, being a mainstream variant of the lineup, is still capable of outperforming Intel’s Lunar Lake processors on raw multi-core performance. Battery life is another plus, and based on our testing it’s suffice to say the laptop is capable to last a whole day of usage while unplugged.

In terms of thermals and noise, the laptop performs perfectly fine on Normal power profiles, with fan noise barely noticeable; Performance does kick things up a notch so more noise is expected, but in all cases, the thermals are at worst around low 80s, while mostly hovering around high 70s. Also, the keyboard and touchpad are generally pleasant to use, no complaints here.

As far as the Copilot+ PC’s aspects are concerned, they’re not exactly revolutionary – but features like webcam effects and Copilot certainly works as a set of value-added features that enhances the general usage of the laptop. There’s also the modern-day features like the new and faster Wi-Fi 7 (provided that your router supports it), on-device security features like biometric logins, and onboard NPU processing which should overall keep the security and privacy in check.

Speaking of user presence detection, Acer has this app called “Acer User Sensing” that utilize sensors to enable some proximity-based features, like locking the laptop if you’re away or a reminder to take a break, and another reminder to keep your eye distance reasonable from the screen. There’s also the GT Booster AIFlow software that uses “AI traffic shaping technology” to improve your networks, but for the most part we find that it’s quite useful as a monitoring tool to see what apps are hogging the connections, or if there are any network issues.

The Bad

There is also two major downside of the Snapdragon chips today: GPU performance, and compatibility. As the numbers shown, the Adreno GPU needs to get some serious muscle-up to keep up with both Intel and AMD’s onboard GPUs, and that’s not mentioning the lack of DX12 Ultimate that effectively prevents a majority of games today to even run on this laptop.

Compatibility issues also reared its ugly head when we tried to do brightness measurement on the laptop for the battery testing, as our SpyderX’s driver simply doesn’t have an Arm-compatible version for this – meaning we need a separate x86-based PC to continue the process. You’ll be fine if the apps you use are mainstream, but it can be quite the exercise to make sure everything you use is compatible, particularly if they’re specialized software.

One more thing worth mentioning is the adaptive brightness behavior of this laptop. It’s hard to tell if this is a Windows feature or a driver-level feature (in this case, it’d be under Adreno GPU’s responsibility): the brightness can drop hugely when it sees on-screen content is dominated by dark colors, and vice versa, you can get blasted in bright white light when you got a brief moment of bright-colored imagery on screen. I had to turn this feature off in Windows Settings as the brightness change is simply too aggressive to my liking.

Verdict

Acer is commanding a price of RM3,999 for one of the new Snapdragon-powered Swift Go 14 AI laptop, and for the price, you’ll be getting a laptop that excels in CPU performance (provided that it supports the software), battery life, and some neat features that makes the laptop a more polished package. You’ll have to understand its downsides to make the most out of this laptop though – but if you’re someone who just needs a laptop for productivity, this is a fairly decent choice overall.

Special thanks to Acer Malaysia for providing the Swift Go 14 AI (SFG14-01-X49U) laptop for this review.