Acer Swift 7 Review: A Thin, Sleek, Kaby Lake Powered Ultrabook

In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests--Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test--to prove out battery life with our test group of machines and the Acer Swift 7. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours have been enabled and displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average notebook this is somewhere between a 45 - 60% brightness setting.

Since notebook displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many notebook displays vary in brightness at each respective brightness setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is also critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.

Battery Life Testing
Heavy-Duty Workload And Light-Duty Battery Life Performance Tests


Acer Swift 7 BEP

Acer Swift 7 HHvideoloop

Acer makes much of the Swift 7’s battery life, and we can see why. The laptop provided excellent battery life scores, outshining the other slim laptops in the intensive Battery Eater Pro test, including the XPS 13. In our custom video playback testing, the machine fared well, but landed just above the middle of the pack. 

Acoustics: Thanks to its passive cooling, the Acer Swift 7 is silent, even under load. The keyboard is very quiet too, making this a perfect laptop for working in environments where noise is kept to a minimum.

Joshua Gulick

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine.  A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family. 

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