Among Acer's in-house apps are JumpStart, which frustratingly redirected me to Documents, which added to my frustration by simply opening the File Explorer to two pre-downloaded PDFs and Acer Legal Information, which I'm sure users are eager to read. Let me take a sip of water because there's more. Sure, it can be quickly uninstalled, but does it really need to be taking up precious storage space in the first place? There is, ExpressVPN, some privacy risk dashboard from a startup called FigLeaf (really, Acer?), and GoTrust ID, a way to use your phone for login authentication (something we strongly discourage). The parts your skin touches, the touchpad and keyboard, warmed to only 83 and 90 degrees, respectively. The toastiest location was the bottom panel, which reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit, just one degree above our comfort threshold. The Swift X's aluminum surfaces did a good job of dissipating hot air as we played a 15-minute 1080p YouTube video during our heat test. Our (oft-given) advice? Buy yourself an external webcam for important meetings and conference calls. The Swift X lasted for an impressive 9 hours and 11 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous web browsing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. Putting a discrete graphics card in a thin chassis is usually a recipe for short battery life. Its dominance continued in our synthetic test, in which the Swift X scored 8,827 on the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark, well ahead of the Envy 14 (7,423) and the Yoga 9i (5,014). The Swift X flexed its muscles in our graphics test, playing Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm at a silky smooth 67 frames per second, which narrowly tops the Envy 14 (63 fps, GTX 1650 Ti) and crushes anything with integrated graphics including the Yoga 9i (25 fps). Slim and lightweight - it must be time to start talking about integrated graphics, right? Hold on one moment! The Swift X isn't like those other ultra-thin laptops because deep within its belly is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, a chip capable of playing the latest games at smooth frame rates. That is in a different league than the Envy 14 (13:20), the Yoga 9i (14:24) and the category average (17:21). The Swift X needed only 8 minutes and 5 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution using the Handbrake app. In a sprint competition, this made its rivals, the Envy 14 (305 MBps) and Yoga 9i (692.3 MBps), look like speed walkers. It duplicated a 25GB multimedia file in just 26 seconds for a transfer rate of 1,050 megabytes per second. It isn't just the CPU and GPU helping the Swift X outperform its rivals - Acer outfitted this laptop with a blazingly quick 512GB NVMe SSD. On the Geekbench 5.3 overall performance, the Swift X scored an outstanding 7,954, crushing the Envy 14 (4,761, Core i5-1135G7), the Yoga 9i (5,321, Core i7-1185G7) and the category average (3,566). The Swift X carried my web browsing curiosities without even a flicker of lag. I watched YouTuber Kai W talk about film photography, streamed Billie Eilish's new album on YouTube Music, and poked around on Twitch to discover that Apex Legends is still a massive hit. The Swift X scoffed, loading 25 Google Chrome tabs in a flash. Running my typical workload on the Swift X was like handing a bodybuilder a 10-pound weight and asking for 15 reps. We'll highlight its graphics prowess in the next section and focus for now on the AMD chip, which is paired with 16GB of RAM on our unit.
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