44 PCWorld JUNE 2020REVIEWS ACER SWIFT 3
pour a little cold water on your fantasy with
the next test: PCMark 8 Work. This
benchmark measures performance in
simulated office-drone tasks of documenthandling, video conferencing, and running
a spreadsheet. Yup, work that you almost
don’t want to get done sooner, because it
just leads to more work.
The Ice Lake laptops and the Swift 3 all
bunch up in front, we think because of the
advanced media and graphics cores on the
chips. The test largely seems to disrespect
laptops with discrete GPUs. With PCMark 8
Work it doesn’t really matter that much which
laptop you have, as TPS reports process at
mostly the same speed on all of them.
The Swift 3 is not meant for gaming, but
3DMark Sky Diver gives you a taste for how
well it would perform if you tried.
Depending on the game’s vintage, what
settings you use, and what your tolerance is
for frame rates, certain games should be fine
at 1080p, while others should probably be
responsibly played at 720p. Basically, the
Swift 3 will easily crush the “gaming”
experiences you’ve had with Intel’s older
UHD graphics, but it’s no replacement for a
proper discrete GPU.
The most important laptop metric for
many is battery life. The battery capacity in the
Swift 3 is rated at 50.29 Watt-hours, but it
safely tops up to 49Wh.
For our video rundown test, we put the
fully-charged laptop into airplane mode and
loop a 4K video using Windows 10’s Movies
& TV app. We connect earbuds (with volume
at midpoint) to reduce variability from the
audio subsystem. We set the displayBattery life on the Ryzen 7-based Swift 3 is in
line with Intel-based Swift 3 laptops we’ve seen,
but certainly nowhere near what you can get on
premium laptops.HP Spectre x360 13 2019
Core i7-8565U
HP Spectre x350 13 5t h Gen
Core i7-1065G7
Dell XPS 13 9300 Default
Core i7-1065G7
Dell XPS 15 7590Core i9-9980HKAcer SwCore i7-8565Uift 3Dell XPS 13 7390Core i7-10710UAcer SwCore i5-8250Uift 3Dell Inspiron 15 7000
Core i7-8565U
Acer SwRyzen 7 4700Uift 3M14 DefaultSI Prestige
Core i7-10710U
Acer SwCore i5-1035G1ift 3MLaptop 3 15”icrosoft Surface
Ryzen 7 3580U
HuawX Proei MateBook
Core i7-8550U4K Video Battery Life
SecondsLONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE971603758517956568637500490471464445435