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Ryzen 3 4300U makes Intel's Core i3 look old - Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 in review

Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 in review: a well-rounded device with Ryzen 3 4300U as well
Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 in review: a well-rounded device with Ryzen 3 4300U as well
Acer's good-looking 14-inch notebook features a slim metal case, dual-channel RAM, and excellent battery life. Its Ryzen 3 APU manages to run consistently at high clock speeds.

The Swift 3 SF314-42 is the successor to last year’s Swift 3 SF314-41. Like its predecessor it features a good-looking slim metal case, albeit the new model is slightly smaller and slightly lighter than last year’s.

The notebook features AMD’s current entry-level Ryzen 3 APU, a Ryzen 3 4300U, which is supposed to take on Intel’s Core i3 range of processors. And quite frankly, it does so very well. Every single Core i3 laptop with Comet Lake or Ice Lake reviewed by us in the past would have been unable to keep up.

The Zen 2-based architecture offers more than enough performance for typical office and internet applications, and the integrated Vega 5 GPU even allows for some limited gaming as long as the hardware requirements are not too taxing. The GPU also ran at full turbo boost speed during our tests.

The laptop’s high performance had no detrimental effect on battery life at all, and the device should easily last a full workday on a single charge. The battery can be charged either with the included power supply or via USB-C thanks to the laptop’s USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB-C port’s support for DisplayPort and Power Delivery.

The IPS FHD display offers wide viewing angles, a matte surface, acceptable color representation, and decent contrast. Its maximum brightness, on the other hand, was too low, as was its AdobeRGB and sRGB color space coverage.

More information and a variety of benchmark results can be found in our Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 review.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > Reviews > Ryzen 3 4300U makes Intel's Core i3 look old - Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 in review
Sascha Mölck, 2020-06-18 (Update: 2020-06-18)