The Acer Swift X 14 is a compact and capable 14-inch notebook with a dedicated graphics chip, a crisp, colour-accurate OLED screen, and plenty of connectivity options. It's designed for content creators that work on the go. And it should fulfill that purpose, though its limited battery life will constrain its mobility.

This year's Acer Swift X has a similar clean look as its predecessor. Some users will likely find it bland. But its aluminium chassis, which has been reworked, feels sturdy without much flex. The weight has crept up slightly to 1.55kg, perhaps due to the marginally larger 14.5-inch screen. It's still fairly portable, with a compact footprint. Bezels are thin, and more importantly, the display has been upgraded. It's now an OLED (instead of IPS) screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, and is brighter at 400 nits (up from 300 nits). There are also slightly more pixels with a 2.8K resolution, but with the same productivity-focused 16:10 aspect ratio.

In my review of the previous model, I had mentioned that a microSD card reader would have been the icing on the cake. So I'm glad to see that Acer has listened, and added this feature to the new model. Aside from that, the Swift X retains the same set of ports: Two Thunderbolt 4 (also used for charging), two USB-A, HDMI and audio jack. In terms of Wi-Fi connectivity, the Swift X supports Wi-Fi 6E, which is timely as the standard will be rolled out in Singapore this year. The keyboard and touchpad seem similar to last year's. I would have liked a bit more key travel. The 1080p webcam also seem unchanged. It produces decent-looking images, with some noise. But there's no privacy shutter, nor face recognition.

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Besides sporting the latest 13th gen Intel processor, the new Swift X comes with Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 4050 graphics. It's a slight upgrade over the RTX 3050 Ti in the previous model. This chip will help content creators in tasks like video rendering, and will run most games smoothly, depending on the settings. For instance, I could run Diablo IV at over 60fps consistently at the native resolution. In Watch Dogs: Legion at 1080p and Ultra setting, the Acer managed 55fps. That's slightly slower than the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus, which has a RTX 4060. I tested the Acer in its Performance mode (toggle using Fn+F shortcut). The fans will become audible in this mode, approaching that of some gaming notebooks. The bottom of the laptop gets warm while gaming, though it runs mostly cool for less demanding tasks.

The Acer Swift X 14 lasted 6hr 21min in our video playback test with the screen at maximum brightness. That's about 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor, but the new Swift does sport a brighter display. At S$2,198, this laptop is competing with mainstream notebooks like the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (S$2,349). Both notebooks are good picks if you want to do some content creation and gaming. If you're more of a dedicated gamer, consider the Aftershock Forge 15X instead. Acer also sells a 16-inch AMD Ryzen 9-powered version for S$2,498. The Swift X 14 is available now from Lazada, Shopee, and Amazon SG.

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Note: Review unit provided by Acer.