[ad_1]
Acer unveiled its refreshed Swift X laptops at CES 2022 in January. Now we have some compelling new details about the fresh hardware that will be packed into these stylish consumer portables. TechTube’s Matthew Moniz shared a sneak peek video of the new Acer Swift X 16 and X 14 laptops today.
While we’re getting some sweet new details, not all of them have been revealed, especially when it comes to the new Intel Arc GPU. Moniz said there is “strictly no benchmark”.
The Acer Swift X laptops on camera are described as pre-production units, but Acer (and Intel?) management must be happy with the products to send them to YouTube en masse.
Before we get into the full specs of the new Swift X laptops, it’s worth mentioning the key upgrades as pointed out by Moniz. First, the screens went from 16:9 to 16:10 and increased the pixel density. Since these aren’t high-end designs, there are still some aspects of these IPS screens, such as the claimed 60Hz refresh rate, and a maximum brightness of 400 nits, which is good but not spectacular.
Other improvements that have been noticed include an improved port selection with a barrel charger port and yesterday’s USB-C replacing this year’s twin Thunderbolt ports. These are included along with an HDMI port and a USB A port. On the other side of the laptops are the Kensington lock, USB A and audio combo port.
The webcams were upgraded to FHD (from 720p) in 2022, but they don’t offer Windows Hello biometrics. However, these laptops have fingerprint scanners on the power keys, in the upper right corner of the keyboard.
There are some big changes in there, as well as some nice little changes. First up, our headliner features the new Acer Swift X 16 with Intel Arc discrete GPU. Very few details have been shared regarding this GPU. Moniz may be telegraphing some clues. In the part of the video that touches on Intel’s Arch GPU performance, in a throwaway comment style, it says that rumors suggest that we should wait between Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3070 Ti performance levels (mobile GPU performance). One should expect that such an opinion would never be casual but has been thoroughly verified by the powers that be at Acer/Intel.
Other changes are the move to Intel’s latest 12th generation Alder Lake-P mobile processors. We don’t know what models will be available in January, but now we know that both machines will have at least an Intel Core i7-1260P 12C/16T option. This 28W CPU combines four Intel performance cores with eight efficiency cores. This is quite a change from last year’s Swift X models with 15W AMD Ryzen processors.
One of the small but interesting improvements we mentioned earlier is the inclusion of dual PCIe slots in these 2022 designs. It should be noted that one is a gen 4 and the other a gen 3 connector due to system PCIe lane limitations.
Finally, as for the ins and outs of the laptop explored in the video, Moniz looks at cooling. While the larger laptop has a twin-fan cooler with thick ducts, according to the YouTuber, the X 14 has the same or similar cooling performance as last year’s AMD version, so it’s the CPU watts that are most concerned.
Details
|
Model |
Acer Swift X 16 |
Acer Swift X 14 |
|---|---|---|
|
CPU |
Intel Core i7-1260P 12C/16T |
Intel Core i7-1260P 12C/16T |
|
GPU |
Intel Arc unspecified model |
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti |
|
Display |
16 inches 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixels, IPS |
14 inch 16:10, 2240 x 1400 pixels, IPS |
|
Random Access Memory |
16GB LPDDR5 sold |
16GB LPDDR5 sold |
|
Storage |
1TB NVMe, + spare |
1TB NVMe + spare |
|
Weight |
3.86 lbs, 1.75 kg |
3.09 lbs, 1.40 kg |
|
Battery |
56 W |
58 W |
|
Price |
1,249 dollars |
1,299 dollars |
Moniz took some time to reflect on the price of these 2022 Acer Swift X machines. If you look at the chart above, you’ll see that the larger model is worth less than the feature. We’ll have to wait and see if that Intel Arc will be as cheap as the Intel chipset’s promotional version, or if it’ll be more expensive due to the more capable NVIDIA GPUs.
On pricing, TechTube was a bit upset about the price hike over last year. Moniz Swift X 14 He said it will launch in 2021 for $999, and even with the machine on the table, he says he doesn’t know if the new CPU will make a significant difference to performance and/or battery life. What’s more, this price hike will start to push these laptops into tougher competition, which will take away some of their appeal.
The new Acer Swift X 16 and X 14 are expected to be released in June.
[ad_2]
Source link