Acer Swift Go 14 SFG14-63 Laptop – AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, 16GB, 1TB SSD, Integrated Graphics, 14″ 2.8K OLED, Windows 11, Iron

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast windows laptop with superb display
This is a superb, fast windows laptop that lives up to most of the good things stated in the Amazon ad. The OLED display is magnificent in its depth of colours and deep black. It is also helps greatly to have a 16:10 ratio screen rather than the usual 16:9 which is the main reason that I opted for this laptop. I am also very pleased with the lightning fast speed afforded by the Core i7 chip and 16Gb RAM. I have marked it down to 4 stars though because I have found the battery life to be nowhere near the claimed 9.5 hours. It’s more like 6.5 hours but I suppose if I turned down the display brightness and turned off the backlit keyboard I could do better. Another odd point is that the excellent full HD camera is not compatible with Windows Hello facial recognition. I’m hoping that that problem will be addressed by a future software update.
After writing the above I decided to check the battery life. The laptop achieved 4 hours 45 minutes from 100% to the first “battery low” warning at 10% in a series of 9 operating times of =/- 30 minutes of which less than an hour was streaming.. Exactly half the claimed 9.5 hours which is pretty disgraceful.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great laptop
Really pleased with this laptop, bought to replace an old Asus laptop. This new Acer is fast, has a great screen (I’m a photographer so screen quality is important to me) and the keyboard feels like a much more quality item than the Asus keyboard. Had it for a month now and haven’t found anything I don’t like about it….

5.0 out of 5 stars So far, so good. Good value, good specifications and easy to set up
I have no hesitation in recommending this laptop. I am not a power user but this laptop does everything I want.

I’d prefer the DEL key to be at the bottom right of the keyboard and I’ll need to become accustomed to the illuminated white letters on the silver grey keyboard. UPDATE: I now find just one button, F11, turns the keyboard illumination on / off so the keys change to a visible dark colour. It’s clever.

But the good points far outweigh these items. The speed, lightness, connectivity, wi-fi and set up have all been impressive. So far the battery has been good but it’s early days (2 days only). Otherwise I’d give it 5 stars. Maybe more premium laptops are have more Pros but this was my price point. UPDATE: battery good for my purposes, so I think it’s worth 5 stars.

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing laptop with a spectacular screen, above average IO but a few niggles
This laptop is amazing. The 120Hz 2880×1800 OLED screen is wonderful for productivity. Being 16:10, you get more vertical real estate for graphic design, CAD, or programming. And being a 120Hz screen means it is also fantastic for gaming. Ergonomics are also a highlight with a keyboard that is great to type on. I was able to hit 75WPM with 96% accuracy, which for a laptop keyboard is very impressive. Key response is snappy but smooth, and travel is expectedly short but enough to make the bounce back of the keys feel nice. The trackpad is large and works well; however, the lack of dedicated LMB and RMB is a downer on what would otherwise be a nice trackpad. I would highly recommend a Bluetooth mouse.

The chassis is made of metal and extremely solid. There is little to no perceivable flex, and the screen hinge is firm but smooth. IO is quite good for a modern laptop, with two USB-A ports on either side, two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt, and a TF slot/MicroSD slot. Audio is where this laptop begins to falter. The speakers are serviceable but unimpressive. I have gotten some decent audio by using Dolby Atmos, but there is only so much you can do with these speakers. Bring headphones.

The CPU is very impressive, having 14 physical cores and 20 logical threads, making it an absolute multithreaded monster perfect for video editing. The RTX 3050 isn’t going to blow you away, but it’s a modest GPU that will handle practically anything you throw at it at decent settings. Despite being an RTX line GPU, do not expect it to handle ray tracing as it simply is not powerful enough. Quake RTX runs at around 40FPS at 1080p. While this is disappointing, remember that RTX encompasses a wide variety of features beyond ray tracing, and thankfully cooling is excellent, and the temps are far from the typical 80+°C you find on many laptops of this size.

One last thing to consider is the SSD size is rather small at 500GB, and it comes with Windows 11 preinstalled with bloatware such as McAfee. I can confirm this laptop runs perfectly fine with Windows 10; however, you will have to sideload the storage controller into Windows 10’s installer as Windows 10 doesn’t come with a compatible driver.

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant ‘budget’ performer with a genuine premium feel.
I’ve been working in the technology field for many years, and any laptop around £600 is going to have some compromises. We got two for our daughters, who needed something reasonable for school.

We opted for the base model 8Gb Ryzen 5 with internal graphics, plenty of oomph for the money and its intended use – the lower power requirement means the battery has 11 hours of charge, and so far, they are coming home with a few hours left in it every day. This is not a games machine; it could run older titles (c2015) well enough; it is suited more to Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, and general browsing.

Where this laptop stands out is the genuine premium feel of it without sacrificing too much. It is slim and light with a rigid all-aluminium case – this is very unusual at this price. It has dual fans which will keep it cool. The keys are backlit, and the screen is a high-quality OLED at 16:10 aspect with excellent contrast and colours. It looks premium and has the build quality to match.

Opening the laptop creates a slight tilt to the keyboard deck which is excellent for comfort. The trackpad is good, a little small, but they did squeeze a big keyboard onto the deck with a fingerprint sensor on the power button. I would say the keyboard is not something that would enable high-speed touch typing, as it has a shallow travel (I use a mechanical keyboard at home) but the keyboard is one of the biggest for a 14” laptop, and I managed 60 words a minute.

The speakers are not bad, but this is a laptop, not a sound system; there is a headphone jack. There are plenty of connections, including two fast USB-Cs (screen and charging), HDMI, and USB-B. It comes with 11g wifi (wifi 6), absolutely trouble-free and fast, and my daughter’s Bluetooth headphones worked without any fuss.

Previously, they had a Lenovo (bits fell off after two years, and the keyboard broke) and an MSI Modern 14, which managed to brick itself – again, just two years old. I know Acer laptops well, and this one is based on the admired Swift chassis as an evolution, not a revolution.

Acer laptops tend to last well; getting five years of daily use out of one is a given, and this model improves on the older Swift models, which was an excellent laptop. The Swift Go is getting excellent reviews in the press, and for the money, you would be hard-pushed to beat it at the moment (Nov 23).