Acer Swift Edge 16 review: A stunning OLED laptop with a crazy-good AMD Ryzen CPU

There are two features that I love to see on a laptop. The first is an OLED display, and the second is a CPU that’s speedy-fast. The new Acer Swift Edge 16 has both of those, and it is the reason why this became my favorite laptop during the three-week period that I had it.

Thanks to the big and bright 16-inch 3200×2000 resolution display, the Acer Swift Edge 16 easily knocks most other laptops out of the water for streaming and multimedia experiences. That’s just the icing on the cake, though. The power of the AMD Ryzen 7840U CPU under the hood of this laptop really will surprise you for tasks beyond web browsing, like some light gaming and photo editing.

If it weren’t for the lackluster keyboard, trackpad, and some small issues with the cooling and thermals, I would have dubbed this as one of the best laptops I’ve ever used. But it’s still a solid Acer laptop that will blow your mind the minute you open the lid, fairly competing against other lightweight laptops like the LG Gram SuperSlim, or even the new LG Gram Style.

Acer Swift Edge 16: Pricing and availability

The Acer Swift Edge 16 was originally announced in May 2023. The model I have for review is now up for sale at Best Buy. Pricing on it starts at $1,300 and you get a sleeve included with the purchase. This pricing is for a unit with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB of storage, and the 16-inch 3200×200 resolution OLED display. If you’re looking to buy this laptop elsewhere, you’d have to be careful, as Acer.com doesn’t list the model I have for review, instead linking to older 2022 models. There’s also a model with a Ryzen 7 7735U CPU that’s more a refresh of last year’s version. The model I have here is totally new.

Design

It is thin, and light

The Acer Swift Edge 16 is similar to other lightweight laptops like the LG Gram SuperSlim or the LG Gram Style when it comes to the materials used. That means it is not made of aluminum, but rather magnesium. This is what helps keep the laptop quite portable.

There’s a downside, though. While magnesium is durable, it also can feel like plastic which might let down people considering the $1,000 price and the natural comparison to the MacBook Air. Some parts of the laptop have flex to it, like the keyboard deck, or the lid. Plastic also surrounds the display, but the critical areas of the device like the palm rest feel super strong. Acer tells me that the Magnesium Alloy material is 10% lighter and 2 times stronger than aluminum, so there is that.

The Acer Swift Edge 16 comes in at about 14.08 inches in length and 0.57-0.60 inches in thickness. It is also 2.73 pounds in weight. That’s smaller but thicker and heavier than the 15.6-inch LG Gram SuperSlim, though, which comes in at a 14.8-inch length, a 0.43-0.49 inch thickness, and a 2.18-pound weight. It is, however, closer to the LG Gram Style 16, which measures in at a 14-inch length, a 0.63-inch thickness, and weighs about 2.76 pounds. For thickness comparison, you can see that it is almost as thin as my iPhone 12 Pro Max, as seen below.

LG always had the lead when it comes to lightweight laptops, and it’s nice to see that Acer is challenging them. This is one thin laptop, and it is a treat to hold and carry around. I really see this as an excellent travel companion and to get work done on the go.

Oh, and yes, this year’s Swift Edge 16 is keeping the same color as last year’s. It’s an Olivine Black color. There’s a subtle shiny and tiny Acer logo on the top of the lid, too. I love laptops that have minimalist branding. It just looks so clean.

You won’t need a dongle

Even though the Acer Swift Edge 16 is super thin and light, it doesn’t mean you won’t get a good port selection. You have everything you need for plugging in monitors, keyboards, printers, and more. Since this is a laptop powered by the new Ryzen AMD 7000 series Zen 4-based processors, you even get USB-C ports supporting USB4 speeds of up to 40Gbps, which is comparable to Thunderbolt 3 when it comes to bandwidth.

Aside from those two USB-C ports, you get an HDMI 2.1 port, and a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port. This USB-A port on the left side supports power-off USB charging. On the right side, meanwhile, you get a microSD card slot, a headphone jack, another USB 3.1 Gen 1 port, and a Noble Lock port. Again, I love this port selection as I never had to pull a dongle or dock out of my drawer when using this laptop.

Display

The OLED will blow you away

The Acer Swift Edge 16 sports a glossy OLED panel, and it is the top reason you’d want to buy this laptop. The 16:10 aspect ratio,16-inch OLED panel on my review unit comes with a 3200×2000 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 0.2ms response time. Brightness is rated at 400 nits, and the laptop is True Black HDR 500 certified. It even has Eyesafe Display certification and wide viewing angles of 170 degrees.

I know that’s a lot of jargon, but this display will just blow you away the minute you pull up a webpage, open a YouTube video, or just look at a photo. It is amazing for anything you want to do on this laptop, whether it’s casual browsing or professional work like photo editing.

In my productivity-focused time with the laptop, I found that the display on the Acer Swift Edge 16 was good enough that I didn’t need an external monitor. Thanks to the tall aspect ratio, and that high screen resolution, after adjusting the scaling, I easily stacked three windows side by side. The 120Hz refresh rate is also super smooth. The small animations on Windows 11 for things like opening the Start Menu and Action Center felt buttery smooth. Even scrolling through X (Twitter) was a treat.

This display really helped make watching YouTube videos during my downtime at work so much more fun. As an example, I watched a 4K video of a walk through the NYC subway system. Typically, the NYC subway can be a dimly lit and dark-looking place, but the OLED panel really brought that video to life. The shiny silver turnstiles, the red color for the paint on the City Hall station platform pillars, the yellow warning strip on the platform, it all looked true-to-life and like I was getting ready to hop onboard for a commute to the city. Any color just looks fantastic and vibrant on this laptop, mainly because with OLED panels, each pixel is individually lit.

As you can tell, the numbers I got from my colorimeter can attest to that experience. The display measures with 100% sRGB, 97% AdobeRGB, 93% NTSC, and 90% P3. It’s pretty hard to beat those numbers, so this is great. The contrast ratio, meanwhile, is crazy high, coming in at around 14,0000:1, something you just can’t get with an IPS panel. Brightness is a little above what Acer claims at 400.6 nits.

But the treat with the display doesn’t end there. At the top of the display is a 1440p webcam. That’s above the 1080p resolution we usually look for in a webcam. Even better, the camera supports Windows Studio Effects, where it can blur your background, and keep you in focus on the frame. I enjoyed my XDA team calls because I was able to keep my messy room blurred, and keep my face in focus.

Keyboard and trackpad

Not the best

Because the Acer Swift Edge 16 is made of magnesium, and so thin and light, the keyboard and trackpad will have to take the hit. I do like that there is a number pad and a fingerprint reader and that the keycaps are backlit, but they felt way too thin for my liking. It didn’t have much action when you tap it into the chassis. Pressing too hard also causes it to bend into the chassis, which is never a good thing.

The trackpad is a bit better, though. It’s what Acer likes to call an “OceanGlass” trackpad. It also feels a bit thin, but scrolling on it is smooth, and pressing isn’t too loud. It’s a nice and soft click. I didn’t find the need to use a mouse with this laptop, but I did sometimes want to use an external keyboard.

Performance

Better than the Apple M2?

Under the hood of the Acer Swift Edge 16 is the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U paired with 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This isn’t your ordinary laptop CPU, and there are not many devices that have this chip so far in 2023. When AMD announced this family of CPUs, it really talked about how it could compete with the Apple M2 SoC and Intel’s Core i7-1360P in terms of battery life and performance. That’s because it is one of the newer 4nm Zen 4-based CPUs from AMD. The CPU has 8 cores, and 16 threads, and runs at 28W up to 5.1 GHz. For graphics, there’s the RDNA3-based Radeon 780M which has 12 cores. Oh, and this CPU also has the Ryzen AI engine, too. For added security, the CPU also integrates with the Microsoft Pluton security chip, which is built into the CPU die.

The performance of this chip in the Swift Edge 16 is excellent on AC power but not as good on battery power. It might not be as good as AMD first claimed, but it is fast, and it is a capable CPU for light gaming. And it’s more than good enough for everyday productivity.

In my real-world tests, with the laptop always plugged into power and using the device on Best Performace, I had no slowdowns with web browsing with this Acer Swift Edge 16. It handled multiple YouTube tabs, an Amazon Prime Video tab, and a virtual machine all at the same time just fine without any slowdowns. Photoshop loaded up quickly, too. The only thing that I noticed is the same problem as last year’s model, the thermals are poor. The fans would kick in really quickly, even when just having four browser tabs open.

And when using this laptop on the same settings on battery? As you notice with the PCMark 10 testing below, performance dips significantly (by a couple of hundred points), and you’d still hear the fans anyway. AMD should have solved this problem with the Zen-4-based CPUs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. You’d get much better performance on battery on a laptop with an Intel P-series CPU, or even on the Apple M2 MacBook Air.

When I took to tasks beyond web browsing, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U shines thanks to the Radeon 780M integrated graphics. Performance is good for casual gaming, but you’d have to tune the resolution from the default down to 1920×1200. I played Project Cars 2 and though I had to tune the settings down to medium, I still enjoyed racing around Daytona International Speedway. The framerate hit 25-35 frames per second, which is impressive considering there’s no dedicated GPU. Another game like Mafia Definitive Edition wasn’t quite as playable, though, and only hit 20 frames per second on the lowest possible settings. And something like Fortnite, well, I got exceptional performance, hitting above 50 frames on medium settings.

I rarely get these numbers when gaming on a laptop with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics, which is why you’ll see that this AMD CPU scores far above the Intel P-series in 3D Mark Time Spy. And against the M2, it is also nearly 2,000 points higher in CInebench, showing a slight advantage for photo editing.

The 16GB of RAM still limits this system. Considering the integrated graphics shares need some of that RAM, 32GB RAM would have made the performance even better, but it’s soldered, so it can’t be upgraded. The system also only has twin stereo ring fans and even though there’s an inclined plane on the fan top to bring in a greater volume of air, this laptop doesn’t have thermals for gaming. Generally, though, as you can see from PCMark 10, and Geekbench, AMD has passed Intel’s 13th-generation P-series chips for general productivity tasks, and is on par with the Apple M2, too. It’s also much better than Intel Iris Xe has for light gaming, too.

For battery life, be prepared to be let down. The battery onboard this laptop only lasted me about four hours. And that’s with the screen at 30 percent brightness, and the system set for the best battery efficiency and in the Acer-recommended dark mode. You can’t expect this laptop to last 10 hours when it has a power-hungry OLED screen and an impressive CPU under the hood.

Acer Swift Edge 16: Should you buy it?

You should buy the Acer Swift Edge 16 if:

• You want a laptop with a huge OLED screen
• You want a portable and slim laptop
• You want a laptop with the best AMD processor
• You want a laptop for light gaming

You shouldn’t buy the Acer Swift Edge 16 if:

• You need great battery life
• You plan to do serious video editing or gaming

The Acer Swift Edge 16 is an almost-perfect laptop. You’re not going to get the best battery life out of it, and you’re not going to be gaming at the highest possible settings and frames, or video editing on it, but you will get a great laptop for casual tasks and light gaming. You’re also going to get a laptop with a great OLED display that’ll bring the content you care about and watch to life. You’re also going to get a laptop that is really light and portable.