Acer Swift X 16 Laptop With Intel Arc GPU Costs $1249, Arrives in June

Acer sketched out its revamped Swift X laptops back at CES 2022 in January. Now we have some compelling new details of the fresh hardware which will be packed in these sleek consumer portables. TechTuber Matthew Moniz got his hands on the new Acer Swift X 16 and X 14 laptops and shared a sneak peek video today.

Note that while we got some tasty new details, not all was revealed, especially with regard to the new discrete Intel Arc GPU. Moniz was told that there was to be "strictly no benchmarking."

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The Acer Swift X laptops on camera were described as pre-production units but management at Acer (and Intel?) must be happy enough with the products to send them to be mass-YouTubed.

Before going into the fuller specs of the new Swift X laptops, it is worth outlining the key improvements, as related by Moniz. Firstly the screens have gone from 16:9 to 16:10 and have boosted pixel densities too. As these aren't high-end designs, there are still some so-so aspects of these IPS screens, such as a stated 60Hz refresh rate, and the max brightness of 400 nits is decent but not outstanding.

Other upgrades noticed were the improved port selection where the barrel charger port and USB-C of yesteryear will be replaced by twin Thunderbolt ports this year. These are included alongside an HDMI port and USB A port. On the other side of the laptops reside a Kensington lock, USB A and Audio combi port.

The webcams have been upgraded to FHD (from 720p) in 2022, but don't provide Windows Hello biometrics. However, these laptops have fingerprint scanners in the power buttons, to the upper right of the keyboard deck.

Inside there are some big changes, as well as some pleasing smaller ones. First of all, our headline singles out the new Acer Swift X 16 with Intel Arc discrete GPU. Very few details are shared with regard to this GPU. Moniz might be telegraphing some clues through. In a section of the video where he touches upon Intel Arc GPU performance he says, in throwaway comment style, that rumors suggest we should expect between Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3070 Ti levels of performance (mobile GPU performance). One would expect any such comment would not be casual at all but rather thoroughly vetted by the powers that be at Acer / Intel.

Other changes inside are the movement to Intel's latest 12th generation Alder Lake-P mobile processors. In January we didn't know what models would be present, but now we know that both machines are going to have at least an option for the Intel Core i7-1260P 12C/16T. This 28W CPU mixes four of Intel's 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 pleasing upgrades we mentioned earlier is the inclusion of twin PCIe slots in these 2022 designs. It must be noted through, that one is a gen 4 and another a gen 3 connector – due to system PCIe lane limitations.

Lastly, with regard to the laptop innards explored on the video, Moniz took a peek at the cooling. While the larger laptop had a twin fan cooler with fatter heatpipes, the YouTuber said he was worried about the X 14 having the same or similar cooling to last year's AMD version, which had a much lower wattage CPU.

Specifications

Moniz took some time pondering over the pricing of these 2022 Acer Swift X machines. If you check the table above you'll see the larger model quite uncharacteristically has the lower price. Whether that is Intel Arc being cheaper as part of an Intel chipset type of promotion, or the Nvidia GPU being more expensive as it is more capable, we will have to wait and see.

Also on price, the TechTuber was slightly annoyed about the increase in price over last year. Moniz noted that the Swift X 14 started at $999 in 2021, and even with the machine on his desk, he said he didn't know if the new CPU would be a worthwhile change for performance and/or battery life. Moreover, this price increase starts to move these laptops in amongst more serious competition, removing some of their appeal.

The new Acer Swift X 16 and X 14 are expected to be released in June.