Today we are reviewing a model with an unrivaled Ultra HD OLED screen. Photographers and content creators dream of such laptops, but not everything is so smooth. Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) really turned out to be very interesting, but there are several nuances that we will talk about in a detailed review.
Specifications Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41)
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) is a modern and powerful medium-high class laptop. An 8-core processor and a good memory subsystem are complemented by an expensive 4K screen. Everything looks attractive on “paper”.
| Main characteristics of Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) | |
| Screen | 16″ 4K OLED 60 Hz |
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 6800U |
| RAM | LPDDR5 16 GB 6400 MHz |
| Accumulator | 1 TB (NVMe SSD) |
| Video card | AMD Radeon Graphics 680M |
| Wireless interfaces | Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi 6E |
| Wired interfaces | HDMI, 2 x Type-A, 2 x Type-C, 3.5 mm |
| Power Supply | 65 W |
| Battery | 54 W*h |
Complete set of Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41)
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) has a basic package that includes a laptop, charger and paper documentation. Everything is modestly packed in a minimalist cardboard box without color drawings.
Type C power supply unit. Power up to 65 W, suitable for any devices with a Type C connector. It charges the laptop fairly quickly (approximately 90 minutes). The cable cannot be disconnected from the PSU, but it is compact enough to fit in a pocket. Of course, you can recharge the battery using a power bank (Power Delivery).
Appearance, interfaces Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41)
The body is made of magnesium alloy, not too branded. The structure is fragile, but nothing bends, everything is assembled tightly. Thin (14 mm) and light (1.17 kg), it is pleasant to hold. This is one of the lightest 16-inch laptops available today. The large screen and low weight make it a really interesting device in its category.
The lid opens surprisingly easily. The hinge mechanism works well like Apple MacBook. Acer has not been disappointing lately. Gaming Predator and thin Swift have performed well in this regard.
A set of standard ports: on the left is an HDMI connector, USB Type A and two Type C 4, and on the right side is 3.5 mm and one more USB Type A. LED indicators and Noble Lock TZ08T are located nearby. Behind is a thin radiator of the cooling system.
Display, webcam, sound
The screen is the strongest point of Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41). Luxurious OLED matrix with a resolution of 3840×2400 pixels. The refresh rate is 60 Hz, and the brightness is 400 cd/m2. Contrast is very high, as with all OLED displays. The black color is saturated and will make you think about setting a dark theme in all programs and the system.
The coating is glossy and perfectly reflects light. It is necessary to set a high level of brightness under direct sunlight. The minimum level of illumination is quite comfortable for using the laptop at night.
The pixel density is impressive – even tiny fonts look smooth and fluid. The naked eye cannot see pixels in text documents from any distance on this screen. The display is great for designers and photographers. Watching him is a pleasure.
What can not be said about the scaling of programs. Windows automatically suggested 250% scaling, but it doesn’t work everywhere. Some software remains in a small window, and the fonts are so small that a person with 100% vision can hardly read them. This will repeatedly tease the potential owner.
Color accuracy was checked using a colorimeter. The Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) display is one of the best on the modern laptop market: 100% sRGB, 95% NTSC, 97% AdobeRGB, 97% P3.
The DTS sound is nice enough that you have to be a musician to judge it. The volume and power are not enough to replace the speaker system, but the sound is really good.
Full HD webcam, just like a typical gaming laptop. In daylight, the image quality is not bad.
Keyboard and touchpad Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41)
The keyboard is low, quiet, pleasant to the touch without a digital block. The up-down arrows are paired with each other. Left Shift full size. There is a keyboard backlight that has two levels of intensity.
The touchpad is moderately large, sensitive, but has strange behavior. Sometimes double taps don’t work the first time. Learn more about this nuance in a separate section below.
Work productivity
The 16-thread Ryzen 7 6800U processor with high-speed memory should not disappoint users in work tasks. It’s really nice, but loses a lot of power in economy mode.
Crystal Disk Mark
The built-in drive shows more than 3000 MB/s. This fast SSD will complement the memory system well.
Geekbench 5
A lot of performance is lost from the battery. In power saving mode, single-core performance suffers greatly. It is felt immediately – all actions in the browser and the system are performed with a greater delay.
Cinebench R23
The processor sputtered a bit during testing in Cinebench R23. Frequencies decreased, but the performance loss is less than that of Intel H-series CPUs. However, the iron in this laptop turned out to be moderately cold.
CPU-Z
In the browser, the laptop works fine when connected to the network. It’s not clear why, but the Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) severely limits single-threaded performance in economy mode. And this, in turn, slows it down in the browser and other typical scenarios. Results at the level of mobile Intel Core i5 11th Gen, sometimes weaker.
Speedometer 2.0
Google Octane 2.0
WebXPRT 4
The video card is quite productive and shows the best results like Intel Iris XE.
Geekbench Open CL
Geekbench Vulkan
Blender Benchmark
And Radeon is much worse for graphics rendering. The AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor performed only slightly worse in Blender, which is surprising for laptops. Some gaming models show a 20x difference between CPU and GPU.
DaVinci Resolve
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) is suitable for media content creators. The laptop processed a 4K video with a length of 8 min 5 min. The bitrate is quite high – 60 Mbit/s, the Quality profile was set during rendering.
Built-in software and “smoothness”
The “jelly” of the system should be noted separately. Powerful iron also means smooth and fast work. At some points, the laptop works with noticeable delays.
For example, sometimes a tap on the touchpad does not work (the mechanical key responds well). This is often encountered when double-clicking shortcuts on the desktop or folders in explorer.
Interface bug (wrong icon)
Scrolling also leaves a lot to be desired. On gaming laptops, you can see rare FPS drops in system animations – this is the fault of the software, but something else. Elementary scrolling in the task manager works with FPS 10-15 (by experience). Such behavior significantly spoils the impression of using an elite laptop.
Interface bug (small icon)
In some cases, cheap laptops from the “up to UAH 20,000” category are no worse. Of course, the synthetic power in work applications of the Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) is much better, but the overall speed of the system does not correspond to the status of a laptop.
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) has a lot of third-party software and ads right out of the box. Such a policy is no longer surprising in the world of smartphones: even expensive flagships with Android OS show tons of ads and paid programs to their owners. But to see such a thing in a Windows laptop for UAH 70,000 is at least strange.
Avast antivirus, links to the accommodation reservation service and browser games. The user is also offered the Planet9 gaming platform. Fewest complaints about the Acer Care Center utility.
Gaming performance
This laptop is not for gaming. An integrated video card and a 4K screen are incompatible things, but the Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) showed decent results in some scenarios.
Call of Duty: Warzone 2
A demanding 2022 game is unlikely to be satisfied with an integrated Radeon 680M graphics card on a 4K screen. We set e-sports graphics parameters: high textures, high texture filtering, other parameters are minimal. FSR in performance mode. The frame rate is very low for a comfortable game.
Going down to 1920x1200p + FSR Quality gets better, but it’s still hard to aim and shoot. By setting the FSR to the average value, we get 30-40 FPS with unpleasant freezes. In offline mode, the drop in FPS is almost not felt.
PUBG
PUBG has lower requirements. It is quite realistic to play in 1200p resolution. E-sports graphics settings.
It makes no sense to display 4K – performance drops too much. Also, there is no AMD FSR in this game. On battery, the frame rate is almost the same.
DOTA2
A popular RPG with cartoon graphics can be played on this laptop. Even in the native resolution, we get a good smoothness. You can confidently set the FSR scaling to 40%. It is impossible to notice the deterioration of image quality on such a diagonal.
The DOTA2 game works on the battery in the same way as on the mains. The frame rate does not sag. Games of this format are quite capable of Radeon 680M. There are no problems with 1920x1200p – you can play hundreds of games with similar requirements.
Autonomy
A laptop with such a screen and weighing a little more than a kilogram is unlikely to be able to please with good autonomy. While surfing in the browser with the mode of maximum energy saving, the following results were obtained:
1 hour of surfing in the browser -14%:
Increasing load and high brightness of the screen makes the battery charge melt before the eyes. Video games drain the battery very quickly.
10 minutes of play -11%:
The 54 W*h battery is not enough for the Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41). With a 4K OLED screen and a Ryzen 7 6800U processor, the best battery won’t hurt. It is interesting that the ultra-budget Prologix M15-710 with a 37 W*h battery shows almost twice the best autonomy and can withstand 14-16 hours of economical Internet surfing at the price of speed.
Cooling system
Acer Swift SFA16-41 has a relatively energy-efficient processor (against Intel H series). The cooling system will easily cope with its work. Fan noise is present, but within normal limits. After the incredibly noisy Acer Predator Triton 300, it seems quiet. When surfing the net, the laptop remains silent most of the time.
The stress test warmed up the processor to 95-100 degrees, after which it dropped frequencies. The front part of the case heats up weakly. It was possible to record a little more than 40 degrees in the hot spot.
Competitors
Among competitors, we will consider only models with OLED/AMOLED Ultra HD screens with a diagonal of 15 to 17 inches. Most laptops with similar displays belong to the gaming category and have powerful GPUs. But this affects the thickness, weight and autonomy. Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) is the lightest laptop in this category. Shops ask for it from UAH 71,000.
The cheapest competitor will be the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro 15 2021. The laptop loses significantly in terms of characteristics, although it has a 4K OLED screen. Half as much SSD, twice as slow RAM, but the Xiaomi MX450 discrete graphics card is on board. Price from UAH 45,000.
The Dell XPS 15 9510 has an RTX 3050 Ti Max-Q discrete graphics card and an Intel Core i7-11800H processor. RAM is also 16 GB, but DDR4. A good alternative, albeit for a lot of money. The model is sold at a price of UAH 96,000.
The unique Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED with two screens can also be considered as a competitor to the hero of the review. Inside is a weaker Intel 10 processor th Gen, but powerful RTX 3070 video card. Price from UAH 80,000.
Pros:
unsurpassed 4K OLED screen, weight 1.17 kg, beautiful body, fast memory and SSD.
Cons:
jelly system and interface suspension, strange behavior of the touchpad, integrated advertising programs and sites, mediocre autonomy.
Conclusion:
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) is an unusual and very contrasting laptop. It has both strengths and weaknesses. Inside is a modern processor, fast memory and SSD, incredibly beautiful 4K OLED screen. But interface lags, pre-installed software, advertisements, problems with the touchpad and not the best autonomy spoil the impression.
For its price, it has few competitors, especially in the ultrabook segment. Very light and comfortable 16″ Acer Swift will not suit all consumers. Its potential buyers are photographers and content makers.
Acer Swift Edge 16 (SFA16-41) will most likely disappoint demanding buyers, but most of its owners will hardly regret the money spent and will be happy to use the device.
