Acer Swift Go 14 AI

Introduction

The Acer Swift Go 14 AI takes all the good things about some of Acer’s more premium portable ultrabooks, and dials the power back just a tad.

It packs in one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus chips, making it an Arm-based choice, as well as a decent 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS 120Hz screen, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. You get a solid port selection and excellent endurance for its £999 price tag.

That puts it firmly in the frame against a litany of key rivals, including the Asus Zenbook A14, Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 (2024) and even this laptop’s own brother, the Acer Swift 14 AI.

I’ve been testing the Swift Go 14 AI for the last couple of weeks to see how well it performs.

Design and Keyboard

• Smart aluminium chassis
• Solid port selection
• Reasonably tactile keyboard and a decent trackpad

The Swift Go 14 AI isn’t all too different in look from its non-Go brother, which is no bad thing, as it features a smart space grey colourway and a metal chassis that gives it a real sense of style. 

Build quality as a result is strong with no creaking or flex, either. There is an intriguing curved pattern across the lid and even on the trackpad, which Acer simply refers to as an ‘AI’ pattern. It looks cool and gives this laptop a bit of flair.

Tipping the scales at 1.32kg is also identical to its non-Go brother, making this quite a portable laptop for its size, being easy to sling into a backpack to take on your travels.

Another element where this laptop is identical to the normal Swift 14 AI is with its port selection, which is functional, if a little lacking. The left side has two USB-C ports, one of which is used for charging, as well as a USB-A port. The right side has a second USB-A and a headphone jack.

The keyboard here is also functional, with a smaller 65 percent layout and decent key travel. It is quite a snappy keyboard, although arguably not as tactile as key rivals. The white backlighting is crisp and bright for when you want to work after dark. As for the trackpad, that’s of a decent size with accurate tracking, as well as an illuminated pattern in the top right corner.

Display and Sound

• Decent detail and smooth motion
• Solid colour accuracy, contrast and brightness
• Middling speakers

As with its non-Go-branded brother, the Swift Go 14 AI eschews the razzle-dazzle of an OLED screen for a more functional IPS choice. It’s a 14-inch 1920×1200 panel with a modern 16:10 aspect ratio for more vertical real estate, while a 120Hz refresh rate keeps on-screen action responsive and smooth.

It’s a screen that can get decently bright, with a measured peak of 352.8 nits from my colorimeter, while also having reasonable contrast and colour temperature, with measured levels of 1210:1 and 6700K respectively.

Where this panel isn’t as sharp and precise as an OLED, or some IPS screens, is with its black level. The 0.21 measured result at half brightness is erring on the side of blacks turning a bit grey, but it’s still fine for generalist workloads.

The Swift Go 14 AI’s panel is a decently colour-accurate one, with perfect 100% coverage of the sRGB space for productivity workloads, while its 81% DCI-P3 and 80% Adobe RGB results are at the minimum we’d recommend if you wanted to undertake more creative or colour-sensitive tasks.

As for the speakers, this laptop comes with downwards-firing units that are just fine for casual listening with some okay volume, although they lack the crispness and body of stronger options.

Performance

• Decent performance from the Snapdragon X Plus chip
• 3D workloads aren’t the strongest
• Speedy SSD

The Swift Go 14 AI comes with one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus chips with 10 cores and 10 threads that help to make it a reasonably potent chip in real-world use, and in synthetic benchmarks with results that are right in the mix with its contemporaries.

This means that single-core performance here is strong against its Intel and AMD-based counterparts, although the multi-threaded workloads aren’t as beefy as with AMD’s chips that have a lot more cores, and still have hyper-threading, unlike Intel.

Nonetheless, it helped the Swift Go 14 AI to feel responsive and zippy in day-to-day tasks, with enough horsepower to undertake more intensive workloads than just having a load of Chrome tabs open.

Where this laptop falls down, as with other Snapdragon-powered choices, is with its integrated graphics. The Adreno GPU within the Snapdragon X Plus posted a disappointing score in the 3DMark Time Spy test, underscoring that this isn’t a laptop that’s well-suited to GPU-heavy tasks such as video editing or lighter gaming. Comparably specced Intel or AMD choices fare a lot better.

Elsewhere, 16GB of RAM gives you enough headroom for some multi-tasking and scope for more intensive tasks, while the 1TB SSD is decent in capacity for storing apps, media, and other files. With tested read and write speeds of 6390.95MB/s and 5739.45MB/s respectively, it’s also quite quick.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Minimal Acer-specific apps
• Copilot+ PC functionality is present

The Swift Go 14 AI comes with a similarly clean Windows 11 install to its non-Go labelled brethren, with little in the way of bloatware or any unwanted apps. There are some Acer-specific apps, such as Jumpstart, which provides a link to the brand’s website, and AcerSense, which gives you access to check your system’s vitals and enable settings such as the AI lighting on the trackpad. Nothing too untoward.

There is also enough AI horsepower from the Snapdragon X Plus chip inside to mark this laptop as a Copilot+ PC, providing access to Microsoft’s AI functionality for generative powers and filters in the Photos and Paint app, as well as the clever Windows Studio webcam effects for background blurring, auto framing and maintaining eye contact.

Being Arm-based means there are some issues with app compatibility, as they have had to be translated from x86 through the Prism translation layer. In most cases, I have faced no issues apart from some elements of the PCMark 10 benchmark test not fully working, although it has been reported elsewhere that some VPN apps and games, including Dirt 5, may also not play nicely with Arm-based Windows machines.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 19 hours 15 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between two and three working days

In keeping with lots of other Arm-based Windows laptops of late, the Swift Go 14 AI features excellent endurance. It comes with a larger 75Whr cell which Acer quotes to last up to 28 hours, which would easily make it the best-performing laptop I’ve tested.

In running a video loop test at the requisite 150 nits, while the Swift Go 14 AI didn’t live up to Acer’s quoted numbers, the 19 hours and 15 minutes it did last is fantastic. It means you’ll easily be able to get two or three working days out of the laptop away from the mains, and also makes it one of the stronger laptops in its price category. For reference, Dell’s Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 with the same chip inside lasted for 16 hours and 33 minutes.

The Swift Go 14 AI also comes with a 65W USB-C charger, whose charging speeds are in the mix of what would be considered speedy; it got from zero to 50 percent in 42 minutes, while a full charge took 93 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs