Best Laptop 2022

The Perfect Laptop for Students? // Acer Swiftx

So this is the acer swift x and when acer announced this i got very excited because i feel like this is a laptop that a lot of students are going to be gravitating towards not only do you get like the traditional ultrabook or slim laptop that you carry to school  the kicker is you get a dedicated gpu the price point is very reasonable for what you get and if you've ever used an acer swift3.you're going to be very familiar on how this laptop feels too here's a few different colors you cant choose from i got the gold edition it's it's okay you know it's not like a deep darl gold a deep muted but the one thing i don't like that they did was they didn't keep the golden casing around the entire laptop they they made the bottom silver and then they kept the top lid gold which is okay but it feels unfinished if you're a maniac and you care about your laptop being open with one hand you  can do it you just gotta go very slowly if you go too fast the bottom is going to lift up too then you u gotta use your second hand to push it down there's tons of i o you know like on the left hand side you have your power connector your usb type-c port ull-size hdmi usb and then on your fright-hand side you have a lock another usb port and then of course your headphone jack this is a light laptop it's about three pounds so it's not going to feel heavy in your bag and when you open it up the bottom portion of the laptop lifts up to provide a better cooling situation now this display is 14 inches it's ips it's 1920x1080 so it's 16x9 so you're not going to get that 16x10 that i personally prefer for productivity but again the price is is reasonable so i'm gonna let them off the hook on this one the screen is okay you know like it's color accurate enough that you can obviously do content creation on this but the brightness is a little on the lower side like it's just over 300 nits but it is matte so depending on how you use your laptop if you're sitting in a room with lots of reflection this screen is going to do a great job of reducing that there's a webcam on top it's 720p and of course it just looks like the rest of 720p cameras that are out there on the market now this keyboard is very easy to type on it is a bit squishy with a little bit of keyboard flex in the middle the keys are not super clicky but they're not the most mushiest keys i've used but they're definitely on the softer side of course you get that   back lighting the only thing i really don't like is the placement of the page up and page down keys like why are they squashed in with the arrow keys because the arrow keys are very thin as it is and placing a page up key above it makes it kind of difficult to press you do have a fingerprint scanner if you want to use windows hello to login and you have a touchpad now this touchpad is not glass acer is calling it mayar which is basically another word for plastic i'm not gonna go crazy over the sticker placement but i'm just gonna say this quickly this is some of the worst sticker placementi've seen today okay like come on let'swake up sticker guy like have some pride in what you do your kids your kids are looking up to you okay you don't want them to feel like their dad is the worst sticker guy in the business they're gonna grow up one day and they're gonna be the kid of that da who didn't place the stickers properly okay the speakers on this laptop are on the bottom there's two of them they're they're not great at all there's like no depth to them whatsoever definitely like the bottom of the barrel for pc speakers but i get why they're not that great you know like acer is focusing on the performance and they want to give yo value for the performance like think about it there's a ryzen 7 you're getting a full size rtx 3050 ti the same wattage of the ti that's inside the dell xps 15. and when you pair that with 16 gigabytes of ram 14-inch display and of course 512 gigabytes of mvme ssd the price looks very very reasonable and when you're thinking about synthetics and you're and you're running that cine bench r23 test the multi-core performance on this actually beats out the dell xps 15. and the single core performance does a good job too it's just when you start doing more intensive tasks that's where things start to change like if you're buying this just for photoshop the performance is awesome like very close to like the high-end h-series processors that are out there but if you're using adobe premiere pro that's where things start to change you know even though this has a 3050 ti the dell xps 15 obviously outperforms it because of that beefier hdre pu and then you've got intel quick sync which is also playing a big factor but if you're a developer the performance is great you know you've seen the the results on these ryzen processors they're great you know and it was able to quickly chew through a mozilla compile or mozilla firefox compile test very quickly and obviously you can game on it are you going to be crushing the late sttitles at ultra or high settings no you're going  to have to drop down the settings to about medium if you want to play most games comfortably but it can do it the fan noise is also very low as this is a very conservative laptop in terms of what it can do with its thermals like the cpu never really gets that hot and if it does it reduces the clock speeds in order to compensate and even on performance mode the fan noise only gets up to about 47 decibels if your head is against the laptop but if you're on a sitting position like you normally would it gets to about 44 decibels which is more than reasonable now taking a quick look at the inside a lot of you are probably thinking that the left-hand side has a little bit of wasted space they could have made the battery bigger and if this had poor battery i would agree with you but this 57 watt hour battery inside of here nets you 10 hours of use before needing to charge which is great the other thing is you get two storage slots one is obviously populated with that 512 gigabyte nvme ssd but if you want to expand in the future there's a second one right here there's a swappable wi-fi card but the memory is soldered onto the motherboard so whatever spec you get that's what you're stuck with and you can't upgrade the ram the only thing i don't understand and this could be because of engineering or costs in order to keep the price lower is why they didn't go with a second fan i feel like if they had that second fan there they probably would have been able to cool this laptop even better honestly for the price this thing is very reasonable you know you're getting an eight core processor that's great for programmers you're getting that rtx 3050 ti that helps designers and creatoror anyone that just needs actual gpu performance if you don't need a gpu at all then the macbook air starts looking a bit more attractive because it is retailing for the exact same price and you are getting better speakers a better display and a few other things but if you need that gpu and you want to be on windows like this.