Acer Swift X SFX14-41G-R1S6 Creator Laptop | 14" Full HD 100% sRGB | AMD Ryzen 7 5800U | NVIDIA RTX 3050Ti GPU | 16GB LPDDR4X | 512GB SSD | Wi-Fi 6 | Backlit KB | Amazon Alexa | Windows 10 Home

Got this at the October prime day and it's been great.ProWeight feels super light especially for the specsWorkhorse for my needs. Occasionally I need some power in my workload and this thing can deliverEasy to add a second drive and fairly easy for a power user to get it to dual boot to Linux. I am using a RHEL type distro and everything except the fingerprint reader is working although it isn't a priority for me on the Linux side so I haven't even looked into it yet. (I am guessing it's fine I just don't have anything on Linux that uses the fingerprint reader)Runs multiple VMs fine (I have done 4-5 simultaneously without an issue)Runs Diablo 3 great (about the only thing I play so I am not sure about how good at gaming it would be)Does great with OBS (open broadcaster software) on windows. Transcoding goes fast able to stream and record at the same time. Needed a usb-c travel dock to get enough ports for my input but I kind of expect that now days especially at this weight and how thin this is... ohh and at this price point.Hinge elevates laptop a little allowing air to flow in underneath and go out at the right side above the keyboard.Cons: after playing Diablo for a few hours I did finally notice it getting a little warm. Not horrible and it did take a while to get it up there. Normal use I never even really heard the fans spin up.Airflow from the bottom, if you have it on your lap or soft surface you can easily block the air into the laptop for coolingOnly major beef with this laptop is the gray keyboard with white backlight. Certain lighting conditions make the keyboard horrible to read. Would happily give it all five stars if they choose a more contrasting keyboard. Shoot at the price I paid I would happily replace the keyboard if there was a compatible option in black or something that showed up better.Actually probably being a little petty on the keyboard... I am giving it 5 stars but 5 stars doesn't mean perfect it has a few drawbacks. But for 8 core 16 thread with a video card 16 gigs of ram and 2 NVMe slots for sub 1000 and 3ish pounds I can complain too much.Not a gaming machine, not a workstation, more like an overpowered netbook. Kind what I had been looking for. Hard to find lightweight powerful computer at a cheap price and this did it for me.

This laptop is perfect at nothing, but great at everything. It can run intensive games well, it can be used for typing well, and pretty much anything else a laptop should do, this is good at doing. Overall, it's one of the best laptops for students, especially if you want a super subtly secret gaming laptop that looks like a typical laptop.Pros:-Fantastic performance, especially for the form factor-Good build quality. Nothing special, but good nonetheless-Looks great-Great for productivity-Nice screen-Great price (especially when you can find it on sale)Cons:-Mine had a little bit of deformation or something such that the keyboard was a bit wonky and uneven in some places. It is barely noticeable, but you might be able to see it in the second two pictures.-Very middle-of-the-spectrum. Might not be the best choice if you only want raw power or only want pure portability. (But it's amazing if you want both)-Some small compression artifacts in the audio coming out of the 3.5m audio port that are noticeable when using high fidelity headphones. This was present on both out of the two of these laptops I got, so it's likely to happen with yours.Overall, it's a fantastic laptop. Would recommend. I'll update if anything significant changes.

Edit: Updated after spending more time with the laptop.I ended up buying two of these. First one was for me, the second one was for my son who is in the military.I can say that my power brick works fine and the "pigtail" fits into the brick just fine. I think that reviewer was unlucky and got a dud.RAM is soldered on, so there aren't any upgrades. However, it's low power DDR4 4266, so it's fast and also in dual channel. 16 GB should be enough for most people.The SSD is a PCIe 3.0 x4, so it's relatively quick. HWinfo64 reports it's also NVMe 1.3, which isn't the latest spec. The SSD itself is made by SK Hynix and performs reasonably well. There are two M.2 slots inside. Slot 1 is NVMe/SATA. Second is NVMe only. Both slots are PCIe 3.0 as the AMD Ryzen 5000 series only supports PCIe 3.0. If you want to upgrade your storage, don't waste your money on a Gen 4/PCIe 4.0 SSD unless you plan on moving it to a faster computer later. I recommend the SK Hynix P31 Gold 1 TB for a second drive. I put one in my son's Swift X and it performs very well.The Wifi is made by Mediatek. I had a lot of issues with this card. It wouldn't connect to my Fios wireless network (it'd connect to the guest network though - go figure). Card was very slow. I bought an Intel AX210 for my son's laptop and it fixed the problems. Speed and connectivity is significantly better with an Intel card.The laptop is a little short on ports, including an Ethernet and an SD card slot. You may want to get a USB dock that has these and additional USB ports.Now the graphics card. First off, this is NOT a gaming laptop nor does it claim to be. This is a low power version of the RTX 3050 Ti. If you buy this with gaming as your primary focus, you'll be disappointed. There are dedicated gaming laptops that will do a much better job.With that being said, this laptop is one that is capable of doing some lighter gaming and doing it reasonably well. It will perform better than other thin and light graphics solutions like the Nvidia MX450 or the Intel Xe. Think more of playing a game in your hotel after a day of work. The lower power edition will have lower performance than other RTX 3050 Ti's running at a higher wattage. The graphics card is there to give a boost to creator software like Photoshop and Premier. This laptop is primarily a work laptop. Still gaming will be significantly better than with the onboard Radeon graphics, or a comparable laptop with Intel Xe graphics.Screen is pretty good for its segment. Sound is ok. Headphones would be advised for better sound.Keyboard backlight was another issue for me. The white backlight with the gold keys can make it hard to read with the backlight on. I found the keyboard more readable with the backlight off in a lit room. The middle right section of the keyboard was significantly dimmer than the left side and right edge. It made the keyboard even more difficult to read and quite frankly, it drove me nuts. My son's laptop didn't have the issue.Acer offered to do a warranty repair for me, but a tech at an authorized Acer repair shop told me to just send it back as I'd have the situation resolved much more quickly. I ended up exchanging it for a laptop that better meets my needs (IA testing and development). I bought another Acer as I still like the brand. I just needed something a bit beefier and a bit more upgradeable. It's a great laptop for my son who has much more "normal" computing needs than I do.Overall, it seems like a solid laptop for the price. It's not fancy but should do it's primary tasks well (business) with a little extra for entertainment. Compared to other thin and lights I've owned (an Aspire 5 and a Lenovo Ideapad 720S), this outperforms them.If you go in with reasonable expectations, you should be quite happy with the purchase.