Geek Lifestyle Review: Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G Notebook

Don’t let the all-business-almost-vanilla-looking laptop from Acer fool you. Underneath this unassuming piece of aluminum beauty is a heart that’s filled with the bones of his enemies crushed amidst the fiery tyrannical heel of his gaming conquest!

Uh, okay, a bit overboard? But kidding aside, this is a quite an offering from Acer, a brand that has been playing second fiddle to the more aggressive notebook and gaming peripheral brands out in the market.

And while there are still misnomers on brand quality, after being our main driver for close to 2 weeks, the Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G is one fine machine that not only is an excellent workhorse, it has, under its hood, the capability to run your favorite games as well.

Geek-sthetic – 8.5/10

I love that the entire chassis of this is smothered in sleek aluminum. It has a slim feature as well giving the illusion that the laptop is easy to carry. Newsflash, it’s quite heavy. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The weight exudes a certain heft that’s attributed to quality – idea that the notebook won’t break easily. Plus, at 2.1kg, this all-metal notebook is a few grams less than the usual 2.4kg 15.6” gaming notebooks out there.

The laptop does away with a physical optic drive (who uses CD’s nowadays, anyway) and instead provides you with enough USB port to hook just about everything you could desire – that even includes a USB type-C port.

The overall (and overused) brushed-metal aesthetic, while classy, has been done by pretty much every other lifestyle notebook in the past 2-3 years. If you like the classic minimalist Macbook Pro look, then this Swift 3 is definitely for you. If you’re after a bit of flair, then, you may not find much in this machine, sadly.

Binge Watching Factor – 8/10

With a full HD IPS display screen, the Acer Swift 3 SF 315-51G is be able to retain vivid colors and light no matter the viewing angle. We were pretty happy with how crisp and pristine the color saturations are in this 15.6” screen.

Binging on Netflix is an absolute joy because of picture clarity, and while it doesn’t have the refresh rate of majority of gaming laptops, the image quality on gaming isn’t really that bad.

Sure, it doesn’t have a 120Hz or higher refresh rate nor is it G-synced, but it’s capable of producing decent videogame playback. For a laptop that’s not really built for gaming, the thing can hold out on its own.

Gaming Prowess – 7/10

With a souped up processor, inclusion of an SSD, 8G of Ram and an NVIDIA MX150 with 2Gb of RAM, the Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G can play most games out in the market…but with a catch. As the unit is only equipped with an MX150, the spiritual successor to the GeForce GTX 940M, and about as close as a GTX 1030 for a mobile desktop, you can’t play everything in ULTRA.

You’ll have to compromise a bit on this and lower some of the settings, however, there are games that you can run on High or Ultra without affecting the gameplay as much. We were playing a lot of DOTA 2 and Cuphead when we had this unit and both were running at high settings all the time. So far, no slow-down occurred.

Everyday Reliability – 8/10

We can’t talk about the Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G without looking at its core components. With the latest Intel Core i7 and a superbly decent NVIDIA MX150 graphic card, this Swift 3 can take most of the office workload thrown at it.

Coupled with a 128 GB SSD, loading programs and apps are faster than ever compared to those that have none. It’s one of the few key components that I truly liked about this variant. It can also run your usual editing suite without much problems. And with an average 10 hours of battery life of usage is a treat!

So far, as far as being an everyday work horse is, the Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G is one reliable piece of hardware!

Price & Affordability – 3/10

While the overall laptop experience is thoroughly enjoyable, my main gripe from the unit is its initial SRP. For a non-gaming laptop, a price of Php 79,990 is just quite steep considering that for around 10,000 pesos less you could already purchase a low-tier gaming laptop — something with a stronger graphic card than an NVIDIA MX150.

Given this, it’s very hard for us to casually recommend this laptop unless you get it at a suitably discounted rate. Speaking of discounts, we just found out that the i7 model is currently priced at Php 69,999 at Villmans with a Php 5,000 SM Gift Voucher. This is a limited time offer.

Final Geek Lifestyle Verdict – 7/10

Discounting the slightly steep price tag, the Acer Swift 3 SF315-51G is a solid unit with classy minimalist designs housing an entry-level-esque gaming-capable laptop. If you lean more towards work than gaming then this laptop is definitely for you. A bit hefty versus an ultrabook but is sleek enough to be carried everywhere – the Acer Swift 3 is your office on the go.