Acer Swift 3X review: Intel’s Xe Max graphics make a surprising debut
Intel has released its first discrete GPU in 20 years, the Iris Xe Max. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s trying to compete with Nvidia for gaming laptops, though. It’s not designed specifically to accelerate games, but rather to work with the CPU to speed up a variety of other tasks. An interesting idea for thin-and-light laptops, right? So far, the Iris Xe Max is in three laptops, and we received one of them — the midrange clamshell Acer Swift 3X — for review. The Acer Swift 3X isn’t a cheap laptop in its Iris Xe Max configuration — at least not for a typical Swift laptop. It comes in at $1,240 at Amazon with a Core i7-1165G7, 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM, 1TB of PCIe solid-state drive (SSD) storage, and a 14-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS display in the increasingly old-school 16:9 aspect ratio. You can spend $899 and get a version with just Iris Xe graphics inside, a Core i5-1135G7, 8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Do the Iris Xe Max graphics make this a must-buy midrange laptop? We’ll start w...
Strong performance; Excellent battery life; Aesthetic is attractive; Well-rounded port selection;
Display is underwhelming; Build quality doesn't meet premium standards; Poor gaming performance;