The Acer Swift X is a lightweight gaming laptop anyone can afford

The Acer Swift series is famed for combining light weight and slim dimensions with decent performance and affordable prices. But the new Acer Swift X, launched at the firm’s annual Global Press Conference steps up the range’s performance game.

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Alongside AMD Ryzen 5 and 7 5000-series CPUs, the Swift X will also be among the first laptops to market to come with the new Nvidia RTX 3050Ti mobile GPU (successor to the older GTX 1650). A replacement for the mid-range Nvidia GTX 1650Ti, the 3050Ti ought to deliver enough power for a decent dose of after-work gaming.

Despite the impressive-looking specification, the Swift X is slim enough and light enough to be your main carry-around laptop. It’s a mere 17.9mm thick and weighs 1.39kg, and with a 14in Full HD display, it shouldn’t take up too much room in your bag, either.

It’s quite a handsome machine as well. We got the chance to go hands-on with the laptop at a recent pre-briefing event and the two-tone chassis (the steel blue model is pictured here) cuts a fine figure of a laptop.

The keyboard is a little flaccid but it does the job and you get a fingerprint reader embedded in a reasonably large touchpad for quick biometric login. With a good selection of ports scattered around the edges of the laptop — one full-size HDMI, a ThunderBolt 4 port, two USB-A ports plus a 3.5mm headset jack — it’s eminently practical as well.

In typical Acer fashion, it’s not the most luxurious of machines but when it’s released in June, the Acer Swift X could well shake up the mid-range lightweight laptop category with its price, which start at a reasonable £899 and rises to a maximum £1,199.

With what looks to be an impressive combination of power, price and portability, we can’t wait to get our hands on one for review.

Acer Predator Triton 500 SE and Helios 500 come with Mini-LED displays

Alongside the Swift X, Acer also unveiled a pair of new gaming laptops: the Acer Predator Triton 500 SE and the Acer Predator Helios 500, the former starting at a price of €1,999 and the latter starting at the somewhat higher price of €2,499.

These laptops are representatives of Acer’s more serious gaming range and can be configured with up to an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics cards, Intel’s 11th-gen Core i9 CPU and 64GB of RAM.

Although not quite as thin and light as the Swift X, the new Predator machines aren’t especially bulky, with the Triton 500 SE, in particular, measuring up nicely. It’s a mere 19.9mm thick and it’s nicely made to boot.

Naturally, there’s full RGB backlighting for the keyboard but this can be toned down if you don’t want to advertise that you’re working on a gaming machine.

It’s the display that’s the Acer Triton 500 SE’s most attractive feature, however. There’s a regular 240Hz IPS display option but most interesting is the Mini-LED model. This comes with a refresh rate of 165Hz, a WQXGA resolution and 1,250nits of peak brightness. It looks like it should be a cracker.

The 17.3in Helios 500 looks even better. Alas, we weren’t shown this at the pre-briefing but it also comes with the option of a Mini-LED display, this time with a higher 4K resolution, a refresh rate of 120Hz and full array local dimming so HDR movies and games should look awesome. If you don’t fancy that, the laptop will also be available with a super-high refresh rate 360Hz display.

The Triton 500 SE will be available from July, while the Helios 500 will be available from June. We’ll be looking to get both in for review so watch this space.