Acer Swift 3 SF315 (Raven Ridge: Ryzen 5 2500U, Vega 8) Laptop Review [Notebookcheck]

Second Raven Ridge laptop to become available, first one being the HP Envy x360. The next one should be the Lenovo Ideapad 720S.

Quick specs:

  • 15.6" screen, 1080p, IPS, glossy.
  • ~2kg / 4.5lbs weight, traditional clamshell chassis, fairly thin at 18mm / 0.7".
  • 8GB of RAM, dual-channel, soldered; no SO-DIMM slots.
  • 256 GB of SSD (Intel 600p, ironically enough); it can be swapped for an NVMe drive, as it's connected via PCIe 3.0.
  • 48Wh battery, battery life of around 5 hours of continuous wifi browsing (vs. ~8h of the Kaby Lake-R version).
  • priced at €800 (in Germany).

As for performance:

  • TDP is set to 15W, temperature is limited to 75 °C.
  • CPU performance (Cinebench): comparable to the Envy x360, both within 10% of most laptops equipped with Kaby Lake-R.
  • Graphics performance: worse than the HP Envy x360, by 5%~15% depending on the benchmark; it remains better than an Nvidia 940MX, but it's considerably worse (>30%) than a MX150.
  • Idle power consumption is fairly high at ~10W, which is >50% more than that of Kaby Lake-R (which explains the shorter battery life).

The laptop itself seems to be fairly well built, both the lid and the base are solid enough, and the brushed metal finishing gives it a nice look (apart from the inevitable fingerprints).
We're not talking about XPS or Razer Blade levels of quality, but it's reasonably well made for a lower mid-end multimedia laptop.
Keyboard and screen are nothing to write home about, but they seem in line with most laptops in the price bracket.

At the end of the day, it's not much more than an average, mainstream laptop: which is to say, not very interesting to us enthusiasts, but pretty much what AMD needs in order to expand their market share.

/r/hardware Thread Link - notebookcheck.net