Battle of the $350 laptops: Acer Swift 1 vs. Gateway Ryzen 3 3200U

We've been on the lookout for good but seriously cheap laptops for a while now. Acer's $650 Swift 3 is an excellent choice for budget laptops in the under-$700 range, but we've been really itching to find one in the almost nonexistent sub-$400 category. To that end, today we're looking at two of Walmart's finest—a $378 Acer Swift 1 and a $350 Gateway GWTN141-2. Both of these are serviceable if cheap laptops, but the Gateway, despite being the less expensive model, will be the clear winner for most people. It's more powerful, more repairable, more upgrade-able, and in our testing, a bit more reliable as well.

Acer Swift 1 SF114-32

Thankfully, the off-putting dingy yellow POST logo isn't in your face for long—the Swift 1 cold boots to the desktop in about 11 seconds.

We found the keyboard pretty unremarkable. It makes maximal use of the Swift 1's chassis, so it doesn't feel too cramped—but we already know some of you will hate the compressed arrow key layout.

DC barrel jack, full-size HDMI out, USB-C, 2x USB 3.0 type-A.

SD card slot, 3.5mm audio combo jack, USB 2.0 type-A, power and HDD LEDs, Kensington lock slot.

If you want to get into the Swift 1, you'll need a set of Torx bits. But there's no reason to bother, unless you're replacing the battery—or, we guess, the Wi-Fi—since everything else is soldered to the board.

Once you (very carefully, due to the thin aluminum side panels) lift off the back panel, there's not much to look at—no active cooling, and no sockets either, except for the Wi-Fi and one unpopulated, SATA-only M.2.

We didn't actually intend to test or review the Swift 1—we ordered a Walmart Motile 14, with a Ryzen 5 processor for only $350. But Walmart has an unfortunate tendency to just throw in any similar product when it runs low on stock, and the Swift 1 is what got sent in its place—with no notification, either by email or in our account at Walmart.com, and no paperwork in the box either.

There's only a 30-day return/exchange window on laptops at Walmart, but Things Came Up, and we didn't open the box until after that window had shut. Discovering that our Ryzen 5 laptop had magically turned into a Pentium Silver (roughly Celeron-class) laptop and there wasn't anything we could do about, it did not spark joy... but it is still an under-$400 laptop, and we're here to test and review cheap laptops, right?

Physically, the Swift 1 strongly resembles a lower-end Chromebook. It's not particularly lightweight, but it's quite slender, and its silver-skinned good looks are unassuming. On the plus side, it has a metallic chassis, not plastic; on the minus side, that chassis is extremely thin and very easily bent up. When we disassembled the Swift 1, despite being extremely careful and using a soft plastic spudger, we still bent the right side a little bit while getting the back panel off.

The best feature of the Swift 1 is its fast boot times—you can expect a cold boot to get to the Windows 10 desktop in around 11 seconds, including POST. Unfortunately, the high performance ends there—the Swift 1's Pentium Silver CPU, 4GiB RAM, and 64GB eMMC storage combine for a pretty lackluster experience.

Everything on the Swift 1—with the exception of the battery, the Wi-Fi chipset, and one unpopulated, SATA-only M.2 slot—is soldered on, unrepairable, and un-upgradeable. What you buy is what you get, and it works until it breaks.

Gateway GWTN141-2

We've got to give EVOO credit for one thing—they nailed the Gateway branding with that wallpaper.

We have a feeling some of you will be excited about that uncompressed arrow key layout.

The fingerprint reader on the Gateway is built into the touchpad—this was a new one on us. Note the dark square in the upper left.

Kensington lock slot, DC barrel jack, USB 3.0 Type-A, full-size HDMI out, USB Type-C.

SD card slot, 3.5mm audio combo jack, USB 3.0 Type-A.

Behold, a mystery panel! It looks pointless at first glance, but there's actually an M.2 slot under there at the top. I think I'd rather pull the whole back off than try to mess around in that tiny panel though.

The Gateway is very easy to disassemble; just Philips screws and pop things loose. The plastic chassis felt sturdy enough to survive quite a few disassemblings.

Looking a little closer, we see an active cooling system, an empty DDR4 DIMM slot, an occupied M.2 NVMe slot, an empty M.2 SATA slot, and an unfortunately soldered Realtek Wi-Fi chipset.

On the left, we see the currently empty M.2 slot, which is silkscreened as SATA only. By contrast, the occupied M.2 (with the C: drive in it) is silkscreened PCIE/SATA.

We went into testing the GWTN141-2 with a mixture of excitement and trepidation—on paper, a Ryzen 3200U system for $350 is a great deal. But in practice, we'd discovered that the new Gateway line is—like the horrid $140 EVOO EV-C-116-5—manufactured by Shenzhen Bmorn Technology and imported by EVOO. We're happy to say that the GWTN141-2 is not a repeat of the EV-C-116-5's story. The Gateway's Ryzen 3 3200U CPU was not limited by substandard thermals or factory underclocking, and it performs as you'd expect from looking at public leaderboards. The Gateway offers an even faster cold boot than the Swift—we timed it at eight seconds from power button to Windows desktop.

Continuing the Gateway's tale of "Hey! Not bad," the 128GB SSD might be an odd Chinese brand you've never heard of, but it's a real M.2 NVMe SSD which can be replaced or upgraded. Although the 4GiB RAM the system comes with is soldered to the board, there's an empty DIMM slot available. There's even an empty M.2 SATA-only slot, with an easy-access panel for that slot on the back.

The only real flies in the GWTN141-2's ointment are its cheap plastic chassis and its equally cheap Realtek 8821CE Wi-Fi.

The plastic used for the chassis is noticeably softer than you might expect for a laptop; it feels more like a kid's toy than a real computer, and it even felt slightly tacky to the touch on first unboxing. (Your mileage may vary, here—it bothered me, but the Spousal Opinion was "Whatever, it's fine.") On the plus side, the plastic chassis felt sturdy enough to survive plenty of disassembly and reassembly, unlike the Swift 1's razor-thin aluminum side panels.

The Realtek Wi-Fi is serviceable if slow under Windows, but it will cause severe headaches for anyone wanting to install Linux—and unlike most of the GWTN141-2's gear, it's soldered to the board and not replaceable.

Performance

Passmark CPU testing demonstrates just how much air there is between these four laptop models—the $650 Swift 3, the $350 Gateway and Swift 1, and the $140 EVOO.

We're not really used to seeing big differences between single-threaded Passmark scores. The near-doubling of Swift 1's score by the Gateway is worth sitting up and noticing.

Cinebench R20 tells roughly the same story Passmark did—namely, the Gateway's Ryzen 3 3200U is far more CPU than the Swift 1's Pentium Silver N5000.

Once again, we see big air between these laptop models, even on single-threaded tests. Notice the EVOO has dropped out of the race entirely at this point.

Geekbench 5, as usual, flattens the differences between CPUs noticeably more than either Passmark or Cinebench. We believe Passmark and Cinebench serve as far references for the difference between Gateway's Ryzen 3200U and Swift 1's Pentium Silver.

Geekbench 5 continues the trend of showing big air on single-threaded benchmarks between these laptops.

Gateway's "Netac" 128GB SSD isn't very impressive by NVMe standards, but it crushes Acer's soldered-on 64GB eMMC without breaking a sweat.

The stars of our show today are, of course, Acer's $378 Swift 1 SF114-32 and Gateway's $350 GWTN141-2. But for reference, we're throwing in a couple of spoilers—Acer's $650 Swift 3 SF314-42, and EVOO's unspeakable $140 EV-C-116-5 doorstop.

We think it's important to relate the Swift 1 and the Gateway not only to one another, but also to a "real laptop." We also think it's instructive to compare the Swift 1, in particular, to the EVOO—because the gap between the two underscores the fact that the Swift 1, though no match in performance for the Gateway, is—for the most part—a usable laptop.

With that said, we find it difficult to recommend the Swift 1 over the Gateway. Although the Gateway's older Ryzen 3 CPU is no match for this year's Renoirs, it's still no slouch—and it absolutely dominates the Swift 1's Pentium Silver N5000. Gaming workloads will bring the 3200U to its knees, but there was never a time we felt like rolling our eyes and saying "ugh" at the Gateway during normal desktop or Web-based use.

The Swift 1's Pentium Silver N5000 is an entirely different beast, designed for maximum electrical and thermal efficiency with everything else left to go hang. It's roughly half the speed of the 3200U in most tests—but it gets by with entirely passive cooling, and the battery life is frankly pretty crazy. In most use, the Swift 1 struck us as reasonably responsive—but unfortunately, it's not hard to find Web-based workloads in which it struggles.

Specifically, the Swift 1 choked badly on Facebook's new layout. Attempting to type a short paragraph about electrical connections resulted in text buffering—leaving us to watch as it "typed" itself out, character by laborious character, for another couple of minutes. To be fair, this is more about Facebook sucking than about the Swift 1—but also to be fair, a lot of people will expect to use Facebook on their new laptop.

We have to stress that the Gateway is absolutely no gaming laptop—it turns in a Time Spy score only a third of the Swift 3's, and the Swift 3 itself is only a budget laptop. But the Swift 1 can't even run the test.

The less-demanding Night Raid tells roughly the same story—the Gateway gets a third the Swift 3's score, while the Swift 1 fails to complete the test.

The differences between the Swift 1 and the Gateway are even more apparent in gaming tests, where the Gateway's scores aren't great, but the Swift 1's score is "I can't do this."

3DMark warned us "this system does not have enough VRAM and may not complete the test" on both systems, but the Gateway completed the tests fine (2 fps on Time Spy is "fine," right?), while the Swift 1 crashed out entirely within seconds of beginning either test.

If you want to run a game from 2010, you might do OK on the Gateway. On the Swift 1, we sincerely hope the only kind of gaming you want to do is interactive fiction.

Battery Life

Both laptops have good battery life, not-so-good stability. Using Event Viewer to find crash times got to be a regular thing.

Neither laptop successfully completed the PCMark 10 Modern Applications battery life test. What you're seeing from them isn't "time before shutdown" it's "time before crash."

Since both laptops crashed under PCMark 10's Modern Apps testing, we tried our go-to YouTube clip at 1080p in fullscreen. The Gateway delivered ten hours of playback—longer than the actual video clip!—but the Acer still crashed.

Trying to test our two ultrabudget laptops for battery life was a frustrating exercise, to say the least. The short version is they both offer excellent battery life—which you may not get all the way through before needing to reboot due to a crash.

Neither laptop lasted all the way through PCMark 10's Modern Office battery-life test. Both crashed well before the battery itself was exhausted. The Swift 1 did at least survive for slightly longer than the Swift 3's (successful) test run; but the Gateway couldn't make it much past four hours before suffering an application crash.

With no good data from the Modern Applications battery test, we tried falling back on something simpler—loading up the BBC's 10 Hours of Relaxing Oceanscapes on YouTube and playing it in full-screen at 1080p until the battery died.

The Acer Swift 1 failed this test as well. After crashing at 4 hours 20 minutes, it tumbled into a strange, half-brightness version of its POST screen. The Gateway, on the other hand, managed to play the clip for a solid six hours and forty-one minutes before shutting down at 5 percent battery.

Scoring this one decisively is a challenge. A sticker next to the touchpad on the Swift 1 boldly claims "up to 17 hours battery life"—we certainly weren't able to verify that figure, but to be fair, we can't really falsify it either. We found the Gateway's more-than-6.5-hour YouTube playtime stellar—but given that it, too, failed to complete PCMark 10 Modern Apps testing, we can't get too excited about it.

Neither laptop is likely to disappoint on the very specific grounds of battery life—but you should definitely save your work before going to bed.

Can it Linux?

The Swift 1 "just works" on Ubuntu 20.04—the only unclaimed device is the fingerprint reader.

The Gateway's Realtek Wi-Fi is a no-go on Ubuntu 20.04. It's possible to download and locally compile a driver from various sources on Github—but it'll break and need fiddling after kernel upgrades.

The Acer Swift 1 worked fine out of the box with Ubuntu 20.04. It lacked for nothing but a driver for the fingerprint reader, which most Linux users don't expect anyway.

The Gateway, unfortunately, should be considered a no-go for most Linux users—its Realtek 8821CE Wi-Fi does not have in-kernel support, and getting it working is a painful slog of finding a driver on someone's Github, downloading and building it locally, and waiting for it to break on the next kernel upgrade.

Extremely ambitious Linux users might be able to turn the Gateway into a good Linux system by putting a $20 Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 card—connected with an M key-to-A+E key converter—in the Gateway's empty M.2 slot. We can't guarantee that'll work, but if you try it, let us know how that goes!

Due to limited time, we did not battery test either system under Ubuntu.

Refurbished, or new?

Enlarge / The Ryzen 3 3200U in the Gateway is a better all-around CPU than anything we could find used for a similar price.

One of the more common refrains in the Ars comments when we test inexpensive laptops is "I can do better buying used!" In this under-$400 class, we don't believe that's actually the case. We went looking on Amazon and eBay for refurbished laptops under $400 and found five of the most common CPU models for those laptops. Then we used public Passmark leaderboards to compare those CPUs to what's in the Gateway and the Acer we reviewed today.

The first thing we'd like to point out is that, unless you've got a cousin looking to unload something fast, you aren't going to get a great refurbished laptop for $400 or less. We didn't find anything newer than Intel fifth-generation Core CPUs in this price bracket. That means a 6-year-old system. Worse, quite a lot of the systems in this bracket had second-generation i5 CPUs, marking them as a whopping 9 years old.

The best-performing CPU in our scavenged finds is an Intel Core i5-4300M. This 7-year-old M-series manages to outperform our sole fifth-generation part due to its whopping 37W TDP—it's configured for power, not efficiency, which in turn means poor battery life, especially if your refurb is still limping along on the OEM battery.

The Core i5-4300M handily outperforms the Swift 1's Pentium Silver N5000, but the Gateway's Ryzen 3 3200U beats it by 25 percent on multithreaded tests and about 15 percent on the single-threaded tests. Add in a new NVMe SSD versus whatever SATA garbage the refurbisher threw in for cheap, DDR4 RAM instead of DDR3, Vega 3 graphics versus HD Graphics 4600, and a one-year warranty versus typically 30 days, and the Gateway is obviously a far better deal.

Do you think we got this wrong? Hit us up in the comments—but please, keep it realistic. A single oddball sale you found in your local Facebook marketplace doesn't count; we're looking for readily available, refurbished laptops from dealers who can be found on Amazon, Newegg, or eBay.

Conclusions

We can't recommend Acer's Swift 1 SF114-32 for most users. Although it's handsome on the outside and boots quickly, it just doesn't offer enough muscle for some common workloads—such as Facebook's new and rather blecherous Web interface, which drowns the N5000 in more Javascript than it's ready to handle.

The Gateway GWTN141-2, on the other hand, is absolutely a credible laptop. It's certainly not a great laptop—we don't love the fact that it, like the Acer Swift, crashed out of the PCMark 10 battery test—but it's got enough muscle to make it through light workloads without complaint. It's even willing to take a stab at some older games if you want it to.

We tested the webcam on both laptops in three conditions: dim office lighting, harsh forelight with a studio flood, and harsh backlight with a studio flood. It would be difficult to tell one laptop from the other on the basis of webcam images; in both cases, all three (difficult) lighting conditions produced grainy, but acceptable images with clear facial features. You wouldn't mistake these for a mid-grade or better Logitech standalone, but you also wouldn't mistake them for the no-name garbage we had to settle for earlier this year to get kids online for school.

The speakers were similarly "it works, meh" on both systems—usable, but tinny. We definitely would not advise anyone to set any store in "tuned for THX" (as the Gateway proudly declares itself) anymore.

You should know what you're giving up by dropping down to this under-$400, ultrabudget laptop class—if you've got the extra $300 to spend, you get an enormous amount of additional performance, stability, and general quality out of an upgrade to Acer's Ryzen 7 4700U-powered Swift 3. But if you just don't have the extra money—or just don't want to spend it—the Gateway GWTN141-2 gets most jobs done just fine.