5 best laptops for college students 2025
Read the Complete Mashable review of the Acer Swift X 14 (2024).
Sturdy, fast and abundant with ports, Acer Swift X 14 of last year is my first choice for students who need a Windows laptop – even on his successor powered by AI. It is ideal if you prefer Windows to Mac, or if you cannot use MacBooks for compatibility reasons.
In particular, he has the dedicated NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 dedicated graphics card that certain engineering programs oblige. It also makes much better for PC games than a MacBook (although if you play often enough to justify a real game laptop, I have a separate recommendation for this later).
Although this 14.5 -inch creative laptop is not the most recent or chic PC on the market, it is certainly one of the most practical – and it does not require a non -capped budget. Its Intel Core Ultra 7,55-hour processor from last year obtained a geekbench 6 multi-core score of 13,386, exceeding all current Intel laptops that we have tried, with the exception of a Lenovo model of $ 2,119. It tends to operate a little strong, but it looks like a fair compromise since it is more zipped than 81% of the models in our current database.
This CPU is accompanied by a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPU which makes the Swift X 14 capable of performing software and specialized games. We have obtained eight hours and 32 minutes of use of our RTX 4070 test unit, which is less than our median battery life for all Windows laptops but good for one with discreet graphics. This exact model was out of stock at the time of writing, but RTX 4050 and 4060 variants are easily available for $ 1,299.99 and $ 1,499.99, respectively. The basic configuration of 4050 to 512 GB of storage, which is perfectly adequate for most students; If you are more a power user, opt for 4060, which has a complete teraoctet.
The Swift X 14 could be a bit Also Practical in the look of looks for some people – it is a very simple gray device – but its quality of construction is “excellent”, said Gedeon de Mashable. It is equipped with a decent elastic keyboard, a large soft touchpad and an OLED screen at 120 Hz which is vibrant and smooth in butter. Gedeon called the latter “a visual treat” in his review. Regarding connectivity, you get a nice mixture of modern and inherited ports with which work, including an HDMI port and a microSD card slit.
Acer sells a more recent and slightly cheaper version of the Swift X 14, The Swift 14 AI, but it is propelled by the ARM processors that students should avoid. He also does not have a dedicated GPU.
