A GOOD RYZEN LAPTOP?? XMG Core 15 Ryzen Review
How can a company that you might not have heard of before be the first to produce a legitimately good Ryzen laptop, and best the likes of Asus and MSI? I’ll leave the speculation to the commenters, but believe me when I say this is what we have all been waiting for. Lets take a look at it, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
The XMG Core 15 is a configurable laptop, meaning you can buy it with whatever combination of storage, ram, GPU and keyboard you want. That’s already better than the competition. The spec starts out as a pretty anemic 1650TI, 8GB of ram and a single 250GB ssd, and runs you just over £1000. If you switch it to the RTX 2060 model I’ve got, bump up the RAM and storage a little, you’ll find yourself at around £1400, which for a laptop of this spec isn’t bad.
The CPU all the models have is the Ryzen 7 4800H – an 8 core, 16 thread beast that in “overboost” mode, where the CPU draws 72W instead of the usual 45W, it can boost to 4.3GHz and stay there, at least for a while. Thanks to this being a pretty slim and sleek chassis, in overboost mode and while gaming it can peak as high as 104°c, although spent most of its time in the higher 90°c range. But, unlike its competitors, that isn’t for lack of cooling. On the bottom the whole area is ventilation, you have vents on every side, and taking a look under the hood you’ve got 4 massive heatsinks combined with multiple heatpipes and dual fans. Take notes Asus and MSI, because this is how you do it.
Running through the rest of the machine, while we’ve got it open, you’ll find the as-configured Samsung 970 EVO 1TB M.2, 16GB of Samsung RAM and the 62WHr battery which gives it a pretty decent battery life. You also get the beautiful 144Hz 1080p IPS panel included too, which, again people like Asus and MSI should be taking notes here. In my testing, it covered 96% of the sRGB spectrum, and 74% of the DCI P3 and AdobeRGB spectrums, making for a legitimately usable creator machine. Sure it isn’t quite as nice as something like Acer’s ConceptD range, but it isn’t meant to be. It’s good enough to be versatile, and that’s fine.
As for the more gaming oriented tests, it aced them. The black to white response time was somewhere around 6ms, not bad for a laptop, and remarkably the white to black response time was only 8ms. When looking at the UFO ghosting test, it’s almost flawless. There is next to no trail, and when the image holds thanks to the refresh rate being 144Hz vs my cameras 980, it’s crystal clear. Oh, and then there is total system input lag. That was quite variable, but on average was around 30ms, which again for a laptop is really good.
Actually gaming on it felt great, every game I played was smooth and responsive even at ultra settings, which brings me nicely onto the benchmark results.
| AVG FPS | 1% Low | |
| BFV | 74.9 | 54.05405 |
| COD MW | 86 | 62.93266 |
| PUBG | 98.15 | 58.78895 |
| Fortnite | 100.93 | 63.21113 |
It’s not all about gaming though. I talked about versatility earlier, and thanks to the hardware and of course thay Ryzen CPU, this has it in spades. Productivity performance is almost on par with desktop 8 cores in overboost mode, and while the fans do ramp up a fair bit you have to expect it from a chassis this small and compact.
Blender BMW: 3m 22s
Cinebench 1T: 4063
Cinebench nT: 461
As for the rest of the laptop, the keyboard is fine. It’s RGB Backlit which is quite nice, and it’s fairly easy to type on. It’s a little weird for me to get used to, but I’d have no problems with it long term. The track pad is about as good as you get on a windows machine. It’s big enough, very well reinforced and feels like a quality part, plus all the gestures you’d expect. And the I/O is well suited for it. You’ve got 3 USB type A’s, and SD card reader, ethernet, dc in, USB type C and an HDMI port with 2 mini displayports out the back.
What’s weird about this laptop is that it shouldn’t blow me away. It’s not the most premium thing in the world, the construction and build quality is good, but not amazing. The display is the same, as is pretty much everything about it. But thanks to the absolutely dreadful job everyone else seems to have done with these Ryzen CPUs, it really does stand out from the crowd as being one of the best Ryzen laptops you can buy right now. Yes it runs hot in overboost mode – if that’s a concern feel free to turn it off and enjoy reasonably cool and quiet gaming, and yes it’s not insanely cheap, but that doesn’t I’m not going to recommend it. This seems like a brilliant choice for a killer gaming machine that has the versatility to be a content creation, or consumption beast too.
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TechteamGB Score
