Customisable 14” Ultrabook – Schenker Vision 14 Review
While not exactly a household brand name, Schenker – the makers of XMG laptops – have been slowly rolling out more and more impressive machines over the years. This is their Vision 14, and it’s actually pretty impressive, sporting an “i7 processor”, an RTX 3050Ti, and even configurable (and upgradable) RAM and storage, all inside a magnesium 14” frame that all in weighs just 1.1KG. Oh, and it’s cheaper than almost every other 14” laptop with dedicated graphics. Sounds like an absolute steal, right? Well yes, but hold your horses because there are some things you should know before exercising that trigger finger on the buy button.
First, you should know the full specs. The “i7 processors” is my absolute favourite (sarcasm), the i7-11370H. I’ve ranted about this before, but basically this is a quad core CPU with 8 threads and in this laptop a “35W+” TDP, aka 35W minimum but in enthusiast mode it was 65W. It uses two standard SODIMM DDR4 slots for RAM so you can configure this how you like, I got 16GB of 1×8 DDR4-3200. The two M.2 slots are also customisable and upgradable, I got a 1TB WD SN750. You can option an RTX 3050 Ti with 4GB of GDDR6 and a 35W (+15W dynamic boost) TDP, or drop almost 500 euros off the price tag and get an 11300H with integrated graphics instead, but rather obviously I got the 3050 Ti model.
Performance wise, the 11370H is an absolute champion compared to the 1165G7 in the Razer Blade Stealth. The Intel EVO chips are ones you will find everywhere in this thin-and-light form factor, and I can happily report this should outperform most if not all of them. Interestingly, comparing to the 11370H in the Asus TUF DASH F15, despite running a much lower TDP – the peak I saw was 53W but was stable around 40W – it handily outperforms the F15 in most cases. Strange! Of course when comparing to something even a slightly higher end like the Ryzen 5600H (which was held back by only 8GB of RAM in my config), the difference is night and day, and comparing to the Apple M1 Pro 10 Core… Yeah, no competition. The M1 wins pretty much everything, especially anything multi-threaded, all while drawing less power and producing less heat.
Speaking of heat, the laptop did a reasonable job of keeping it away from the components. The peak CPU temp I saw was 88°c under 100% load rendering, although that was just a small peak as it was stable at more like 80°c. If you fire up a game you can expect both the CPU and GPU to sit at around 70°c, thanks to the absolutely tiny fans whirring their hearts out. While you can make use of the noise limit modes, if you want any level of performance out of it you’ll need to deal with the fairly high pitched whine of the fans. Have a listen.
I mentioned gaming, of course I couldn’t test a laptop with dedicated graphics without at least trying to game, right? Sure Schenker list the 3050 Ti as a “Content Creation Accelerator”, but it can accelerate games into my eyeballs so let’s see! In light weight games like CSGO, sure, even at the display’s 2880×1880 it’ll generally hit the 90FPS required to match the display’s refresh rate, and it’s not the absolute worst time. Anything heavier than CSGO though is pretty much a no-go. I managed to squeeze out 37FPS average in Cyberpunk at 1080p on low settings, so it is possible, but there is another problem with gaming on this, and that is the display.
It’s a pretty nice panel, like I said it runs at 2880×1880 meaning it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio, uses an IPS panel and will even run at 90Hz too. Sadly, the pixel response times are pretty dreadful, averaging over 20ms using my new response time tool which is painfully slow. Any amount of fast motion gets smeared and blurry – that’s actually a problem for more than just gaming too. Scrolling around especially with dark mode enabled can make light text smear while in motion. It’s not the end of the world, but much like the new MacBook Pro it can contribute to an uncomfortable viewing experience. At around 22ms average, that equates to one frame at 45FPS, meaning anything over 45FPS is going to have a fully ghosted frame.
Luckily the display actually beats it’s claims in brightness, they claimed 380 nits but I saw 413 nits with my unit. That’s still not amazing as in bright offices or outdoors you’ll struggle to see anything, but for average use it’s perfectly fine. It also exceeds its colour space claims, reaching over 100% of the sRGB spectrum, up to around 82% of the DCI P3 spectrum, and seemingly pretty accurate out of the box. That makes it a decent, if not mind-blowing, option. It will work well for office use and content consumption, and should even fit reasonably well for content creation if that’s what you’re into.
The I/O also fits that bill, with two full size USB 3 A ports, two Type C’s (of which the right one actually Thunderbolt 4), an SD card reader, 4 pole headphone jack, HDMI 2.0 and DC in. You can charge the laptop via the USB C ports with a 20V 3.25A (65W) USB PD charger, although the left port – the standard USB one – can only charge while the laptop is on or asleep, not powered off, whereas the Thunderbolt port on the right will charge it no matter the state.
The area that puts me off the Vision 14 the most is the keyboard. It’s not actively bad, but it feels a little cheap. The keys aren’t all that stable through their travel making for a bit of a cheap feel. Also, despite being listed as a backlit keyboard and having the setting in their control centre software, mine refused to light up. I could be missing something, but I think something might be up as in their software it says I can change the colour of the backlight, but I’m not presented with any options or way to do that, so that could be a bug with my unit.
The trackpad is better, it’s pretty massive, has all of the gesture support you can expect and feel pretty premium. I did have it jump around on me from time to time though, and the lack of a touchscreen on a machine like this is kind of a dealbreaker for me. For this screen size, being able to fold it over and tap stuff on the screen – or hell just tap stuff on the screen outright – is often preferable to using a trackpad or external mouse.
So, who is this machine for? Well, if you are after an around-the-house, every-day-carry laptop for word processing, web browsing and content consumption, this probably isn’t it. There are better, cheaper options available that will suit you better. But if you do a touch of content creation, or need a little more power while still retaining the size and weight then this might be for you. The pricing is incredibly competitive, as even with how I have it spec’d here it’s under 2,000 EUR, or around £1,650. Sadly, because we were all lied to, if you want one of these in the UK you’ll need to pay VAT on top of that, which sets it to at least £1,900, and that’s assuming you don’t also get charged an import tariff as well. And for that kind of money you can afford the MacBook Pro 14 with the 8 core M1 Pro, or a touch more will net you the better 10 core instead. Or you can get to soon-to-launch Razer Blade 14 with a Ryzen 6900HX, RTX 3060 6GB and a 144Hz display I can only assume won’t be so painfully slow, albeit for £2,200 instead.
All-in-all, I do quite like the Vision 14. It’s not quite for me personally, but if you fit its target market (and live in Europe), it’s not a bad option. The build quality isn’t all that great, and since this is an ODM machine made by TongFang (the PH4TRX1) you might find similar options available elsewhere – although Schenker do a number of under-the-hood tweaks that you might feel outweigh any likely small cost savings. Plus since you can add storage and RAM yourself you can either try and save some cash upfront by buying a lower spec and upgrading, or just extend the lifespan of the machine with easy upgrades later on.
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TechteamGB Score
