XMG FOCUS 16 Review – 13900HX + RTX 4060 Gaming Laptop

It’s been a little while since I’ve had a laptop in, and this is a great one to come back on. This is the XMG Focus 16, a CPU focused monster of a machine. XMG does things a little differently than your average laptop maker – you can customise your machine straight from the factory. Their site will let you pick what GPU you want, and of course things like RAM, SSDs and even what keyboard layout you’d prefer. I spec’d this machine with the 13900HX – the only choice you get on the CPU front – an RTX 4060 Laptop which has 8GB of VRAM, 32GB of SK Hynix DDR5-5600 RAM, a 1TB Crucial P5 SSD, and naturally the UK ISO layout. It’s worth pointing out that you can get up to an RTX 4070 in this, along with up to 64GB of RAM, and there is actually two M.2 slots inside so you can have up to 8TB of total SSD space if you have the cash for it! 

CPU Performance

Since this is a slightly more CPU focused machine I’m going to start off with the CPU performance from that monster 13900HX. That has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores for a total of 24 cores. It comes with a 55W+ TDP, although I’ve run these tests in the “Performance” mode which as you’ll see pumps that up a fair bit. Now it’s important to note that for the Puget Bench suite you can’t compare between versions, so I don’t have any good data to compare to. Tests like Cinebench and Blender haven’t changed though so I just want to give you some context for how insane this chip is. Cinebench single threaded already shows promise – it’s over 100 points faster than the 12900H, and 500 points higher than the 6900HX. In multi threaded though, it’s a landslide. Of course, comparing a chip with 6 P cores and 8 E cores to one with 8 P and 16 E isn’t exactly apples to apples, but my god that’s a lot of performance in a laptop. 

Blender shows the same performance. The BMW scene is now under 100 seconds, over 40 seconds faster than the 12900H. Gooseberry is even more impressive, with its run being completed in under 9 minutes, compared to over 12 for the 12900H or over 14 minutes for the 6900HX. I’ll flash the puget scores up here quickly for you too – once I get some more machines in these will start to make some sense in context, but suffice to say these are pretty great scores. 

The last thing to mention is the power and temperatures. Surprisingly, the 12900H actually draws MORE power than the much faster 13900HX. It’s still an absolutely insane amount of power to be drawing in a laptop chassis, but it is over 10 watts higher. Despite that, the 13900HX ended up running at pretty much the same temperature – although that’s not all that surprising as these chips turbo until they hit that sort of temp then throttle back. 

Gaming Performance

When it comes to games, I tested at both 1080p and at the native 2560×1600 resolution, and across seven games at generally medium to high settings, the machine averaged 231 FPS. Not bad eh! CSGO and Rainbow Six Siege do inflate that number a fair bit, but generally you’ll find pretty much any title a good experience. Even a CPU heavy game like Microsoft Flight Simulator ran at over 110 FPS on the medium preset, so that’s great. Of course you’d probably want to run the games at 1200p instead of 1080p so you don’t have to stretch the image or have black bars on the screen, but the performance should be pretty close to this still. 

At 1600p, the native resolution the average dips to 167 FPS, which still doesn’t sound too bad. On the whole it isn’t too much of a drop from 1080p – although strangely Fortnite on the High preset with no TSR or DLSS ran pretty slowly at 58 FPS average. Flight is still above 60 though – actually over 70 FPS – and both Cyberpunk and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are sitting pretty just below 100 FPS. Only the more esports titles like Siege and CSGO actually exceed the display’s 165Hz refresh rate though, which is a bit of a shame. Of course since you can option this with an RTX 4070 laptop GPU, you might have better luck there.

Display

Speaking of the display, let’s take a look at that. XMG claims this covers 95% of the sRGB spectrum, and it sure does. It actually exceeds the sRGB spectrum a little, with my SypderX reporting 99% coverage, and 77% of the DCI P3 spectrum. That’s not bad at all! XMG also sells this display short with a claimed 400 nit peak brightness figure – but I measured it at over 550 nits! That means that you could somewhat comfortably use this outside, or say on a train next to the window, if you can handle the fan noise anyway. What also impressed me is the black levels – while it’s no OLED, it managed to hit almost a 1300:1 contrast ratio, which for an IPS panel is really good. What’s even better is the colour accuracy. It averaged a DeltaE of just 1.42, which is great. There are a couple that break through the DeltaE of 2 threshold, but overall it’s a great panel to use. For content consumption, or content creation actually, I’d be pretty happy with this panel. The 16:10 aspect ratio makes it a good choice for video editing, as does the colour accuracy. Couple that with the top shelf CPU and you’ve got a killer content creation machine!

Response Times & Latency

Taking a look at the more gaming focused tests though, namely the response times of course tested with my open source response time tool, you’ll see just how slow this is. It averaged over 10ms, or almost two whole frames at 165Hz. While that’s far from the worst I’ve seen, it’s not exactly great. It could definitely do with having an overdrive mode available in their control centre software as it’s clear this panel can be driven a bit harder than this. As for input latency, as is typical for a laptop – even one with a MUX switch like this one – is a bit higher than a desktop. It averaged around 11ms of on display latency, which equates to about two frames of latency. While a desktop system – even one of the same sort of power – would be under one frame, this isn’t too bad for a laptop.

Gaming Experience

When it comes to the actual gaming experience, on the whole I’d say it’s pretty good. The slow response times do mean motion is a little smeary, especially in faster paced games, but it’s not that bad. Once I got my eye in I had a pretty good time with this. Temperatures are generally kept in check – the only area that gets warm is just below the display. The left side of the keyboard stayed nice and cool, and nothing got unbearably hot, save for the bottom although that’s normal these days. The keyboard feels pretty soft which I think works well for gaming, although a little less so for typing and regular usage. I’m used to a mechanical keyboard though so I’m sure if this was my main machine I’d get used to it. The massive, and I mean ginormous, track pad has great palm rejection as it didn’t trip once while gaming. It does occasionally stutter or lock up though which can be a little frustrating but it’s not all that common. 

I/O

One thing that might bother you is the I/O – you only get two USB A ports, one of which is USB 2 and both are on the left hand side. You do get two USB C ports so if you want more ports you can live that dongle life, but it’s a little annoying to need to on a relatively thick machine like this. DC in is a funky and chunky rectangular port, you get MiniDisplayPort – something I haven’t seen in quite a while now – and HDMI for display outputs, a MicroSD card reader, separate headphone and microphone jacks, and even ethernet too. 

Internals

A quick look inside reveals the absolute beauty of the cooling package – it’s all copper. It’s shielded, has heatpipes for days, and exhausts on both the back and sides. It does sound like a jet engine while gaming, in fact have a listen. 

Despite that, it’s a work of art in here. It’s really easy to get in too, just regular philips head screws and a gentle bit of prying gets the bottom cover off. From there you can see the relatively small 73 Wh battery, the currently empty second M.2 slot, and the SODIMM module RAM you can easily upgrade yourself if you need to. This is great – no anti-tamper stickers, no security screws or complicated clips. It’s easy to get in here and clean it or upgrade anything. It’s no Framework machine, but it’s pretty good.

Thoughts

On the whole I quite like the Focus 16. It’s definitely swinging to be a more creator focused machine and the shocking 8GB of VRAM you get on the 4060 and 4070 laptop GPUs is going to become a problem pretty quickly, especially with a 1600p display, but that’s hardly XMGs fault. The build quality is pretty good overall, the screen is nice, if a little slow in the response times department, and the performance is pretty good too. It’s a bit on the noisy side, but with this much power I can’t blame it. Pricing wise, that depends a lot on how you configure it. As tested it’s a hair over 2,000 euros, which sounds about right for this kind of configuration. I’d be pretty happy to recommend this overall – although as always take that with a grain of salt as I haven’t tested any other machines in a similar class recently so there’s a good chance I’m missing a better option. Still, it’s hardly a bad choice!