RTX 4060 Laptop vs RTX 4070 Laptop – XMG PRO 15 Review

This is the XMG PRO 15 – a rather impressive 15” gaming laptop that you can spec however you want. It comes with an i9-13900HX as your only CPU option, but you can pick from an RTX 4060 laptop GPU, or a 4070 instead. You can also spec your RAM, I picked 32GB of SK Hynix DDR5-5600, and up to two M.2 SSDs, I got a 1TB Crucial P5. You can even pick your keyboard layout! But as you might have noticed, I reviewed a pretty similar machine last week – that was an XMG FOCUS 16 so a little different, but it featured the same CPU, RAM and SSD, but with an RTX 4060 laptop GPU. I specced a 4070 in the PRO 15, so I thought on top of a normal laptop review I’d show you just how different – or similar – these two chips are. Let’s dive straight in with the gaming results!

In Rainbow Siege Siege, at 1080p there isn’t all that much of a difference. The 4070 nets 20 FPS more, which of course sounds great until you realise that’s only 5% more performance. Still, it’s safe to say you’re getting a good experience from either of these chips. At 1440p and 1600p respectively the difference is a little bigger, although do bear in mind that these aren’t like-for-like resolutions. One is 16:10, one is 16:9, meaning there are 10% fewer pixels on the PRO 15’s display. That might help explain the 14% better performance on the 4070 – but still either way you’re going to have a good time here.

CSGO, another ultra-fast esports title, runs incredibly well on both machines, with another 5% performance improvement at 1080p, and almost the exact same percentage difference at native resolution, at around 14%. Again, both of these chips and resolutions offer an excellent gaming experience, so I wouldn’t be too worried about spending the extra.

Cyberpunk is a rather interesting one though, as at 1080p there’s only a 4 FPS gap. That translates to just 3% faster going from the 4060 to the 4070 laptop chip. That’s a little lower than we’ve seen before, but compare that to native resolution where there’s now a 24% gap! That’s 10% higher than the other games we’ve seen so far, and can’t be all down to the resolution difference. Both have 8GB of VRAM though, which is likely a limiting factor for both chips. Again, regardless, getting nearly 100 FPS average at 1600p isn’t exactly bad, and that’s with DLSS disabled too, on medium settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider has a larger gap at 1080p, up to 10%, going from around 160 FPS to around 175 FPS. You’d be hard pressed to notice that difference, but it’s there nonetheless. At native res again we see a larger gap, this time around 22%, with almost the exact same results as Cyberpunk going from 95 FPS on the 4060 at 1600p to 116 FPS at 1440p on the 4070. 

The results from Fortnite are a little strange. While I will flash up the results so you can have a quick look, I’m not going to dive too deep into them. The results from the FOCUS 16 in particular I think could use a little more troubleshooting. 

Microsoft Flight continues the trend for DirectX 12 games of having around 10% – 8.7% specifically – more performance at 1080p, and actually over 30% more performance at 1440p. Neither reach anywhere near to their refresh rates, but you do get a healthy amount more performance from the 4070 especially at native resolution. Going from 72FPS average to 95 FPS average is a considerable, and noticeable improvement for sure.

Lastly in Hitman 3 on generally medium settings you can expect over 200 FPS from the 4070, versus 180 FPS on the 4060. That’s about 15% faster which is pretty impressive considering they both have the same TGP at up to 140W. I mean either is plenty, but an extra 25 FPS isn’t a bad thing. At native resolution you’re looking at 26% more performance, going from 116 FPS up to 140 FPS. Again that’s a healthy increase, and isn’t just the resolution difference either.

The biggest change by far though is the price tag. The 4070 laptop chip is 295 Euros more than the 4060. That’s 13% more, for, at native resolution, around 15% more performance when adjusting for the resolution. I can’t say that I’d want to spend that personally, especially since both only offer 8GB of VRAM. If the 4070 offered 10GB or 12GB for the same price difference I’d say it’d be worth it, but as it stands I’m not so sure. 

When it comes to the rest of the XMG PRO 15 though, it’s one hell of a machine. Personally I prefer the 16:9 aspect ratio, especially for content consumption. It’s a little shorter of a machine which makes it easier to fit in a backpack, and the 240Hz IPS 1440p panel is fantastic too. It isn’t quite as bright with a peak of 350 nits – although that still beats XMG’s 300 nit claim, and the contrast ratio isn’t quite as good at 1030:1, but it’s still a great experience. The colour gamut coverage is actually a fair bit better, pretty much covering 100% of the DCI-P3 spectrum. The accuracy isn’t quite as good with a DeltaE of 1.63, although that’s still great especially for a gaming machine.

Response times are a touch disappointing, with only 20% of the transitions falling inside the 4.2ms refresh rate window. The light-to-dark transitions especially are insanely slow, taking up to 4 frames to finish transitioning, although the dark to light transitions are considerably better. It looks like XMG remembered to overdrive the panel on this model as you can see a tiny bit of overshoot in the middle transitions. That’s a good thing though, and means that the middle transitions are considerably faster – the upper edge averages out at around 2.4ms which is half the refresh rate window which is fantastic. A little more tuning down at the bottom would be great though!

When it comes to input lag, I’m incredibly impressed. My OSRTT Pro tool reckons the on display latency is just 2ms. If you ignore the couple outlier results you can expect well under one frame of latency, which is incredible, especially for a laptop! Normally they are on the slower side, but selecting the dGPU only in the NVIDIA control panel is a must on this. That dedicated MUX switch is doing rather well here.

All of that means a solid gaming experience. The 240Hz panel is still fast enough to enjoy even fast paced FPS games. While I’m not sure it’s exactly “Pro” level, it’s one of the better laptop gaming experiences you can find. It’s smooth, pretty responsive and especially for more esports titles like Siege, a pretty great experience. I didn’t have any problems clicking on heads – beyond my own inaccuracy of course – with the only drawback being the fan noise. Here’s a quick clip of that.

The cooling system does do a pretty decent job of cooling these power hungry chips though, and a look inside shows you why. It has four heatsinks, two fans and plenty of heatpipes. It isn’t quite as much a work of art as the bare-copper FOCUS 16, but it’s nice enough. While we’re in here it’s worth noting that because of the fully configurable design, you get two SODIMM DDR5 slots to upgrade if you fancy, and two M.2 SSD slots too, along with the 80Wh battery that lasts about as long as you expect – aka a couple of hours, or under an hour for gaming. 

I/O wise, on the left you get a mic or SDPIF jack – a rarity on a laptop – along with a separate headphone jack, and two USB A ports. On the back you get the funky rectangular DC in jack, 2.5G ethernet, HDMI 2.1 and Mini DisplayPort, and on the right you’ve got a Thunderbolt 4 port, a regular USB C port with DisplayPort ALT mode and a microSD card reader. Not bad – although only having two USB A ports is a little annoying. 

As specced, this XMG PRO 15 is a hair over 2,500 Euros. Dropping that down to a 4060 Laptop GPU does clear 300 Euros from that, but that does make it one of the more expensive machines with either a 4060 or 4070. The 13900HX is probably driving a lot of that, so it would be nice to see a few lower end CPU options like the 13700H instead, but if you want the top end CPU and like the ability to customise your machine, it might be worth giving them a look. The build quality is pretty good, the keyboard is a little soft for me but otherwise nice enough, and the display is pretty good especially for gaming. For content creation the lower contrast ratio might be a bit of a problem, although the gamut coverage and accuracy is great. On the whole I quite like it, even if it is a bit pricey!