THIN AND LIGHT GAMING LAPTOP! Schenker Vision 16 Pro Review (M23)

I must admit, I’m rarely surprised when it comes to gaming laptops, but this – the Schenker Vision 16 Pro – is definitely a surprise. It’s thin – just 17mm in total – and despite rocking an i7 13700H with 6P cores and 8E cores, and an RTX 4070 – it weighs just 1.6KG. Hell, even the 180W power brick is tiny and lightweight! Despite its size, this is a remarkably powerful gaming machine. Of course physics is physics, but I’m quite impressed at what this thing can do. Let me walk you through this whole thing, starting with the performance. 

As I mentioned, this is rocking an i7-13700H. Specifically that’s a 45W TDP, 6 P core, 8 E core chip. I’ve also specced 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM here, which is definitely the config I’d recommend. Of course, being a 45W chip it’s unlikely to keep up with the considerably higher TDP variants like the 13700HX, but in Cinebench you’ll find it’s the same sort of single core performance, albeit quite slow on the all-core front. It came out a little slower than the 6900HX – a now multi-year old 8 core CPU from AMD. Of course, since it’s only sipping power by comparison, that’s pretty good. Blender is a very similar result – it’s definitely no workstation powerhouse, but considering it isn’t much thicker than something you’d find with an Intel EVO sticker on it, this is pretty remarkable.

The thing that surprised me the most here is that even in the “Enthusiast” performance mode, the Vision 16 Pro has the lowest PEAK power consumption, AND the lowest PEAK temperatures. The 13700HX in the Helios Neo 16 drew nearly triple the wattage while not quite delivering twice the performance – and was 30°c hotter. This thing was remarkably quiet too. It’s hardly fanless, but compared to my usual fare of thick boi gaming laptops, this was whisper quiet. I’m really quite impressed!

When it comes to gaming performance, the most important thing you should know is that the RTX 4070 Laptop GPU in here is the 70W (well 95W with dynamic boost included) variant. Most models I’ve reviewed are the 140W version, so you should temper your expectations here. I’ll start with the native 1600p resolution performance – across the seven games I regularly test with the Vision 16 Pro averaged almost exactly 144FPS – admittedly CSGO and Siege do pump that up a fair bit. It’s more like 100FPS average with the rest of the games. Still, that’s remarkably playable. The esports titles will even saturate the 240Hz display which is fantastic, and again for how thin this thing is, that’s incredible.

At 1080p for comparison’s sake, in CSGO the Vision 16 Pro doesn’t look like it’s holding up too well. CSGO is a super CPU heavy game, and especially when the GPU robs up to 25W of the CPU’s power budget, performance is going to suffer. Still, a touch over 300 FPS average is more than adequate for a playable experience. Cyberpunk has the Vision 16 Pro a little closer to the rest of the pack at just shy of 100 FPS average.That’s only 25 FPS shy of the 140W TDP chips, which really isn’t that bad! Shadow of the Tomb Raider is even closer, netting 141 FPS average, just 17 FPS slower than the next fastest machine I’ve tested, that being a sister machine to this, the XMG Focus 16. Fortnite is the same sort of performance gap if you excuse the poor result from the Focus 16, with the Vision eking out 83 FPS average on high settings with no TSR enabled. Flight being more CPU bound does hurt the Vision’s performance in comparison, running at around 80 FPS average compared to the other chips hitting more like 110 – 120 FPS average. Still, for the size I can’t argue. Hitman 3 is a shocker – the Vision 16 Pro outperforms both RTX 4060 based machines, notting around 5 FPS more than the Focus 16! The 1% lows do suffer a little from the slower CPU, but that’s excellent news. Lastly in Rainbow 6 Siege you’ll find the Vision 16 Pro isn’t too far off from the Helios Neo 16 – ok it’s almost 80 FPS off but when you’re talking about 306 and 382 FPS I’d call that fairly close, and more than playable!

Of course to be able to play games well you need a good display – and on paper this 1600p 240Hz IPS panel sure sounds like one! Realistically it isn’t all that bad – and a far sight better than the panels you’d find on other machines of this size – but it isn’t exactly the perfect gaming panel. Response times are somewhat lacking, averaging 10.5ms, or nearly three full frames of ghosting on average. The UFO test bears that out too as you’ll find quite the trail here. To the eye it’s a little sluggish, although still certainly playable. I found it a little difficult to line up shots perfectly, although since I’ve now moved to an OLED for my main gaming monitor my reference point is likely a little skewed. 

Strangely it isn’t exactly the perfect content creation display either, with a quoted 95% coverage of the sRGB spectrum. In my testing it does a little better at 97%, and with a perfectly good DeltaE of just 1.36, but I think I’d like to see that more like 95% of the DCI P3 spectrum and a 165Hz refresh rate instead as I think that would balance the machine out a little better. Still this isn’t bad. Brightness peaks at around 400 nits – not quite bright enough for use outside but plenty for on-the-go use in brighter environments. Contrast is decent – for an IPS panel anyway – with 1130:1 in my testing. 

Inputs wise the trackpad is absolutely massive. It feels great to use, palm rejection is done well and it actually gives you enough room to use the Windows gestures which is a nice change. The keyboard is a bit weird for me – being so thin, there isn’t much room to have long travel keys. I can normally get used to that quite quickly, but I think because these are so insanely light they took longer for me to get comfortable with. For gaming that works great, but for typing I found I was accidentally hitting keys pretty often. 

I/O wise you get two USB A ports, two USB C ports – the one on the right is actually Thunderbolt 4 with up to 100W USB PD power – plus HDMI, DC in, a combined audio jack and an SD card reader. Inside is where things get interesting. You’ve got an 80wH battery which delivers better than average battery life – for a gaming laptop anyway – plus fully upgradable SODIMM RAM and TWO M.2 slots. Now you can configure these machines from the factory with whatever you like, but being able to manually upgrade this later on is always a bonus. What’s more interesting though is the cooling package. This is one of the largest diameter fans I’ve seen in a gaming laptop – it’s massive! That is dedicated mostly to cooling the GPU, with the smaller heatsink and fan being left for the CPU for the most part. Despite the size, I’m really impressed by how quiet this was even while gaming. Again it’s hardly silent, but compared to most gaming laptops it really isn’t bad! 

The last, and likely most crucial, point is how much this thing costs. As tested with the Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD, RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, it’d set you back nearly 2,700 Euros – easily over £3,000 once you pay the import tax. That’s a hefty premium to pay over the slightly larger (and more performant) Focus 16 which is around 2,250 Euros. The Vision 16 Pro is definitely a more premium machine – the metal body feels fantastic and the overall build quality and feel is top notch, plus the full kilo less weight and 10mm less height does put it in a different category, but at the same time I’m not sure that I could justify that difference. I’m not the target market here so take my opinion with a pinch of salt, but I’m somewhat struggling to work out who needs between 50 and 80% of the performance of a gaming laptop, while still being fairly thin and light, and who’d be willing to pay the hefty price premium. If that sounds like you though, I’ll link to Schenker’s site below where you can check it out and configure your own model.