This is an awesome laptop.

I have a slightly different loadout (i7-8700, 6 cores, 12 threads, 3200-4300/4600 MHz, GeForce RTX 2080, 2x16 GB DDR4-2666 RAM, 15" FHD 144 Hz G-SYNC, Samsung 970 EVO Plus PCIe NVME 500 GB, Samsung 860 EVO SATA 2.5" 1 TB).

Under heavy load (gaming) the CPU sits very near its boost speed on all cores (4280 MHz), while the GPU is always somewhere between 1700 and 1900 MHz (which is way more than the nominal boost clock of 1590 MHz of the laptop version of the RTX 2080), yet the laptop has absolutely no problem cooling them, neither the CPU, nor the GPU ever exceeds 75°C (typically both remain in the 65-72°C range). Thermal throttling is nonexistent (although both the CPU and the GPU throttle very heavily on battery power, but that's not a problem as no one in their right mind would ever try to play games without the A/C adapter, which by the way is approximately the size and weight of a brick).

Yes, the fans are loud (although not very annoyingly so in my opinion), but it's a very powerful gaming laptop after all, not some little-sister's-facebook-station.

As for the downsides:
- the lid could be a little bit sturdier (just as mentioned in the article), although I haven't experienced any serious problems with the panel, mine doesn't even have any backlight bleeding to speak of
- the connectivity is very good, but some ports are in awkward locations ergonomically, such as the headphone/microphone jack slots at the front 1/3 of the right side (where the jacks themselves can be very near to the external gaming mouse I use)
- the Clevo Control Center application shipped with the product is an utter bugfest. Which is not very good since that is the piece of software which is supposed to be in charge of managing the custom fan profiles. Luckily there are better alternatives (like the Obsidian tools for Clevo) which work flawlessly.

Hopefully the keyboard reliability is improved. I have a Clevo 15 inch notebook from a different model, and the keyboard has several keys that don't register a press unless you press very hard and repeatedly. This was after I had setup the notebook with an external keyboard for 1 year, and hadn't pressed the keys for a long time. I read of several other owners of Clevo having a similar problem.

typo: "The XMG Ultra 15 is one of the few remaining and notebooks with a swappable GPU."