We are distributing this laptop under the name XMG CORE 15 in Germany and the European Union.
We have shared Notebookcheck's review with the ODM in Taiwan and received the following response.
1/ Idle Power ConsumptionThe ODM says that this model usually only an Idle power consumption in the 10W range - not the 21 to 35W that is quoted in the NBC review.
The ODM assumes that this is either related to the Windows installation from Eluktronics or the NBC editor was running some applications in the background that kepts the dGPU awake. Usually, in Idle Desktop, the dGPU should be sleeping unless you add an external desktop.
To understand more about which kind of software can keep the dGPU awake, please read the section
My battery life is less than it should be / I have high Idle power consumption / my dGPU is not turning off in this article:
XMG Gaming Laptops: First Steps & TroubleshootingElevated power consumption due to software background activity might also explain elevanted skin temperatures and fan noise activity in Idle.
Regarding skin temperature in Idle, the ODM has measured the following data:
Touchpad: 26°C
Keyboard: 33°C
Hotspot above keyboard: 34°C
This is at Idle desktop with dGPU sleeping and fans turned 'OFF' due to low CPU temperature, at 25°C ambient temperature.
2/ Balance of Performance vs. fan noiseThis is not from the ODM but from me, personally. IMHO, the NBC review does not represent the true nature of the product very well. There is no mention of fan noise for CPU-only tasks (which is something the AMD CPU really shines at) and almost all of the fan noise data is recorded in the extremely high "Turbo" mode. Thin & Light products have multiple performance profiles for a reason. There is always a sweet spot in the lower profiles, and it's up to the user if they want to squeeze out the last percentage of performance of the system or not. NVIDIA calls this sweet spot "Max-Q" (see
this chart) but the same logic also applies to the CPU and the whole system.
In the moderate "Gaming" profile (which is selected by default), Witcher 3 at "Ultra" quality settings on the boosted RTX 2060 (110W, much more than most other RTX 2060 competitors) records only a moderate 48 db(A).
3/ DPC LatencyThe test scenario for DPC latency is relatively unclear in Notebookcheck. The German editors seems to use Prime95 (including start and stop) under full load. The US editors is randomly clicking around on their website (probably without Adblock). At any rate, it is our understanding that the ODM has recently begun some serious work on improving DPC latency stability across the whole product range. We have already been informed about significant improvements on one of our premium models, a collaboration with Intel.
Feel free to ask more questions. To read our full FAQ on this series, check out
this thread on Reddit.
BR,
Tom