Schenker XMG Neo 15 with XMG Oasis in review: RTX 3080 Ti without thermal limits

[Redaktion]

Users of powerful 15-inch gamers often have to live with high volumes and temperatures. While laptop components are becoming increasingly efficient, it will probably be a while yet before gaming is possible on silent and cool high-performance laptops. Perhaps Schenker thought it was time for some practical interim solutions and so decided to experiment by creating a gaming laptop with an optional, liquid cooling system, the XMG Oasis. A successful piece of bridging technology? Find out in our review.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker-XMG-Neo-15-with-XMG-Oasis-in-review-RTX-3080-Ti-without-thermal-limits.633870.0.html

[Bennyg]

Having done my own fully detachable water-cooling mod on a high performance Clevo DTR years ago that eats up to 170W on the CPU and 200W on both GPUs.

Pros:
- Much reduced fan noise! 60dba down to 40. I have a single 360mm rad under my desk with about 3m of tubing with pump and fans set to low speed.
- Cooler keyboard and case temps especially when run at high load for long periods of time.
- Lower power consumption (better cooled VRMs = more efficient), more performance from same power limit, more noticeable at higher load.
- Convertible back to fully portable takes literally 5 seconds.
- Higher performance, NO thermal throttling at long 500W+ combined load.

Cons:
- I expected more; short term performance improvement is constrained between voltage limits and VRMs on the CPUs and GPUs. I basically get the same benchmark results as the pro-OC crowd who sit these things on air-conditioners. The spec of the laptop power circuitry needs overkill tolerances to unlock performance potential.
- Fine grained customisable fan control is required to set custom temperature thresholds. The stock fan curves for aircooling usually don't produce desirable results
- Additional cooling is of major benefit when air-cooling is insufficient.
- The base unit I started with (desktop CPU, 2x GPUs with no power saving technologies when in SLI) was not very portable to start with (2 inch thick, 6kg, 1hr battery life) but a better base like a 15 inch like this is a better choice to retain portability
- A loop that needs to be drained is annoying and dangerous. I designed my mod with self sealing disconnects. They're physically huge but work brilliantly with an occasional drop or two to wipe after removal.
- I've spent a few years experiencing and learning... I hope the Oasis is idiot proof enough that it doesn't get a bad rep when laptop users, who usually have no experience with water-cooling, kill
their hardware.
- The 'soldered loop pulling heat off heat pipes' type of mod here is one I used early on but went looking for better, I found the pipe needs to be soldered much closer to heat sources (or to vapour chambers) to really cool 100W+ loads down into the 60s and turn the fans down to near zero. Especially if heat pipe capacity is limited.
- There are replacement CNC milled hybrid wateblock heatsinks in the last couple years that can be found on Chinese sites that look very high quality. I'd like to see these offered with the Oasis instead
- I want to see results with 12900HK and overclocking :)
- Don't think a full internal loop will be better. I built one and it's cool, but squishing everything in was a nightmare, tiny pumps suck, and the main bonuses fell away without the giant low noise external rad.

[_MT_]

Don't think a full internal loop will be better. I built one and it's cool, but squishing everything in was a nightmare, tiny pumps suck, and the main bonuses fell away without the giant low noise external rad.

The primary limitation in a laptop is that small dimensions (especially thickness) dictate small heat exchangers. Which means you have to push a lot of air through them to make up for the lack of size. Which is noisy and inefficient. Putting everything inside can even make things worse as all that gear takes up space. Not to mention that you're adding mechanical points of failure. Heat pipes work fine at such small distances. Ultimately, you're limited by the exchanger to air interface where liquid can't really help. It's all about surface area and air flow. So, the whole idea is using an external exchanger which can be large and efficient which means you need to get heat from inside a laptop out - which is where liquid cooling makes sense (longer distance, flexible tubing, etc.).

[Ednumero]

While it's nice to see that this display has a >1080 resolution, and doesn't have the same contrast issue another QHD 240Hz panel has, I don't see a good reason for it not to be 16:10.

C'mon Clevo.

Needs a display like this: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Predator-Triton-500-SE-review-Slim-gaming-laptop-with-RTX-3080-Ti-and-Alder-Lake.627537.0.html

[bp]

Complex cooling is not the solution for laptop gaming.
I love gaming, but I hate the Intel/Amd/Nvidia profit race. Constantly increasing raw power. Making hardware quickly obsolete, and short lived. Buy a new laptop every 3-5 years so you can play new games. If not, it will break up itself anyway, because of thermal stress and crappy components.
And those things cost a fortune for such a short life.
Raw power is not an issue anymore. You don't need 1000hp engine to drive a car on the regular road.
I'm sure you can run the newest games 60fps on 10 years old gaming laptop, if developers optimize it. But it's not profitable.

230W+ power bricks for gaming laptops is ridiculous.
And this huge water cooling thing for LAP-TOP (on top of your lap) is even more ridiculous. It has benefits, but it is bad solution overall, because it moves away from the portability philosophy.

End users get the worst of the hardware race.
Developers don't have time to properly optimize software, so end users always buy underperforming, electricity guzzling, inefficient, cumbersome, hot, noisy, easy to break, super expensive half-products.

I've never been an Apple fan, because of snobbish exclusivity, but with M1/M2 chips they are on the right track for laptops, even gaming ones. Powerfull and light, super-optimized, so that end users can have quality product that might last a decade, and use it for the gaming too.

You don't need 1 gazillion shaders, rt cores, threads, memory or whatever. Just like you don't really need 100000ppi screen resolution. You as user need games that are perfectly optimized for the 1k/2k/4k gaming hardware. 10 years for double performance, and hardware replacement would allow more time for software optimisations.
It's like focusing more on engine efficiency, and less on engine power.

Therefore I hope Apple will manage to   do more in attracting gaming development, and shake things around. Because as end user I want reliable, rugged, high quality, long life, portable, energy efficient, software optimized, boringly perfect, bug free gaming product. 

1.The future is in making profit on software, not on hardware. So that users can confidently use their machines for 10 years
2. The future is in super efficient, light and powerfull MOBILE chips, like ARM architecture, with most of the components inside them, without bottlenecks. Not in super old architectures with separate processor, RAM, graphics, with bunch of bottlenecks
3. The future is scalability, not ugradability. Upgrading RAM is just half-measure, because you realize that you also need new processor and graphics card for best effect.
But if you could stack multiple devices together and scale up the coputing power, that is the future.