i know right trust me when i first saw this thing i
was just as confused as you it says Intel mated in the title of the video
but Intel doesn't make laptops they make
excuses for why AMD is making them look bad oh
got them but maybe this isn't a bad look
i mean part of the reason that apple's m1 macbooks are so good is because apple
already designed basically everything in it themselves and then just took it one
step further designing a processor well Intel on the other hand already
designed processors so they just came at it from the other direction and created
this laptop that looks just like a macbook it's a bold
strategy cotton let's see if it pays off for them with
glass wire you can keep track of the weird stuff that's connecting to your pc
even when you aren't using it if a strange device joins your Wi-Fi you'll be
notified instantly get 25 off using code Linus at the link below
i should clarify Intel has actually made their own laptops for years just in
secret for example back in 2011 Intel
released their specifications for what they called an ultrabook a super thin
and light Windows notebook that didn't compromise on performance or battery
life in order to get laptop manufacturers started with the concept
Intel provided them with a reference model that they could use as a starting
point for their own custom designs because let's be honest some of these
laptop companies need help to not design laptops that look like a decepticon i've
actually been hands-on with a handful of these kinds of concept devices in what i
call the secret ces suite over the years and the
frustrating thing for me is that a lot of the time the reference or concept
device looks way closer to something that i would
actually want to buy than any of the things their partners end up building
and apparently Intel feels the same way because in 2019 they decided to make a
reference design that was more or less
ready for the consumer and announced the nook 9 extreme laptop kit
like desktop nooks these white books came without storage memory or an
operating system which were intended to be added by Intel's partners who would
also tweak the system settings and software before releasing the laptop
under their own brand giving birth to the main gear element electronics mag 15
and the xpg xenia which brings us to this model
this is the xpg xenia xe essentially a
tweaked version of Intel's new nook m15
laptop kit while its predecessor was based on the six core core i7 9750h and
a discrete GPU this one sports Intel's latest quad core i7 1185 g7 with as the
name indicates Intel's iris xc graphics
now the last one was designed as a straight up gaming laptop but this model
is what xpg calls a lifestyle gaming notebook while ultrabooks were meant to
compete with the macbook air this is a reference model for Intel's new evo
brand which aims to take on the macbook pro lineup with better performance for
professional uses i mean other than a few visual giveaways you'd be forgiven
for thinking this was a macbook pro
from late 2015 anyway oh god again
and that's not the end of the world the minimalists in the office can definitely
appreciate the xenia xc's simple straightforward design with its cnc
machined aluminum shell but even though i just explained it to you
guys i still don't know what this thing
is what is lifestyle gaming and how is it
that Windows laptop makers just cannot seem to capture that apple magic
put this thing next to a macbook and it just looks
cheaper not at all like our beanies from lttstore.com which still look great if
not even better but let's look a bit closer and the xenia xe quickly starts
to make up some ground i mean for one in addition to the two Thunderbolt 4 ports
there's actually two usb type a ports of the 10 gigabit variety as well as HDMI
and a headphone jack so you don't have to keep your bag stuck with dongles
xpg has supplied 16 gigs of lpddr4x memory and a one terabyte s50 pci
express gen4m.2 SSD so it's nice and snappy and it's got Windows hello along
with proximity sensors that wake the laptop as you approach
leading to one of the smoothest login processes that we have ever encountered
as for performance the core i7 1165 g7
in here is a step down from the early model 1185 g7 powered machine that we
looked at back in september but the only real difference between those two chips
is slightly lower clock speeds and sure enough the gaming story here is similar
the xenia xe managed to squeeze out 41 frames per second in shadow of the tomb
raider at lowest settings and 26 FPS at
medium actually matching the performance of that early unit driver updates
probably helped with that but it's impressive ultra settings and a frame
rate in the hundreds are a far off dream for onboard graphics still but at 1080p
and low to moderate settings competitive multiplayer games like rocket league cs
go and even rainbow six siege are totally playable
i said it last time and i'll say it again the fact that we're running these
on integrated graphics from Intel no less is astounding on to the lifestyle
side of lifestyle gaming i guess maybe
for us that means more traditional benchmarks in luxmark the xenia xe
outperformed every laptop in the lineup of notebooks from our m1 macbooks review
and in cinebench and geekbench while it didn't beat the macbooks it came real
close while beating the xps 13 two in one an excellent laptop built on the
same processor photoshop runs like it should while scrubbing 4k footage in
premiere is pretty smooth at half preview quality and in our handbrake
hardware h.265 test while the xenia xe
didn't beat the macbooks it finished the encode in almost half the time of the
xps 2 in 1 even though they have the same model of CPU in them
i guess that means Intel's thermal and power solution is quite a bit beefier
even if it did spike up to 96 degrees under full load and hovered around 90
degrees once the thankfully quiet fans kick in the xenia
xc is thin and light enough to be easily totable it's got enough battery to last
you through the workday into the evening and even beyond if you're nice to it and
it's got a beautiful ips touch display that can open all the way to 180 degrees
with four far field mics on top so you can talk to either cortana or alexa and
see the light bar below the track pad light up which would be great if the
screen wasn't 1080p the integrated webcam wasn't so bad and
that their fancy microphone array sounded a little bit better i give it a
a b then for lifestyle but the performance story is pretty good i mean
you know we've given Intel a pretty hard time for dropping the ball in the past
year or so so it's a treat to see an Intel notebook compare so favorably to
apple's m1 machines so soon after being put to shame it's also interesting that
this laptop outperformed the dell by such a degree
like what the heck Intel why have you been hiding the fact that you can
apparently make a straight fire laptop just like apple don't hide that under a
bushel you gotta let that light shine bro now to be fair Intel's already doing
that by releasing the nook m15 through partners like xpg and the pricing seems
to reflect their confidence in this machine the xenia xe starts at 1359 us
for the core i5 config and 1549 for this
core i7 model which is actually not bad for a premium laptop
it's cheaper than a macbook we did find a couple of laptops with the same
processor for around half the price online but as we saw in our benchmarks
the processor isn't everything these cheaper models have half the storage
less memory much less battery life and no Thunderbolt so the xenia xc seems to
take a lot of boxes for someone who wants a clean macbook like experience
but with Windows Intel has preloaded a couple of bloatwares
but one of them is a simple driver update utility with aesthetics that
don't assume you're the most badass gamer to ever hit the interwebs and the
other is a GeForce experience style graphics utility that lets you update
drivers and tweak global graphics settings like adaptive tessellation
retro scaling and smart vsync so i dare say this laptop might be the
Windows laptop for macbook fans now we've talked a lot in this video about
Intel but let's not forget this is being released under the xpg
brand so it's true that Intel did the bulk of the work designing it but that
isn't to disparage xpg or the other companies that Intel works with to
release these models xpg told us that the process of getting Intel's reference
design ready for the market is a collaborative one the two companies work
together to make decisions about components the BIOS and software
configuration and the packaging but xpg also knows that at its core this
is an Intel design and they think it's really cool that Intel wants to help
them and other up-and-coming laptop makers work towards developing their own
fully custom designed laptops i mean this is only xpg's second laptop they've
ever released and the first one was also an Intel nook so if Intel can drive the
Windows laptop market forward with excellent ready-to-go designs like this
one while continuing to work with partners on custom designs
who knows they might just be done with dropping the ball
they might even be picking it up maybe
just like i'm picking up the segway to our sponsor
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out at the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this video maybe
check out our coverage of ooh yeah ASUS's upcoming laptops they had some
quote unquote ces news to announce they got like super high refresh rate
displays external graphics all kinds of cool stuff