This is the best performing gaming laptop I've ever tested. It's XMG's Neo 16, and it's broken most of our performance records. What makes it special is you can easily attach a liquid cooler to boost performance and lower fan noise.
But even without the optional liquid cooler, this 16 inch gaming laptop was constantly beating larger 18 inch models on air cooling, and there's way more to it than that. The Neo 16 is just much better this year. And that starts with the build quality. which feels way nicer compared to last year's version. Last year it was just the lid that was aluminum, but now this year it's also the interior and bottom panel too, which means the soft rubbery finish around the keyboard is gone.
There's a bit less flex to the lid and keyboard now too, but more importantly the screen doesn't wobble around anywhere near as much as it used to. The middle of the lid sticks out a little, making opening super easy, and the lid goes the full 180 degrees back now. compared to last year's 135. The hinges feel super sturdy even when ripping the lid open fast.
Fingerprints show up but aren't too obvious and they're super easy to clean with a microfiber cloth. It's not a huge laptop or anything, but it's definitely thicker compared to a lot of other 16 inch models we've tested, but hey, you know what they say, more chunk means more performance. It's still fairly portable at 5.6lb or 2.5kg, increasing to around 7.9lb or 3.6kg with the 330W charger included. It's only slightly heavier compared to last year's model, and realistically still pretty reasonable relative to other 16 inch laptops.
I mean Alienware's X16 markets itself as a thinner device, yet it weighs a bit more. Even with the 330 watt charger it's far lighter compared to the 18 inch options, which is worth noting because again even without the liquid cooler the Neo 16 outperforms most of them. It's using a GaN charger this year too, which means it's a bit smaller compared to the previous massive brick.
I've got the maxed out configuration with Intel Core i9-14900HX processor and Nvidia RTX 4090 mobile graphics, because I really want to put the water cooler to the test. but you can customize it quite a bit with the link below which affects the price. So XMG are offering this laptop as the Neo 16 to their customers in Germany and Europe, but the laptop itself is actually produced by Uniwill, aka Tongfang. Basically this just means that other companies around the world are able to sell the same laptop with a different name.
For example in the US it's known as the Hydrox 16 from Electronics, while here in Australia Aftershock offers it as the Rift 16X. The electronics version has a different prima bios with more customization available, but at the end of the day what I'm showing here in this review should reflect most regional variants. There's no mechanical keyboard option this year, but it still feels good to type with. The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting which lights up all keys and secondary functions. Key brightness can be adjusted between 4 levels or turned off by holding function and pressing the spacebar.
Mine has the German keyboard layout, but XMG lets you pick from a wide range of options when ordering. Lighting is customized under light settings in the Control Center software, and that includes the light bar on the front. This isn't really important, but you can get a nice smooth transition of colours on the front light bar, but then on the keyboard this is as best as you can get. which just isn't as smooth of a transition compared to a lot of other laptops.
The glass touchpad is a little bigger this year, it's smooth, clicks down anywhere and works well. As for ports, the left side has USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A and Type-C ports and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. There's a Kensington lock at the back. The right has a full size SD card reader and two more USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports for three in total.
Unfortunately none are faster Gen 2. The rest is on the back. From left to right there's the port for the liquid cooler, a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port with USB 4 support, HDMI 2.1 output, 2.5 gigabit ethernet and the power input on the right. It would have been nice to have some rear port icons on the back so you know where to plug stuff in without turning the laptop around or looking behind, but there's not much space.
The Type-C port on the back gets an upgrade this year and can now be used to charge the laptop with up to 100 watts. And that same Type-C port on the back also has DisplayPort 1.4a support for connecting a monitor, and it connects directly to the Nvidia discrete graphics, which is exactly what you want for VR gaming. And that applies to the HDMI port too, which could run our LG B9 TV at 4K 120Hz 12-bit with G-Sync. Getting inside requires taking out 10 Phillips head screws, the four down the front are shorter than the rest.
It was pretty easy to open up with pry tools, I'll leave a link to these ones I use below. Inside we've got the battery down the front, two RAM slots above in the middle, two PCIe Gen4 M.2 slots for storage on the left, and the WiFi card on the right. WiFi speed was in line with other 6E laptops, but on the lower side compared to others with the same card, but this is still well over gigabit speeds and plenty for most people. The performance from the 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD was excellent, but this will vary depending on the drive you select when ordering the laptop.
The speeds from the SD card were ok but not impressive, as other laptops can do 200MB plus in sequential reads and writes with the same card. The card does not click in and sticks out, so be careful not to bump it. The upgradeability score is about as good as it can get for most 16 inch gaming laptops, with the same amount of changes as last year's model. We can change both memory slots, the WiFi card, and both M.2 storage slots, which can both fit double sided SSDs no problem.
The speakers are found underneath on the front left and right corners. They've got some nice bass, but sound a bit muffled and not clear. It sounds way better if you lift the laptop up off of the desk.
The latencymon results weren't the best, but not as bad as we've seen from others. The Neo 16 is powered by a 99.8Wh battery. You can enable automatic refresh rate under general settings, then GPU settings to automatically lower the screen's refresh rate down to 60Hz on battery to help save power.
This makes the screen flash black while the refresh rate changes, and it goes back up to 240Hz when you plug the charger back in. You could also set iGPU mode to prevent the more powerful Nvidia graphics waking up, but we tested in hybrid mode, aka Optimus On. You can use the control center software to adjust the charging profile.
This limits charging speed and maximum charge capacity to help improve longevity of the battery. Battery life was… ok but not amazing, almost lasting for 5 hours in the YouTube video playback test. Still, this is 20% longer compared to last year's Neo 16, and it's ahead of most of the big and powerful gaming laptops that I'd say are its competition performance wise. Let's check out thermals next.
There are two fans with heat pipes shared between the CPU and GPU, and there's liquid metal on both. at least for the RTX 4080 and 4090 versions, the 4060 and 4070 use PTM-7958 instead. The pipe for water cooling goes through the block so you can't see it, but it goes over both the CPU and GPU now. In last year's 2023 model the water pipe was on top of the heat pipes, and it only went over the GPU, so I'm expecting better results from the newer 2024 design.
There are holes for air intake directly above the fans, and air also comes in through the keyboard. Air gets exhausted out of the left and right sides and from both corners out the back. The control center software lets us pick between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are balanced, enthusiast, and overboost.
You can also enable the custom profile for manual tuning, but only overboost overclocks the GPU by default. Custom mode gives you control over the CPU temperature limit, CPU and GPU power limits, GPU overclocking and enabling fan boost, which sets the laptop fans to full speed. You can also swap between these modes using the button next to the power button. It's colour changes so you can easily see which mode you're in at any time, or you can go into the BIOS and change it so this button is a shortcut to max out the fans instead.
Undervolting is supported through the BIOS, but I haven't tested that here as results will vary based on silicon lottery, aka luck. The liquid cooler is only compatible with the RTX 4080 or 4090 versions, and connecting it is easy. The laptop charger plugs into the cooler instead of the laptop, and then a power cable runs from the cooler to the laptop. Tubes for the water connect between the cooler and the laptop, with magnets helping you line it up and push it in. The design has improved on last years to be even easier, and I didn't have any unexpected leaks during testing.
just the occasional small drops left behind after disconnecting to wipe up, which is normal. Technically you don't have to drain the liquid in the laptop when you unplug, as it's using a quick release system, but XMG recommends it for safety when travelling, because any chance of water leaking near electronics is bad. The power button is on the front of the liquid cooler, and both sides let you see the current water level with a line to filter.
You unscrew the top to refill it with distilled water. The cooler connects to the laptop via Bluetooth through the control center software. Once connected you can set four different fan profiles for the liquid cooler, which from lowest to highest are quiet, high, and maximum, while automatic uses whatever it thinks is best at the time. You also get some control over the RGB lighting on the cooler. This controls the fan light which is visible on one side of the cooler.
Alright let's get into the thermal results. We've tested both air cooling and liquid cooling. ...quick cooling, but we'll start with the air results.
The internal temperatures were fine at idle when running on air. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. Temperatures were highest in custom mode, which was tested with all power limit sliders maxed out. The CPU was reaching the thermal throttle limit of 95 degrees Celsius, while the GPU was only a few degrees away from Nvidia's 87 degree thermal throttle limit.
Closing the lid to dock the laptop wasn't much different to lid open, and the cooling pad I test with, linked below, didn't change the temps much. Custom mode with the fans on automatic was basically the same on the CPU as overboost mode, but custom mode had lower GPU performance. But if we max out the fans in custom mode, we're able to get a fairly big performance boost.
CPU thermals were a limit at 95 degrees Celsius here, so that's why setting the fans to maximum gives us a performance boost. That said, overboost mode with the cooling pad performed better without needing to have the fans as loud, as you'll hear soon. Although the CPU was thermal throttling on air, it was also running at around 70 watts, which is on the higher side for this workload from a 16 inch gaming laptop. Maxing out the fans was able to boost the Neo 16's CPU to 84 watts, which is quite high.
For comparison, MSI's much larger Titan 18 HX maxes out at 173 watts on the GPU and 89 watts on the CPU at stock, so the Neo's performance isn't too different on air, but it's definitely a smaller laptop. The Neo's GPU power was limited to 160 watts in custom mode with the fans on auto, but maxing them out or using overboost mode ran the GPU at 175 watts, which is full power for the RTX 4090 mobile GPU. We can see that the cooling pad and overboost mode allows the CPU to use more power. because it's doing a better job of cooling compared to just setting the fans to max. Now let's look at the same stress tests, but with the liquid cooler attached.
Alright so this highlighted section is the performance mode set on the laptop. For custom mode I've specified if we're running the fans maxed out with fan boost or not, otherwise the last part represents the profile on the liquid cooler. CPU thermal throttling wasn't happening in any mode anymore, and the GPU was a fair bit cooler on water too.
We can see that setting the liquid cooler to its maximum profile was able to lower temps a bit, but as you'll hear soon its pump is a bit louder too. Overboost mode was hitting the highest clock speeds on both the CPU and GPU, which is why we've used it for all of our performance testing. The performance in custom mode wasn't that different regardless of what we do to the laptop's fans or liquid cooler modes. so it comes down to whether or not you want to increase fan and pump noise to get lower temps.
The power levels being reached are kind of insane. Overboost was sustaining the CPU at 110 watts, with the RTX 4090 maxed out at 175 watts indefinitely. For comparison, last year's Neo16 with liquid cooler maxed its 13th gen processor out at 88 watts with the GPU at 169 watts.
Not only is the newer 2024 model using an extra 28 watts of power over the CPU and GPU, it's running cooler too. Last year's Neo 16 was still reaching 95 degrees Celsius on the CPU with the water cooler, likely due to its water pipe only going over the GPU. Depending on the performance mode, the newer 2024 model was 5 to 21 degrees Celsius cooler on the CPU, a big improvement. Overboost and custom mode gave us similar FPS in Cyberpunk 2077. I've got the air cooled results in purple and liquid cooled results in red.
Balanced mode uses Nvidia whisper mode on air cooling and limits FPS to 30, but that's not happening with the liquid cooler attached. The CPU can use way more power in a CPU only workload like Cinebench, where the GPU is idle. Maintaining above 150 watts on air cooling was impressive enough, but using the liquid cooler lets the 14900HX sit at 205 watts indefinitely.
That's crazy stuff. so it's no surprise to see that the Neo 16 is the best performing laptop we've ever tested. Even on air cooling it's almost scoring 11% higher in multicore than the next best result, ASUS's larger Scar 18, while the liquid cooler result is 19% higher.
Multicore performance is 34% ahead of last year's Neo 16 with liquid cooling, and given the 14900HX isn't really that different to the 13900HX, I think this really shows just how much of a difference the new cooling design makes. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run off of battery power, with most laptops out of our selection now performing better. I'm not sure why the liquid cooler result was worse than air here, I doubt cooling is even a limit.
It would be the battery, ultimately it doesn't matter, because you need power to run the liquid cooler anyway, so you would just connect a laptop too if you had power available. I just wanted to see what would happen for fun. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degree Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the Neo 16 was below this on air cooling.
It warms up with the stress tests running, but it doesn't feel hot, probably because Nvidia whisper mode limits frame rate to 30 FPS. The higher enthusiast mode is warmer, but still none of it feels hot. The higher overboost mode was pretty similar.
The WASD area is cool as air goes through the keyboard. The mode with the fan on auto was pretty similar. pretty similar, and enabling fan boost to max the fans out was a little cooler but also louder too.
The keyboard is a bit warmer with the liquid cooler, but it's nowhere near as loud. We can lower the temps further to make it quite cool with the liquid cooler and laptop fans maxed out, but the compromise is this is as loud as it gets. Let's have a listen.
Here's how average fan noise compares in the different modes with different cooling methods. I've got the liquid cooled results in red and air cooled results in purple. It doesn't look that much quieter on liquid, but don't forget performance is better and internal temps are lower too. They're about the same with the fans maxed out, so the addition of the liquid cooler didn't make the worst case much worse. It's not just thermals, the screen gets some welcome improvements this year too.
Colour gamut is pretty similar to last year's model, so fine for gaming but content creators might want higher. Brightness is excellent this year. The panel is advertised at 500 nits, so I might have just gotten lucky as mine is a fair bit better than that at maximum.
Even if we assume 500 nits, it's still brighter compared to last year's 400, and mine is only really beaten by mini LED panels. Backlight bleed wasn't a problem, but this will vary between panels. Response time was ok but not impressive.
For a 240Hz panel we want transitions to occur within a 4.16ms refresh window, and most of them were slower than this. It's a little faster than last year's screen, but neither of them have a panel overdrive mode. That's why they're not able to get to 3 or 4ms like a number of other laptops we've tested.
I don't think this is a bad result at all, the screen didn't look blurry when gaming or anything, it just could be better with an optional overdrive mode. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in Counter-Strike 2. The Neo 16 is the fastest laptop we've ever tested here, despite the screen response time not being the best. And that's because it's so powerful it can make up for the screen by spitting out more FPS, which helps lower latency.
This laptop has a MUX switch, but it needs a reboot to swap between optimus on or off. or you can leave it on hybrid mode and use advanced Optimus through Nvidia's control panel without needing to reboot. G-Sync is only available when Optimus is off, but adaptive sync is available from the integrated graphics when Optimus is on.
There's a 1080p camera above the screen. They've added a physical privacy shutter this year, and it still has IR for Windows Hello face unlock. Here's how the camera and microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like while typing on the keyboard.
Now let's find out how well XMG's Neo 16 performs in games. We've tested it with these settings with both air and liquid cooling to see the difference. Cyberpunk 2077 was tested with our own custom test run, and I've got the Neo 16 shown by the red highlight, with both air and liquid cooling results. It's a good result to 1080p, but not the best.
Many of the best results are within the margin of error range though, you're not going to notice these differences when playing. This game in particular seems to benefit from AMD's 3D vCache with the 7945HX3D in the lead. The liquid cooled Neo 16 takes the lead at the higher 1440p resolution, but it's not really too different compared to last year's Neo 16 which had the same GPU, and they're close at 4K too. Although the newer 2024 model can absolutely run with a higher CPU power limit, this doesn't really matter at this GPU heavy resolution. They're both able to max out the 4090 graphics, and at the end of the day you wouldn't notice the difference between the top 10 or so results.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game's benchmark, and at 1080p the air and liquid cooled results are the best we've ever measured, with only last year's liquid cooled Neo 16 nearby. For some reason that's took the lead at 1440p, but again these are all crazy high results with small differences you'd be unlikely to notice when playing. Technically the liquid cooled Neo 16 is our new best result at 4K, but again it's well within the margin of error range with last year's version. The liquid cooled Neo 16 broke our record in control at 1080p, with last year's version only a little behind. It's the same deal at 1440p too, and it's worth noting that both the liquid cooler and air results have notably higher 1% lows compared to most others, which translates to a smoother experience with less dips in performance.
Again it's technically first at 4K, but you're not going to be able to tell the difference between many of the top results. Here are the 3DMark results. Liquid cooling in red was always ahead, and the difference is bigger in the CPU tests than the GPU. As we saw in the thermal testing earlier, the Neo 16 has no problem maxing out the GPU on air cooling. while liquid cooling allows the CPU to perform better and use more power.
The Neo 16 was a chart topper in all of our content creation tests too, with and without the liquid cooler attached. The BIOS has more options compared to most other laptops, except perhaps Lenovo and Dell and definitely MSI who offer unlimited customization. There's XMP support for memory overclocking, CPU overclocking and undervolting.
but you need to enable the CPU advanced performance menu in the control center software first. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 24.04 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, speakers, camera, WiFi and ethernet all worked fine.
Keyboard shortcuts for screen brightness, volume adjustment and keyboard brightness work, but the button to swap between performance modes does not. Pricing and availability will change over time, so check the link below the video for updates and current sales. XMG are based in Germany, so if the Neo 16 does have a good sale we'll add it to the slash Germany page of our GamingLaptop.deals website, or if the US version from electronics goes on sale you'll find it on the homepage. We update the deals site daily to include all of the latest sales, so make sure you check it out regularly with that link below to save money on your next gaming laptop. At the time of recording, if I select the lowest specced option to make it as cheap as possible we're looking at 1748 euro.
That's definitely on the more expensive side for an RTX 4060, but this is also a more premium laptop than most others. The maxed out configuration I've tested in this video goes for €3,570, increasing an extra €200 if you want the liquid cooler, and if you're spending this much money on a gaming laptop you're probably after max performance, so the cooler is worth including, but you could always buy it later. Meanwhile in the US market, Electronics offer their Hydrox 16 for $3200 USD for the same MaxDart configuration I've tested here, and you know what they say, with great performance comes great price.
So then is this laptop worth the money? Honestly it could be if you want the highest possible performance in a form factor that's still portable. It still costs less money compared to other premium RTX 4090 laptops like ASUS's Sky 18 and MSI's Titan 18. while also performing better in a lot of workloads, even without the liquid cooler. But although we saw some pretty crazy performance in the thermal testing, Cinebench and even content creator workloads, the performance in games wasn't really that different compared to other cheaper 4090 laptops. Yeah technically the Neo 16 was often at the top of the chart for the game tests, which is certainly impressive, but at the same time a lot of the differences are so small that you just wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
So you could buy a 4090 laptop for $1000 less than this and get a similar experience in most games, especially if you're playing at higher resolution which is more dependent on the GPU. So yeah, if you're just gaming you could probably save money getting a cheaper laptop, but if you want the extreme performance for other tasks or want the liquid cooler to get less fan noise or a cooler feeling laptop then yeah this with the liquid cooler is an option. And combined with all the nice quality of life improvements in the 2024 version there's just not much to hate about this laptop.
The build quality is much nicer with the all metal design, it's got a brighter screen which goes further back and doesn't wobble around anymore, it's got Type-C charging, a smaller GaN charger, a privacy shutter on the camera and a bigger touchpad. And we can't forget about that RGB bar on the front. Apart from the price, the main downsides are the battery life, though it still lasted longer compared to many other MaxSpec laptops we've tested.
Faster USB 3.2 Gen 2 would have been nice on the Type-A ports, especially when you're spending this much money. An optional mini LED or OLED screen would have been good for people that want it. The lack of a screen overdrive mode means that this just isn't quite as competitive compared to other options.
And a newer WiFi 7 card would have been nice considering that's found in most modern high end gaming laptops this year, but you could always upgrade that for like $30. And honestly at the end of the day those are some pretty minor gripes. They're just not really deal breakers unless you really had your heart set on a mini LED or OLED screen. And of course if you do want the best performance then a desktop PC might be worth considering. Check out this video next where I've compared all the positives and negatives between gaming laptop and desktop PC.
It'll help you decide which one is best for you, so I'll see you over in that one.