These laptops were designed by Intel, which may explain why they’re some of the best
performing 11th gen Tiger Lake machines I’ve tested so far. It’s the Intel NUC M15 design,
and I’ve got two configurations here, the Vision 15 from Schenker and the Xenia Xe from XPG,
AData’s gaming brand, granted this isn’t a gaming laptop.
My models have the quad core i7-1165G7 with 16 gigs of RAM and a 500gb NVMe M.2 SSD,
no discrete graphics though, but you can customize it with the links in the description.
It’s all aluminum with a silver finish, both on the lid, interior,
and bottom panel. The metal build feels nice, and there weren’t any sharp corners or edges.
The adata one is slightly different in that it’s got more obvious branding on the lid,
it appears to be a reflective sticker.
The laptop alone weighs 1.65kg or 3.65lb,
then up to 2kg or 4.4lb with the small 65 watt Type-C charger.
It’s quite thin for a 15” laptop at 1.5cm or 0.6” thick,
and the smaller size allows for thin bezels, you’re mostly viewing screen.
The 15.6” 1080p touchscreen looks good, it’s got a decent colour gamut and can get quite bright.
There was no backlight bleed in my unit, but this will vary between panels.
The 720p camera is above the display in the center,
and it’s got IR for Windows Hello which worked well.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like
and this is what it sounds like to type on the keyboard.
The keyboard has white back lighting with two levels of key brightness which
illuminates all keys and secondary key functions, and it automatically
turns off after 5 seconds. I couldn’t see options for extending this in the BIOS,
though there were quite a few other useful options available in Intel’s BIOS as shown briefly here.
Anyway back to the keyboard, there’s no numpad and it’s a 15” laptop,
so the result is keys with lots of spacing. Personally I don’t like that,
but that’s subjective, here’s how typing sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
The power button is above the keyboard to the right, so no chance of an accidental mispress,
and there’s also some air ventilation above the keyboard.
The glass precision touchpad feels nice and smooth
and works well. The click feeling is subtle and soft but I liked using it.
Fingerprints don’t really show up due to the silver finish,
but the surface is smooth so you can clean off dirt easily with a microfiber cloth.
There are Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports on either side, and both offer displayport 1.4a outputs and
either can be used to charge the machine. Each side also has a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, while
the left has a HDMI 2.0b output and the right has a 3.5mm audio combo jack and Kensington lock.
The back has a couple of air exhaust vents towards the corners,
while the front has an indent for getting your finger in to open the lid.
You can open it up easily with one finger, though it starts to lose
balance after a bit as the screen goes the full 180 degrees back for sharing.
There’s some keyboard flex when pushing down hard, but the metal lid is quite sturdy.
The bottom is clean with just some subtle air intake vents towards the back,
however as you’ll see soon these aren’t directly above the fan intakes.
Getting inside requires taking out 7 TR6 screws,
after removing those I pryed the bottom panel off with the tools linked in the description.
Once inside we’ve got the battery down the front and a single M.2 storage slot just above.
The WiFi 6 card is on the far left and memory is soldered to the motherboard.
We can’t see the cooling here, however I was provided with the following image of the cooler.
The speakers are underneath on the left and right sides. I thought they sounded decent, above
average with some bass and still pretty clear at higher volumes, but the latencymon results weren’t
amazing, but this may improve with firmware updates, I was testing with an early sample.
It’s powered by a user removable 73Wh battery. It
lasted for more than 10 and a half hours in my YouTube playback test,
one of the best results I’ve recorded so far and within margin of error to second place.
Let’s check out thermals next. There’s no software for controlling performance modes
or anything like that, the NUC software studio just provides some basic options,
so I’ve run the Aida64 CPU stress test without changing anything.
The processor was running at 90 degrees Celsius, which is pretty standard for a long term stress
test like this, but the reason that it’s this high is because the processors were running up
to 40 watts, which is higher than the 28 watts specified by Intel for the 1165G7,
so basically we’re expecting higher temperatures in exchange for better performance.
Here’s how CPU only performance looks in Cinebench R23, and this laptop has beaten my record for
highest single core score. Additionally the multicore score is the highest I’ve got from a 4
core Tiger Lake chip, only just a little behind the 9th gen 6 core in the Y540 just above it.
That performance doesn’t disappear when unplugged either, these are the scores when
running on battery power. The single core result is still the best, and interestingly the multicore
score was actually slightly better on battery power, the MSI Stealth 15M just above it also
rose on battery and was now slightly ahead, but the difference is margin of error stuff.
At idle the keyboard was cool, for context most laptops I test sit at around 30 degrees Celsius.
With the CPU stress test running the wrist rest and most of the keyboard is still cool,
only the back in the center was hot but you don’t need to touch there anyway,
let’s have a listen to the fan noise.
The fan was very quiet when idling, but it would ramp up a little from time to time.
It’s louder with the stress tests going,
but still far below the 50+ decibels seen in the gaming laptops I test.
Although not a gaming laptop by any means, the Intel Xe graphics are definitely capable
of running games, especially with the high processor power limit. AAA titles can run at
720p with lower settings, for brief comparison the Dell XPS 13 with the higher tier i7-1185G7 ran at
35 FPS on lowest settings. Esports titles on the other hand were no problem at all.
We can attach external graphics to these laptops as they’ve got Thunderbolt 4,
and I’ve actually tested this laptop with the RTX 3080 desktop graphics
in this video over here if you want to get an idea of how well it does.
I’ve also tested some content creator workloads. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems
benchmark, and despite not having discrete graphics it’s beating many other thicker
laptops that do, with a score more than double the XPS 13 down the bottom. Despite
the XPS having a higher tier CPU, its long term power limit is capped at 15 watts so it suffers.
Adobe Photoshop is heavily dependent on processor performance,
and as we’ve seen before the 11th gen Tiger Lake processor is doing
better than most others here, which is reflected in the Photoshop score.
DaVinci Resolve on the other hand is heavily dependent on the GPU,
so although the result is lower due to the Intel Xe graphics compared to laptops with
discrete graphics, it’s still doing better than the other Tiger Lake machines tested.
As an Intel 11th gen machine, it’s got the option of using new PCIe 4.0 storage,
which is why we’ve got some pretty crazy read speeds here, though writes were much
lower comparatively - but this will of course vary based on the ssd you select when buying.
The Adata machine is of course using an Adata SSD,
and this SSD was much more well rounded between reads and writes.
I booted an Ubuntu 20 live CD to test Linux support. Out of the box the speakers, camera
and touchscreen did not work, but the touchpad, keyboard, screen brightness and WiFi worked fine.
For updated pricing check the links down in the description, as this will change over time.
The Vision 15 from Schenker starts at 1500 Euro. I’m still waiting to see what US pricing is like
for other models like this one from AData, but again I’ll keep those links updated.
I think the Intel NUC M15 makes sense for a business user, it’s got a clean
professional looking design, great battery life, a sharable touchscreen and good connectivity.
The CPU performance is excellent, all while not feeling hot to the touch while actually using it.
That said the camera quality wasn’t great. The keyboard is the only other area I’d fault it,
but that’s just personal preference, I just wasn’t a fan of typing on it due to the big
spacing between the keys. If you want to know more about my personal preferences,
personally I’d prefer a 13” machine for travel, you know, once that’s allowed again.
The price is on the higher side, but it is a more premium laptop. If you do need more
GPU power though, you could definitely get more performance for less money in a cheaper gaming
laptop - it just depends what you’re using it for and what your priorities are. I’ll leave
some links to other similar laptops that you might be interested in over here, otherwise if
you’re new to the channel then get subscribed for future laptop reviews like this one.