The last time we saw a laptop from newcomer XPG was the XPG Xenia Xe, the company’s second foray into the laptop space. While it boasted strong performance overall, it was held back from greatness by a host of issues. Now, XPG is returning with its latest effort, the XPG Xenia 14 (starting at $1,099; $1,199 as tested), a thin-and-light laptop dubbed a “Lifestyle Ultrabook” by the company and geared toward professionals, students, and casual gamers. Our configuration is powered by an 11th Generation Intel “Tiger Lake” CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. Overall, the laptop impresses, even if it’s not the gaming notebook that the XPG brand and Xenia family suggest it could be. Look at it as a competent, highly upgradable alternative to premium business ultralights from Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
A Light Lift
One of the things that remains consistent across every XPG laptop is tidy, compact design, which is one of the strongest selling points of the Xenia 14. At 0.5 by 12 by 8 inches (HWD) and just 2.14 pounds, the Xenia 14 is one of the lightest 14-inch laptops available, thanks to its magnesium alloy chassis. That airy material gives the laptop a delicate feel, admittedly bordering on flimsy territory. The top panel in particular is worrying, bouncing back and forth even from the slightest shake of the chassis.
On the other hand, the laptop is easy to open up and upgrade, with two RAM SO-DIMM slots and two M.2 slots (one PCIe Gen 3, one PCIe Gen 4) easily accessible once you pop off the bottom case. It’s ideal if you might be interested in upgrading your laptop in a few years with more memory and storage, rather than replacing the whole thing. (See our guide to laptop upgrades.)
The Xenia 14 sports a 16:10 full HD IPS display with a 400-nit, 1,920-by-1,200-pixel resolution, excellent for movie watching, photo viewing, and game playing. Its uber-thin 2mm bezel offers a 92% screen-to-body ratio, which helps give the laptop a sleek look. You’ll find a 720p webcam tucked into the top of the screen with Windows Hello support, for those who like using their face to unlock their laptop in lieu of a password.
The machine is not shy of ports and even includes a Thunderbolt 4 port, which XPG says will allow users to connect up to three monitors at a time. In addition to the Thunderbolt 4 port, you’ll also find an HDMI 2.0 and a USB 3.0 Type-A port on the right flank…
The left flank includes another USB 3.0 Type-A port and a USB 3.1 Type-C port, as well as an SD card reader, a 3.5mm audio combo jack, and a Kensington lock notch.
Rounding out the connectivity list are Bluetooth 5.1 and Wi-Fi 6 wireless, which give the portable machine some real connectivity advantages, especially when dealing with multiple wireless devices. You’ll find the same feature set in the slightly cheaper configuration as well ($1,099), albeit with the Intel Core i5-1135G7, another Tiger Lake processor with slightly slower clock speeds.
This puts the Xenia 14 ahead of its contemporaries in several categories. It’s lighter than the Razer Book 13, the Acer Swift 5, and even the Dell XPS 13 (9310), and it includes the best mix of ports out of the bunch. The additional RAM and memory slots give the Xenia 14 some welcome customization options that help it stand out from the competition in its weight class, though there’s no touch screen on either the Core i5 or Core i7 configuration (a feature I didn’t miss, but some may). A touch screen is included in the $1,399 configuration, which also has a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM.
Putting Xenia to Work
While the Xenia might look good on paper, none of that matters if it can’t perform. Luckily, the Xenia 14 handles the basics with ease. Its keyboard is wide and comfortable, with all of the functionality you’ve come to expect from a modern laptop. While most of the keys have enough space between them to avoid any accidental key presses, the up and down arrows in particular might be too close for some. Overall, the keyboard lacks any satisfying feedback when used, but it’s tactile enough that it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker.
Speakers are found at the bottom of the laptop on both sides. They get the job done so long as you’re using them to watch YouTube videos or take calls. Otherwise, you’ll be disappointed by the subpar bass, which comes across as overblown when the volume is maxed out. The touchpad, however, is mercifully spacious and responsive, and it can easily lock with a double-tap of the top left corner.
Joined up with a PCI Express 4.0 512GB SSD and 16GB of 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM, the Intel Core i7-1165G7 acquits itself well, offering snappy performance while opening multiple tabs, taking calls over Zoom, and working across multiple documents.
But while the Xenia 14 excels at being a laptop for everyday casual computing, the XPG brand postures itself as gamer-friendly, and this laptop isn’t that. While you might be able to casually play games that aren’t too graphically demanding, the integrated Iris Xe graphics quickly buckle under the weight of genuine AAA titles. A shame, because XPG does include a one-month pass to Xbox Game Pass, but you’ll have to drop your graphics settings and settle for lower frame rates to get some of the service’s premiere titles up and running.
Testing the Xenia 14: A Mixed Bag
Despite snappy general performance, benchmarking the Xenia 14 was somewhat rockier than expected. After multiple attempts, we were not able to perform our 3DMark test due to frequent crashing, though the culprit was likely software issues on our end. Still, the laptop managed to hold its own in most of the benchmarks that we could run. We put it up against four other 14-inch laptops, almost all of them sharing the Xenia 14’s internals, with the exception of the Razer Blade 14, a true gaming-focused machine with powerful GeForce RTX graphics and a late-model AMD Ryzen mobile CPU. (See how we test laptops).
Productivity Tests
The Xenia 14’s main audience is the college and business crowd, who’ll use the laptop for general multitasking. To approximate these tasks, we use UL’s PCMark 10. This wide-ranging benchmark suite simulates a variety of Windows programs to give an overall performance score for office workflows, including such everyday staples as word processing, web browsing, videoconferencing, and spreadsheet analysis. A number between 4,000 and 5,000 is what we look for here in a solid mainstream machine.
In this test, the Xenia 14 did great, scoring 4,945 points, better than the Dell XPS 13 (9310), and neck-and-neck with the Razer Book 13. In the PCMark 10 Storage Test, which measures the program load time and the throughput of the laptop’s boot drive, the Xenia 14 also did very well, not surprising given that the XPG brand is owned by major SSD player ADATA.
We then put the CPU to the test by running Maxon’s Cinebench multi-core benchmark meant to exercise all of a processor’s cores and threads—the more powerful the chip, the higher the score. Given that the Intel Core i7-1165G7 is a late-2020 chip, it does well enough in this benchmark but is still outclassed by business laptops like the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga.
We also run Primate Labs’ Geekbench, another CPU stress test meant to simulate real-world applications. The higher the number, the better. Again, the Xenia 14 does well, but still comes up short when compared to its 14-inch competition.
HandBrake 1.4 is an open-source video transcoder for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. Video editing is a strenuous process on most computers and is very CPU-demanding. Because this is timed, the lower the times, the better. The Xenia 14 doesn’t particularly excel here, coming in a bit behind the pack on this sustained trial. To be fair, it’s not really meant for this kind of work.
Rounding out our productivity tests is Pugetbench for Photoshop, another content creation benchmark. Pugetbench, developed by workstation maker Puget Systems, employs a broad range of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks, exercising both the CPU and GPU. In this burstier, less sustained test, the Xenia 14 regained its footing, besting the Asus ZenBook Duo 14 and coming in alongside the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s Yoga.
Graphics Tests
While we were unable to run our 3DMark test, we did manage to get the GFXBench 5.0 benchmark up and running. This is a stress-test that runs low-level routines like texturing and high-level tasks like game-like image rendering to gauge GPU performance. We run two of its subtests, Aztec Ruins and Car Chase, which are rendered off-screen to accommodate different display resolutions and make comparisons valid.
Unsurprisingly, the Xenia 14 buckles under the 1440p Aztec Ruins test, averaging just 20 frames per second in the test. Results were better during the 1080p Car Chase test, but even then, the Xenia 14 never managed to reach a steady 60fps. It’s not a gaming notebook, but no surprise given its reliance on Intel Iris Xe graphics, as opposed to a discrete GPU chip. (Hit the link for an analysis of recent CPU-integrated laptop graphics solutions and games.)
Battery and Display Testing
To test the battery, we play a locally stored copy of the open-source Blender classic Tears of Steel on a loop at 50% brightness and at 100% volume, along with a few other battery-testing tweaks. We also disconnect the Wi-Fi entirely, putting the laptop on Airplane mode.
At just over 9 hours, the Xenia 14 taps out, falling short of most of its competition by a few hours. It’ll survive your average workday without a charge, but not much longer than that.
Last, using Datacolor’s SpyderX Elite calibrator tools to measure display performance, we test screen-brightness output levels at 50% and 100% brightness, per the OS’s brightness setting. We also measure gamut settings for the three most relevant color spaces for laptop users: the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 standards.
The Color Gamut numbers were about the same across the majority of the laptops, but the Xenia 14 shined brightest (no pun intended) in the brightness test of this comparison group.
XPG Makes Some Real Advances
The Xenia 14 does a lot of things right and is a respectable 14-inch laptop for productivity work, cloud jockeying, and other general use. It’s a speedy and lightweight machine, with barely any bezel (thus maximizing screen space in its footprint), though its chassis isn’t quite as sturdy as you’d like it to be.
Don’t expect to game on this laptop—the Xenia 14’s integrated graphics card holds it back from being a true gaming rig. For that, you’re much better off with a 14-inch gaming laptop like the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE or the Razer Blade 14. Despite a few hiccups, it’s a pleasant surprise of a laptop from its relative-rookie maker, and one that happens to be packed with ports, too. It’s incredibly lightweight, and its performance keeps pace with what you’d expect from a laptop of this size. XPG has finally delivered a laptop worthy of praise, even if it’s not the best ultraportable laptop out there—that’s still the Dell XPS 13 (9310).
