XPG Xenia Gaming Notebook – Review 2020

You may know ADATA for its popular storage and memory solutions, but the company also operates a gaming brand, XPG, that dabbles in peripherals, accessories, and now, laptops. The XPG Xenia (starts at $1,699; $2,199 as tested) is the company’s first gaming laptop, and it goes straight for the high-end market. Our configuration includes a potent Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU to ensure high frame rates in all games and make the most of its 144Hz screen, as well as plenty of RAM and storage. The build is compact and quality is decent, but an initial stumble with the touchpad left a sour taste in our mouths, and the design is a bit plain. It’s a decent first effort, but it can’t touch our Editors’ Choice for best value, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, nor our top premium pick overall, the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502.

Keeping It Simple

The XPG Xenia comes in a tidy all-black package that measures 0.8 by 14 by 9.1 inches (HWD), fairly compact for a laptop with a 15.6-inch display. It also weighs just 4.06 pounds, which is respectable for a gaming laptop and makes it legitimately portable. The body is made of a light magnesium alloy, which feels nice to the touch, though it comes off a bit closer to plastic than the clearly metal builds of competitors like the Razer Blade 15 or the Acer Predator Triton 500.

The design opts for simplicity, which some may prefer to the louder looks of many gaming laptops. Only the Blade 15 commits to as much of a fully black look as this, and even then, that competitor bears a lime-green logo on the lid, whereas nothing breaks up the Xenia’s one-tone color scheme. Any splashes of color are optional, provided only by a front-facing LED light strip and individually backlit keys, both of which are customizable via the included software. The look is very plain overall, which won’t offend anyone but is tough to get too excited about.

As for that display, it’s an IPS panel with a full HD resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate. This is a good match for high-end gaming, as the hardware in this laptop can push high frame rates, but only at 1080p. As you’ll see in the performance section below, this laptop can’t pull off 144fps on AAA games, but high-refresh-rate screens are really meant for competitive multiplayer titles. The thin bezels around the display look sleek and help contribute to the laptop’s smaller body, while the picture quality is good, if not anything to write home about.

Some Input Stumbles, But Plenty of Ports

The rest of the build is where this laptop let me down. The touchpad simply did not work correctly through the first phase of my testing time, frequently ceasing to respond to any input. During normal use and testing, I would be panning along normally to move my cursor, and it would suddenly lock up. Taking my finger off the touchpad and putting it down again wouldn’t fix it, either, and I’d just have to wait a few seconds for the computer to catch up and start moving again. 

This sometimes happened again just a few seconds later, while at other times I was allowed longer spans of normal use. Other times, the laptop would work for long stretches just fine. It made the laptop frustrating to use even while just installing and running benchmark tests (I eventually plugged in a mouse, which worked fine), and it would be virtually unusable for everyday tasks. It’s worth noting that you can intentionally disable the touchpad by double-tapping in the top left corner, whereupon an LED indicator and onscreen prompt will tell you if it’s on or off.

I reinstalled the touchpad drivers directly to make sure they weren’t at fault, which didn’t fix the issue. However, I went back to triple-check this error and saw that Windows needed an update, so I let it run. After that, the touchpad behaved just fine, at least for my final stretch of testing. In the end, it may have just been a software issue, but it’s still concerning for a laptop in this price stratum, and I have never hit this snag with the many other Windows laptops I’ve tested over the years. For a company that doesn’t have a laptop pedigree, it may just be growing pains, so take my experience for what you will.

The keyboard, on the other hand, exhibited no problems. The keys are very flat and have a “floating”-top design, which may not be everyone’s preference for typing, but it allows them more travel. They have a satisfying accompanying click thanks to their optical actuation. XPG calls this a mechanical keyboard, and while I would not compare it to a true mechanical desktop keyboard, the keys certainly feel more clicky and tactile than those of most laptops.

After being initially unsure about the keyboard, I grew to like the feel, but I can see some users thinking it’s too bouncy or light-feeling. I’m a little wary of the elevated keytops serving as traps for crumbs or debris beneath, unlike the more usual island-style key layout. Also, I would have liked to see some dedicated keys for shortcuts/macros and for media controls. The latter are shared with the function-key row.

Finally for the physical build, the ports. There are three USB 3.1 ports, one USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3, an HDMI connection, and even an Ethernet jack. Those last three are located around the back of the laptop, which isn’t very common on 15-inch systems. The power jack is also back there, which I actually like—when the power connector is on the left or right side and you’re using the laptop in your lap, I find it gets in the way far more.

Bench Testing: Running With the Premium Pack

Our pricey $2,199 unit is equipped with some of the most powerful laptop parts around. This starts with the Intel Core i7-9750H, which was the go-to processor for premium gaming laptops for the last year or so (and is just now starting to be replaced by the Core i7-10750H in some laptop lines, which has the same essential six-core/12-thread profile). That’s paired with a potent Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (Max-Q) GPU, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB solid-state drive. The last is partitioned into one smaller 100GB drive for Windows and essential files and a larger 850GB drive. 

Overall, this is a pretty decent value for the parts, especially compared to the prices of some competitors. XPG’s lesser model is priced at $1,699, and the only real change is swapping the RTX 2070 for a GTX 1660 Ti GPU.

For the purposes of benchmark testing, I gathered similarly expensive gaming laptops to compare against the XPG Xenia. These competitors all cost more than $2,000, as well, and you can see their components in the table below.

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system’s boot drive. Both tests yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.

There isn’t too much to say about these results; we consider above 5,000 points on either test an excellent result, and the XPG Xenia achieved that on both. All of these expensive gaming laptops are, unsurprisingly, efficient for everyday use and multitasking. The Acer Predator Triton 500‘s newer CPU (the MSI GS66 Stealth shares this chip, but failed to complete PCMark 10) outperformed the rest, but otherwise there isn’t much separation. Similarly, all of the speedy SSDs in these laptops ensure quick load and boot times, which benefits normal daily use and gaming.

Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.

Given the number of shared processors here, the results are very tightly clustered. The same conclusion from the previous batch of tests applies here—they’re all very proficient, even if there’s no standout. Like the rest, the XPG Xenia isn’t quite a specialist laptop for media editing, but it can do the job decently well.

Graphics Tests

3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on each laptop’s graphical prowess.

On the GPU side, the RTX 2070 (Max-Q) is unsurprisingly capable. With these tests, you’re really examining the GPU rather than the laptop itself, and we’ve seen what this one can do many times before. The RTX 2070 loses something in the Max-Q downtuning, but it’s still a potent GPU. In fact, in this particular laptop, it performed better than some theoretically superior GPUs in Fire Strike, and hung close to others in the high Superposition preset. Before drawing too many conclusions, let’s look at the next batch of tests.

Real-World Gaming Tests

The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world gameplay at various settings. We run them at 1080p resolution at the games’ medium and best image-quality settings (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12).

Things are roughly as they should be here, with the GPUs higher up the hierarchy delivering better frame rates. The XPG Xenia performs respectably, achieving or nearing 100fps. That’s more than smooth enough to play AAA titles, and means very high frame rates for competitive multiplayer titles, making use of that 144Hz screen. 

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.

The Xenia’s battery life is quite good, surprising me with its runtime. As you can see, it’s longer than most gaming laptops with power-hungry parts. This allows you a legitimately useful amount of time off the charger and means the portable design can be fully utilized.

A Decent First Effort

It’s a shame the touchpad issue undermined some of the more successful aspects of the XPG Xenia. While I don’t think the design is the most innovative, it’s perfectly competent, and the compact size is appealing. I can’t write off the laptop altogether from one big stumble, especially since it may have resolved itself, but it’s fair to be skeptical when a first-time laptop maker launches with a major issue. 

Still, another unit may not have the touchpad problem, and otherwise, the value is solid here. Performance is about on par with pricier machines, though you can see where the added cost goes with the build quality (and, in some cases, more premium features like the Predator’s 300Hz display). Given the first-timer status, the touchpad business, and the intense competition, the XPG Xenia is a decent but second-string pick versus what’s out there for the moment for the money. If you’re looking for a money-saving option that looks and performs like a high-end laptop, go for the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. For a premium alternative, our favorite is the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX502.

XPG Xenia Specs

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Further Reading