This Gaming Laptop is Water Cooled! – XMG Neo 16 Review
This gaming laptop has an optional water cooler which is super easy to attach, lowering temperatures and fan noise while improving performance. Sounds amazing, right? Well, yes and no, there are some problems that you need to know about. It’s known as the Neo 16 from XMG in Europe, but the same Tongfang chassis is also sold by Eluktronics in the US as the Mech-16 GP. They’re both available with an optional liquid cooler – but you don’t have to buy that to use the laptop. You can spend less for last year’s older cooler, which is still compatible, or
a bit more for the newer version with more RGB that I’ve tested with here. The newer cooler is a little smaller, is a little easier to fill up and check water levels, and can run a bit quieter with a revised pump. We’ll come back to the cooler in the thermal section. As for the laptop itself, it’s got an all black finish with aluminum lid and plastic bottom, while the interior has a grip-touch finish and feels a little rubbery. The build quality is decent, with the exception of the lid, I just can’t stand it. It just
feels like it’s flopping around for too long when you accidentally bump the desk. There’s a little more flex to the metal lid than I’d expect, and some
space to fit the extra pipe for liquid cooling after all. The laptop alone weighs 5.5lb or 2.5kg, increasing to 7.6lb or 3.5kg with the 330 watt charger included, so not exactly lightweight. The lower specced 4060 and 4070 configs have a smaller 280 watt brick. The configuration that we’re reviewing here has Intel’s Core i9-13900HX processor, Nvidia’s RTX 4090 graphics, 32 gigs of RAM, and a 16” 240Hz screen. It is also available with lower tier RTX 4060, 4070 and 4080 options, so something for everyone at different price points – you can customize it yourself with the link
below. I figure that focusing on the 4090 configuration for this review makes the most sense, because if you’re after the liquid cooler then you’re probably an enthusiast that wants the best possible performance. Don’t worry though, we have tested all 4 of those Nvidia GPUs in the XMG Neo 16 with the videos linked below this one, so you can check those out later if you want to see how other versions compare in games. By default, it comes with a membrane keyboard with 4 zones of RGB backlighting. You can upgrade to a per-key RGB mechanical keyboard with
Cherry MX ultra low profile tactile switches for 125 Euro at XMG, while it seems to be the default only option at Eluktronics, and is what I have here. All keys and secondary functions get lit up, and there are 4 brightness levels available. Lighting is customized through the included Control Center software, and there are a few basic effects built in which let you adjust things like brightness and speed. Lighting for the rear vents is also controlled here, but you can always turn those off if it’s not your thing. I like the clicky feel when typing, but
that’s definitely going to be personal preference as it’s very loud compared to others. If that’s not for you, then consider the membrane option. Not all of the keys are mechanical though. I’ve highlighted the ones that use mechanical switches in green, and the membrane ones in red. Basically the top row and the whole numpad don’t use mechanical switches, even with the upgrade. The glass touchpad feels super smooth and clicks down anywhere. It works well, and you can double tap the top left corner to disable it, which turns on the white light. As for ports, the left
side has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks, and a Kensington lock up the back. The right has an SD card slot and two more USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports for 3 in total. The rest is on the back, with the liquid cooler connector on the left, Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port, HDMI 2.1 output, 2.5 gigabit ethernet, and the power input on the right. The Ethernet port is kind of annoying to use, there’s this bit of metal inside that you have to push down with the cable. You can do it
without lifting the laptop, but it’s harder to get the right angle. The Type-C port on the back cannot be used to charge the laptop, but it does have DisplayPort 1.4a support, so you can connect a monitor. And both Type-C and HDMI ports connect directly to the Nvidia graphics, bypassing optimus whether optimus is enabled or disabled. And we confirmed HDMI could run our LG B9 TV at 4K 120Hz 12-Bit with G-Sync. Getting inside requires removing 12 Phillips head screws from the bottom panel, all the same length, and an additional 2 on the back on either side
of the liquid cooler connector. It was very easy to open with pry tools, I’ll leave a link to the ones I use below. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots stacked on top of each other just above, two PCIe Gen 4 M.2 slots on the left, and the Wi-Fi 6 card on the right. The layout is slightly different between the RTX 4060 and 4070 models compared to the 4080 and 4090 models. The Wi-Fi speed was decent, but not amazing compared to some other laptops tested. The 1TB Samsung 980 Pro that came
in mine was performing very nicely, but there are a few different options you can select when ordering which will affect this. The SD card wasn’t amazing, my V90 card is capable of doing more than 200 megabytes a second. The card does not click in and sticks out, so be careful not to bump it. The upgradeability score is basically as good as it can be for a laptop this size. Both M.2 slots can fit double sided drives without any problem, we can change both memory slots and the Wi-Fi card, and it’s easy to open. The speakers
are found towards the front on the left and right sides. I’d say they’re a little below average for a gaming laptop. They’re tinny without any bass, and they hurt my ears at max volume so it seems they get loud. The Latencymon results were bad, which has been the case with most laptops this year. The Neo 16 has a 99Wh battery. You can change between three different charging modes, which affects charging speed and limits the maximum charge level to help extend the lifespan of the battery. The battery didn’t last very long, a little over 4 hours
in the YouTube video playback test. It’s worth noting that the refresh rate was on 240Hz for this test, which is the default. Unlike most other laptops on this list, the software does not provide any way to automatically lower the refresh rate to save power, but manually changing this could help. Last year’s Neo 17 had this feature, so I’m not sure why it’s not here now. Let’s check out thermals next. There are two fans with three heatpipes shared between the CPU and GPU, with liquid metal on both. There’s an extra pipe directly over the GPU for
the liquid cooler. This went over both the CPU and GPU in last year’s models, and I’ve been told they’re intentionally prioritizing cooling the GPU with RTX 40 series. There are holes for air intake directly above the fans, and the front section is lower to help air get in. 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 extra tuning. This gives
you some control over the CPU temperature limit, CPU power limits, memory overclocking, 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, at least by default. You can optionally go into the BIOS and instead set this key to act as a shortcut to max out the fans. Undervolting is supported through the BIOS, but I haven’t tested that here. Connecting the liquid cooler 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. The design is much improved compared to last year, as it uses a magnetic connection now. It’s just much easier to connect and disconnect, though that said, on at least two occasions I didn’t have a proper connection and experienced leaks, so you need to make sure it’s connected properly. You can’t only rely on the magnets putting it into place. Oh and don’t move it around while connected, which is what I did to cause this leak. Unlike the
older version, you don’t have to drain the laptop as it’s using a quick release connection now. I still found a few small drops left behind that you’ll want to dry up. The power button is on the front, and both sides let you see the current water level with a line to fill to. You unscrew the top to refill it. The cooler connects via Bluetooth through the Control Center software. Once connected, you can set three different fan speed profiles for the liquid cooler, which from lowest to highest are quiet, high, and maximum. You also get some
control over the RGB lighting on the cooler. This controls the fan light on one side of the cooler, there’s no lighting over on the other side. Alright let’s get into the thermal results. I’ve tested both air cooling and water cooling, but we’ll start off with air. 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 with overboost and custom mode was tested with all performance sliders maxed out. The CPU
was reaching the thermal throttle limit of 95 degrees Celsius, but the GPU wasn’t thermal throttling on air. Closing the lid to dock the laptop was slightly warmer on the GPU, and the cooling pad I test with, linked below, made no difference to the temperature. These are the clock speeds during those tests. Despite the temperatures being the same, the cooling pad allowed us to reach higher CPU and GPU clock speeds, as it provides more thermal headroom and temperatures are a limit. The clock speeds were only a little worse with the lid closed, so there’s not really
much performance loss if you want to dock the laptop. Custom mode was reaching higher CPU performance than overboost mode though. This is because the CPU power limit was able to run around 60 watts in custom mode. The RTX 4090 was running at 170 watts in both custom and overboost modes, which is basically as high as it can go. This is a good result, as it means you don’t need the liquid cooler to get full GPU performance, even with the CPU loaded up at the same time. Now let’s look at the stress tests, but with the
liquid cooler attached. The CPU was still reaching the thermal throttle limit any time custom mode was enabled. The GPU gets slightly cooler depending on which mode the cooler is using. Setting the cooler to quiet was the warmest of the three, the higher high mode was a little cooler, and setting the cooler to max was best. Closing the lid of the laptop resulted in the GPU running a few degrees warmer, and if we set both the laptop’s fans and the liquid cooler’s fans to maximum, the GPU temp was the lowest yet, but as you’ll hear soon
it’s fairly loud now too. And the CPU was still thermal throttling. Setting both the laptop and liquid cooler fans to max resulted in the highest CPU clock speeds though, because thermals were the limit for the CPU. We can see the CPU and GPU clock speeds increase slightly as we set the liquid cooler to higher modes. Best case, the CPU was running at around 88 watts with the GPU at 170 watts with the laptop and liquid cooler fans maxed out, which is quite impressive when you remember that this is a 16 inch laptop. The CPU power
level is 20 to 30 watts higher compared to running on air, so although the liquid cooler isn’t reducing CPU thermals, it is able to use more power and clock much higher in these workloads. Just for quick comparison, the larger ASUS Scar 18 with 13th gen Intel Core i9-13980HX and RTX 4090 runs its CPU at 65 watts best case in this same workload. So being able to run higher than that in a smaller 16 inch laptop is an advantage possible due to the water cooling. Intel 13th gen HX CPUs just need a lot of power to
hit all core turbo boost, and more power equals more heat. Despite custom mode performing better in the stress tests, we constantly found overboost mode to result in better FPS in games. The CPU doesn’t really end up using that much more power when the GPU is idle, like in Cinebench, and this is due to thermal limits, even with the liquid cooler connected at full speed. The result with the liquid cooler attached in red wasn’t very impressive. I mean Razer’s smaller Blade 16 was basically matching it with just air cooling. The laptops that are much higher are
larger 17 or 18 inch models, but still, I was expecting water cooling to count for more here. It would probably perform better if the water loop went over the CPU, but they chose to prioritize the GPU. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power. It’s not very impressive when compared to most other laptops. I mean the ASUS ROG Ally, a small handheld console, was able to do better when it came to multicore performance. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at
idle, and the Neo 16 was in line with this on air cooling, and it wasn’t that much different with the liquid cooler attached. If we look back to air only, balanced mode was cool as it enables whisper mode, which limits frame rate to keep it quieter. Enthusiast mode is warmer, the WASD area was fine but the middle was quite warm, and it’s a similar deal in the higher overboost and custom modes too. The keyboard was still on the warmer side even with the liquid cooler attached, which isn’t too surprising given this still can’t tame the
thermal throttling CPU. The keyboard was much better if we also max out the laptop fans in addition to the liquid cooler, but it’s louder now too, let’s have a listen. Basically the takeaway is that it’s possible to use the liquid cooler to run quieter while also improving performance. However, this new laptop and new cooler was a little louder compared to last year’s Neo 17, despite the new mk2 cooler claiming to have a revised pump with quieter operation. That may be the case, I think the laptop’s fans just ended up running a bit louder compared to
last year. It’s also worth noting you can enable passive cooling mode in the BIOS, which will allow the fans to intermittently turn off if it’s cool enough, so completely silent should be possible, but the fans may turn on and off as needed. The Neo 16 uses a 16:10 screen, which means more pixels vertically compared to standard 16:9 panels. But with most other laptops, going to 16:10 tends to remove this bottom chin down the bottom. Other brands just typically turn that into screen space, but that’s not the case here. However it does give the Neo 16
an advantage by making the screen slightly higher, so you don’t have to look down and bend your neck while looking at the laptop quite as much. But at the same time, the bigger lid probably contributes to that wobble that I was talking about earlier. The Color gamut isn’t super impressive. Fine for gaming, but content creators might want to look elsewhere. The screen is advertised at 350 nits, but ours was just able to hit 400, as this can vary a bit based on the panel lottery. Backlight bleed wasn’t a problem with only minor patches that I
never noticed during normal use, but again this varies by panel. The average grey-to-grey screen response time wasn’t impressive at 7.9ms. For a 240Hz panel, we need transitions at 4.17ms to occur within the refresh window. Unlike most other laptops, there’s no overdrive mode available through software, and that’s why it’s lower compared to most other 2560 by 1600 240Hz screens that we’ve tested. Only the other Tong Fang based laptops are similar, as none of them seem to have adopted screen overdrive for some reason. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and
when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. Again, it’s near those other laptops without a screen overdrive mode, but at the same time it’s not very different compared to most other high-end laptops. There’s a 1080p camera above the screen with IR for Windows Hello face unlock. The camera and microphones don’t look and sound very good, and that’s before we even consider using the mechanical keyboard. The Neo 16 has a classic MUX switch. You toggle it in General settings under GPU settings, but this needs a reboot to change. You don’t have to do this
though, because it also has advanced optimus through the Nvidia control panel, and G-Sync is available when optimus is disabled. Now let’s find out how well XMG’s Neo 16 performs in games. We’ve tested it on both air and water cooling to see what the differences are. Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got both Neo 16 results shown by the red highlight. At 1080p we’re able to boost average FPS by 17% with the liquid cooler, but without it, it is one of the lower 4090 results. Not too different compared to the Blade
16, another 16” laptop that’s slightly smaller. The liquid cooled Neo 16 is the second best result at the higher 1440p resolution, just a couple of FPS behind the ASUS Scar 17, though there are fewer dips in performance with the Neo 16, as per its higher 1% low. We’ve got fewer results at the higher 4K resolution, but the difference between air and water cooling seems to matter much less here compared to 1080p and 1440p. The GPU can reach max power level on air, so the improvement at lower resolutions would be due to the cooler CPU. Red
Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and this time the liquid cooled Neo 16 was the fastest result we’ve ever measured from a laptop in this game, again coming in at 17% faster than the air cooled result at 1080p. The Neo 16 was still the best at the higher 1440p resolution, but even without the water cooler, it’s not that much behind the far bigger Scar 17 and 18, and then at 4K, even the air cooled result was ahead of those larger laptops. The water cooled result wasn’t that much better though. It was the
fastest in Control at 1080p with the liquid cooler too, coming in 10% faster compared to the air cooled result. The difference is smaller at the higher 1440p resolution, which is probably because the water cooler improved CPU power level more than the GPU, as we saw earlier in the thermal testing. At 4K it’s basically matching the larger ASUS Scar 17, and the 1% lows see a nice improvement with the liquid cooler attached. Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests. The Neo 16 was consistently one of the
better results when compared to other maxed out laptops, and these tests were all done on air cooling, so expect better with the liquid cooler connected. The BIOS provides a lot of customization compared to most other laptops out there, with the exception of MSI which just offer a stupid number of options. I haven’t seen this level of undervolting tuning available in quite some time. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 23.04 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, camera, ethernet, Wi-Fi and speakers all worked. Keyboard shortcuts to adjust volume, screen brightness, keyboard lighting and performance modes
all work. The RGB lighting also gets saved from Windows as long as you click the save to BIOS button in the control center software. Then again, if you’re going the Linux route, you might want to consider the Stellaris 16 from Tuxedo computers, which is the same laptop. Tuxedo are XMG’s sister company, but provide Linux support. Even the liquid cooler is supported in Linux through the control center software. But I already did a whole video comparing Linux and Windows in this video. Pricing and availability will change over time, so check the link below for updates and
current sales. At the time of recording, in the US at Eluktronics it starts at $2000 USD for the RTX 4060, kind of pricey 4060 tier performance. If you add the extras like liquid cooler, upgrade to RTX 4090 graphics, and the RAM and SSD I’ve tested with in this video, we’re looking at $3472. Surprisingly, this isn’t actually that bad when compared to other RTX 4090 laptops available in the US, at least without a good sale. We have had RTX 4090 deals on our gaminglaptop.deals site for $2700 in the past, but deals come and go every day,
so make sure you check our deals site out regularly with the link below to save money on your next gaming laptop! Over in Europe, the XMG Neo 16 starts at 2000 Euro, but this includes their 19% tax. Again once we spec it up to the configuration that I’ve tested in the video, it’s not cheap at more than 4000 Euro. Obviously XMG’s Neo 16 is kind of insane, given it’s one of the few gaming laptops that has water cooling support. But does that make it worth it? As we saw in the benchmarks, liquid cooling doesn’t automatically
mean that it’s going to perform the best. Though the laptops that were usually beating it are larger 17 and 18 inch designs. As we saw, the liquid cooler could certainly help improve performance and lower temperatures, and although this new 2nd gen version is way easier to use, it’s not going to be for everyone. I still experienced leaking at least a couple of times during testing, but I am willing to admit that that may have been me relying too much on the magnetic connection and not properly checking that it was in. Still though, if I were
spending this much money on a gaming laptop setup, I’d want to make sure I was being careful about keeping that water far away from the hardware. And unless you really want that liquid cooler, I think there are just too many other concerns with this laptop. The battery life isn’t good, the screen wobble is just annoying, there’s no overdrive mode resulting in a poor screen response time compared to the competition, the camera quality is well below average and that goes for the speakers too, and let’s be real, thermal throttling on the CPU at 95 degrees Celsius
with liquid cooling isn’t great. And that’s even when the GPU isn’t active, like in just Cinebench. Look, I get it. Intel’s 24 core 13th gen processors need a lot of power to hit high clock speeds over all those cores. But the Cinebench score kind of says it all. The smaller Razer Blade 16 should not perform similarly to the Neo 16 with liquid cooler attached in my opinion. That kind of makes me wonder if the water pipe really needs to go over the GPU only. Because the GPU was still hitting max power level on air cooling
without the liquid cooler anyway. It seems like having it go over the CPU, either instead or in addition to, might have been a benefit. But what do I know, I’m not an engineer. As we’ve seen, this top-end RTX 4090 config is not cheap. You can probably save some money and get a lower specced model while still having a great experience. Check out this video next where I’ve compared this RTX 4090 against a 4080 in the Neo 16. So this exact same laptop chassis tested in 25 games at 3 resolutions. I’ll see you in that one
next!
