THE NEW XPG Xenia 15 KC gaming laptop
packs some serious punch for a slim
portable PC. But wait! Isn’t XPG the
performance brand of memory specialist
Adata? Yes, it is—and the Xenia 15 KC
is based on a 1 5-inch laptop chassis
engineered by none other than Intel.
Flip the Xenia upside down and you’ll
find an Intel Corp sticker and product
code, which is no bad thing. Intel not only
has the resources to engineer a laptop
right in a general sense, but it also has
access to more information than anyone
else when it comes to optimizing a chassis
design to suit its mobile CPUs.
The chassis in question has been
around in some form since 2019. It’s mildly
revised here and remains pretty sweet.
Built largely from magnesium, it’s slim,
slick, well built, and relatively portable
at 1 .94kg. It feels solid throughout with a
particularly rigid keyboard bed. Speaking
of which, that keyboard sports per-key
RGB lighting, complemented by a slice of
RGB lighting on the front of the chassis.
Port location with the USB-C, HDMI,
and LAN on the back makes sense, while
three USB-A sockets, headphone jack,
and the SD card slot are on the sides.
Elsewhere, the specs look good, with an
eight-core Intel CPU and Nvidia’s RTX
3070 graphics with 8 GB of RAM, plus1440 p high-refresh in a slim,slick,portable packageXPG Xenia 15 KC9VERDICT XPG Xenia 15 KCPOWERHOUSE Nicely
engineered chassis;
great mix of components.
OUTHOUSE Slim proportions
limit GPU power; not exactly cheap.
$2,499, http://www.xpg.comomSPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i7-11800H
Graphics Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 8GB,
1,290MHz boost
RAM 32GB DDR4
Screen 15.6-inch, 1440p, IPS, 165Hz
Storage 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
Ports 3x USB-A, 1x USB-C, LAN,
HDMI, SD Card
Connectivity Intel Wi-Fi 6, AX201, Gigabit
Ethernet, Bluetooth 5.2
Weight 1.94kg
Size 23.4 x 35.6 x 2.1cm32GB of XPG’s own RAM and a 1 TB version
of XPG’s rapid Gammix S7 0 SSD. Best of
all, the 15 -inch IPS panel combines 14 40p
resolution with 165 Hz refresh.
It’s taken a while, but laptop makers are
final getting the balance right regarding
resolution and refresh. A 4 K panel on a
relatively thin laptop like this would be
silly. 14 40p is a better match with the RTX
3070 graphics while offering more image
detail than 108 0p. Admittedly, you might
not notice much of a difference compared
with 108 0p in-game. But for day-to-day
computing, it makes for a much, sharper,
clearer display with superior font
rendering than 108 0p. Less impressive
are the Xenia’s speakers, which produce
thin, muffled, and muddy sound.
The caveat to all this involves that slim
chassis. It inevitably means that the RTX
3070 chip is clocked at the lower end of the
available range at 1,290MHz. The compact
chassis also means that fan noise at full
performance is a little intrusive, which is
often the case with thinner laptops with
smaller, whinier fans. That said, there is
a quick-jump button above the keyboard
which can be used to toggle between
‘Battery’, ‘Balanced’ and ‘Performance’
modes. Balanced mode is much quieter
than Performance while only reducing
performance by 10 percent in games.As for actual gaming performance,
the Xenia puts out some pretty decent
numbers at 108 0p, clocking nearly 80fps
in Total War: Three Kingdoms at Ultra
quality and around 7 0fps at the same
settings in Metro Exodus. Of course, this
is a 144 0p laptop so the best image quality
will always be running native at 2 ,560 x
1,4 40 pixels. At that resolution, you’re
looking at frame rates in both games of
about 50 fps at Ultra quality.
It’s also worth noting that the IPS
panel looks decent interpolated to 108 0p.
Running online shooters at 108 0p and
with some of the eye candy toned down
will comfortably net high frame rates, if
that’s more your thing.
The performance of the Intel eight-
core CPU is strong. Arguably even more
impressive is the 1TB SSD. It’s XPG’s own
Gammix S70, a PCIe 4.0 drive capable of
7GB/s reads and 6GB/s writes, along with
strong 4 K random access performance.
Add in the 3 2GB of XPG RAM and it’s a
strong overall proposition. As for battery
life, the Xenia delivers over six hours in
PCMark 1 0, which is good for this class
of laptop and helps to round out what is
a strong overall package. – JEREMY LAIRDBENCHMARKS
XPG Xenia 15 KC
3DMark Fire Strike 21,171
Cinebench R20 Multi-core (points) 5,113
GeekBench 5 (single-core) 1,572
GeekBench 5 (multi-core) 9,267
PCMark 10 (points) 7,027
PCMark 10 Battery Life (h:m) 6:25
Movie playback Battery Life (h:m) 5:40
Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, Ultra fps) 79
Metro Exodus (1080p, Ultra fps) 70in the lab