Agree with Niko and the rest
89's a 'Gold' or High 'Silver' award in your current (last ½ dzn years) system. Yet your review reads like the same measurement of brightness (162cd/m?) and/or dB of coil whine when you set your keyboard backlight to lower than high! No TB4/USB4 power delivery, and who knows if the other 2 ports are sharing a single controller (if so, halving your throughput of 40Gb/s) - but as long as you use it in the dark, plugged in, you can enjoy <1.0 delta and gamma control on a sweet Sammy OLED? The nVME measures okay, and heat seems under control (89°) but they shorted the memory stack on the dGPU (8GB minimum today if you want to game or produce and export video, ingest, render or attempt to alter codecs), soldered the minimum amount of RAM without a second slip (16GB) you need today and the team seems clueless about how to handle the mass calibration of their entire display stack including the on board proprietary C/GPU management system!
Junk speakers, bad I/O, minimum TDP and memory you're unable to upgrade, and a killer 1.7mm travel keyboard? That's justification for a score so high?
Wow.
To me, and for the price, there's a dozen better Windows laptops @ 14" & another ½ dozen options from Apple that'll leave this one in the dust. For a little to much less money than this "64" (my score from your review, tabulated by ten scores 1-10 on CPU/GPU/Memory/Cooling/I-O/heat management/performance with 110v vs unplugged/storage/display/software management from the manufacturer. I even added an 11th for the build quality you spoke about and STILL came up with a 64!
Anyway, excellent review, phenomenal testing bench and detailed analysis, you clearly understand what you're doing and how to write the technical details about said testing
But you drop the ball on the overall score, as well as practical application/software testing and benchmarking... even if subjective, you are the author and you know your s&*t! Tell us what YOU think and how it feels to YOU as an everyday thin and light 14" with the underwhelming GPU. I have to wonder why they chose to even include a dGPU in this rig. The fact that they don't have the heat control necessary for the 75w it's using, and per watt, the performance is junk if not plugged in.
Lastly, there's no excuse for the lack of innovation when it comes to cooling these thin and light laptops. If you want to game, buy an Xbox or a desktop and cool it down so you don't sound like a jet taking off incessantly while you work on the spreadsheet or have a couple open tabs in Chrome. I don't understand why they continue to equip the laptops with core i9 CPUs (under powered) in addition to desktop GPU processors' basic unit and package it in the laptop using 15-25% of the power of their equal in the desktop space? Why? Marketing? They aren't anywhere near the same level as their direct counterparts unless you spend $5k and up on a 12 pound desktop replacement and even then it's 330 watt bricks with two power inputs to keep the power hungry PUs operating in a TDP releasing poor environment. Creating heat and wasting energy on thermal throttling.
There must be a better solution! I bought one (15/16" gaming laptop 18 months ago, during the 3000 series of nVidia/12xxx Intel series. It had a 3070, 12700 I believe and 1TB nVME/32 GB RAM. I bought it specifically for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and its premium edition. I've played the game since 1983 on an Apple IIe before there was Windows the OS. I have been a both OS guy since and the PCs are mainly used in my sims, macOS when I need to get work done (I'm an audio engineer and masterer), but I have no hate for either one of the OS's. And I don't blame Windows for the loud fans, crazy heat or bad hinges on an otherwise stellar build - as they don't have the vertical and horizontal control Apple has (building the hard and software, as well as custom calibrations from the factory for the cheapest iPhones and iPads through the overpriced XDR displays (although the display and speaker systems on the Apple silicon (M1/M2) laptops are astounding, regardless of what you think you know of Apple, and I don't work for them, am not compensated by Apple, nor have I ever been given a product. They were using Intel as well until three years ago and they had the same egregious issues (more if you include the 3 year run of POS keyboards) with temps,exceeding 100° as the norm, junk GPUs they tried to make work with a 200w supply but they were no more successful than MSI, Alienware/Dell, Lenovo, Razer and the many I didn't mention.
It's physics and if you build a desktop gamer, even a relatively inexpensive PC, you definitely aren't looking @ 300 watt PSUs. 500? Still small. Likely a 600-1,000 watt or higher power supply that is always powered by 1800 watts from the wall. I feel like that's the direction some of these companies are going - and we'll see 500, 600, 750 watt bricks in 50% pairs (2x 250/2x300/2x375w) used to power the desktop replacement laptop - a completely unnecessary need as you've already taken the reason away for most people who decide to buy the laptop. Portability. The bricks will weigh as much as the 14 pound laptop and without them, expect 20-30% the performance and less than an hour editing and exporting or decoding footage, ingesting a couple hundred 45MP RAW images, or play Ultimate for an hour. With ANC headphones on so you can hear your game or the audio without the drowning in nasty whining pink noise at 55dB+ while trying to get the audio balanced in your video, or hear the bad guy coming up from your six!
I believe there has to be a better way, and it states with sites like this, well respected and deservedly so, NBChk's got the information, ability to provide education with engaging and informative - sometimes entertaining content. But you have a couple dozen 14-16" laptops reviewed and you have scored them between 83 & 90, with a significant mean/average if 86-87! I don't think that any layman buyer would find your reviews enhance their purchase experience, rather over complicating it and definitely over frustrating the buyer who just throws hands up and buys something they return (as I did my 12xxx/3080) in two weeks due to the heated toaster oven with the loudest fans in the house that don't come close to cooling the processing and storage down enough to consider musing the five times multiplier that comes with running the namesake C/GPU on a well cooled desktop.
If you are looking to game these days, you can't beat a PS5 and Series X Xbox, less than a thousand (by a couple pennies), and run your favorite triple A games @ 4K 60fps+! You can buy both so you can run everything you can on the PC. If you want to emulate old titles, then you need only spend another few hundred on a PC to use it for legacy emulation.
We've never had so much software available in history and legacy software/applications are rarely used, are unsupported and have been replaced with new, more efficient and cheaper alternatives than the resurrection of software who's end of support came with Win 7. It's just the brain builders who need to get to work (Intel, AMD, nVidia) shrinking the nodes, looking at efficiency and stop adding cores where unnecessary and adding memory where necessary.
Most games are built to run on single core or 2 and their hurdle or bottleneck is the amount of and speed/latency of the memory and the ability to talk to the PUs over the board. We likely won't need more RAM if we buy 32GB today, and we will be likely playing AAA titles with 12-16GB of vRAM - but 6? And 16? That's considered a two year throwaway, a waste of excellent hardware throttled by the manufacturer to make a buck or two.
Also, it shows how lazy the boutique manufacturer has become, the absolute lack of power in dealing with the chip designers, and who should maybe take a look at the way ARM/Android and iOS (now through the entire lineup of computers) are doing it. Using a system on a chip approach, the latency disappears, the memory necessary is less, as it's shared between vRAM and system RAM, SSD/M.2/NVME speeds have increased significantly over the last few years and have the capability to 'have then RAM's 6 o'clock' If you have a need to cache your memory for instant recall when necessary. But 192GB is blowing the doors off the just 2-3 year old XEON dual CPU configurations with 20 cores - 40 threads and a TB of RAM! Using 60 watts of power totally, vs 1,000/1,2000 watt power supplies necessary to power a $40,000 MAC Pro (not an argument about Apple tax, as the XEONs alone were and are expensive $4-5,000 CPUs and the enterprise RAM, which ain't cheap. But the indifference with nVidia has impacted the older machines - which is another reason why unified architecture is so revolutionary in the performance of the 30-60 watt systems being released that are halving the time necessary to export those 250 RAW pictures, decode RED footage or Canon/Sony's proprietary codecs to ProRes and saving the creators time which equals money all day.
Gaming is also now available on the Mac considering it's using the same architecture as the iPhone and iPad, and they've implemented into Xcode the ability to essentially drop your app in and out pops the app in minutes that's universally recognized and playable by the computer. Maybe not the latest AAA titles but a single day in savings for a production house by being able to double your output means you will have enough money to buy both PS5 & Xbox series X at close of business. And their support (OS) extends as long as a cared for MacBook Pro does. I have a perfectly working 2012, 15" first Retina display and PCIe flash storage or a terabyte. Boots in 10-12 seconds and shuts down in 3-5. Down to about 3 hours away from the wall but the battery's replaceable by the user from the era, so it's all good, and easily got my wok through high school.
I love me a screaming 13000HSK(? I know it's not a thing) and a 4090ti Founder's Edition (also probably an unknown SKU) with a couple Samsung 990 nVME 2 TB sticks with six true to the C/GPU Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports and a sick case see thru with a chunky mechanical keyboard and wrap around 40" OLED display calibrated and capable of HDR... but not at the expense, the headaches (see in this review how he had to get the proprietary software for controlling the system at a deeper level than the basic win 11 adjustments) and the fact that next year comes the Intel 14xxx and nVidia 5000 series! PCIe 4's here, 5's right behind and memory is faster, m.2 and nVME storage continues to get much faster and the latter may be the best option for speeding up a slowing rig today. No need to buy new. Intel's just now starting to build a gap between their now decade old CPUs, as AMD & Apple have shown up with the wares
Unfortunately Intel is still a long way from 3nm, and the efficiency and performance that comes with the smaller nodes as well as practicality in a supposed portable computer (laptop).
Don't buy a $5,000 desktop replacement running at half or less the speed and power of its peers in the desktop range. Buy/build a desktop system as you will save a ton of money, enjoy huge boosts in performance and productivity, less unwanted cooling noise and more frames per second at a higher resolution on a display that you can turn up past dim and still enjoy n less than 1 Delta and supports most color spaces up to 100% for the price of the laptop you're going to be replacing in 18-24 months because the heat's killed it and boutique builder 445 is OOB (Out of business)
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