We would like to make a few additions to the review:

Balanced is much less noisy than Enthusiast and Overboost, with only small FPS impact

The main difference between Balanced and Overboost profiles are in the Fan Control and maximum CPU TDP-Level. Overboost ramps up the fans to allow peak performance and gives the Intel CPU free reign with seriously 120 Watt PL2 and PL1.

Enthusiast is more moderate, with only 80W PL2 and 55W PL1, being much closer to the advertised 45W TDP of the i7-10875H.

Balanced is the most moderate with 60W PL2 and 35W PL1. This one also has a more balanced fan curve which can be further customized by the user.

The GPU TGP is identical at 115W in all 3 modes modes, so the impact on FPS between Enthusiast and Overboost is very small in most games, but the fan noise difference is very noticeable.

Enthusiast and Overboost are primarily targeted for users who are doing a lot of all-core CPU rendering. The only games that really benefit from the Enthusiast and Overboost modes are those which have heavily all-core optimized, such as various strategy games.

Furthermore, you can reduce fan noise additional by smart adoption of per-game FPS Limiters. Read more about that topic in this article.


Battery Life is a function of Idle Power Consumption and Battery Capacity

Notebookcheck has measured a minimum of 17W in Idle, whereas we have seen the system consistently around 10W if there are no background tasks running and if the NVIDIA GPU is inactive. 10W is pretty much within the ballpark of typical high-end gaming laptops if they have implemented NVIDIA Optimus.

We don't know how NBC has reached their 17W++ numbers, but it does have a clear impact on their battery life measurements. In our testing we have seen about 30% longer battery life in similar conditions.

There can be many potential reasons why a Windows system can have elevated Idle power consumption. We have written a long list of potential causes in this thread:

• XMG Gaming Laptops: First Steps & Troubleshooting

We have already cleared the most common of these causes with the Notebookcheck editor, but we haven't been able to dig deeper with them. Anyway, let his just be the usual notice: your mileage may vary and if your XMG system (except XMG APEX and ULTRA, which are based on Desktop components) is consuming more than ~10W in Idle, you can contact us for troubleshooting.

Cheers,
Tom