Schenker Slim 15 RED (i5-8265U, UHD620) Laptop Review

Schenker chose metal for the surface while using plastic for the inner frame and bottom cover. The workmanship is of very high quality and leaves no room for criticism. The display's weight is a bit high though so that when placed on your lap, the Slim 15 tends to tilt backward. The metal frame encloses the side edges, providing the available ports with stability. A full-fledged Thunderbolt port is included among these, with which the already good range of connections can be significantly expanded.

Since Schenker now also relies on narrow bezels, the Slim 15 is about the same size as comparable models from competing manufacturers. With a weight of 1,700 grams, the Schenker Slim 15 RED sits in the second to last place in our comparison.

The internal card reader only fits SD cards halfway, therefore making it impossible to permanently keep a memory card in the Schenker Slim 15. With our Toshiba Exceria Pro M501 reference memory card, the card reader reached very good read and write speeds. The Slim 15 finds itself with a clear advantage in the first place among the devices in comparison.

For wireless network connections, users will find Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi with the fast AC standard. In this way, the Schenker Slim 15 Red Edition reached very good transfer rates from 580 Mb/s for receiving and 650 Mb/s for sending data in our review.

The Schenker Slim 15's keyboard offers a well-balanced layout and good size. The surface of the keys is quite smooth and the feedback when typing is relatively soft. Nevertheless, longer writing sessions can also be done well, which has a lot to do with the easily reachable letters. Also, the arrow keys, as well as the special keys, are easily usable. Moreover, Schenker has added a full-fledged numeric keypad with keys of the same size as the ones in the keyboard. For work under poor lighting conditions, the device offers keyboard backlighting with four levels of brightness. These aren't blinding and all keys are evenly illuminated.

Instead of a mouse, the Schenker Slim 15 offers a classic touchpad with separate mouse buttons. The navigation area is quite large and enables precise control of the cursor. While the right mouse button has a soft pressure point and reacts quite audibly to inputs, the left mouse button delivers soft feedback and a barely audible click.

Our review device is equipped with an Intel Core i5-8265U, Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated graphics unit, 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD. Thus the Schenker Slim 15 RED Edition can also handle demanding office tasks, where low energy consumption is taken care of by its energy-saving CPU during normal usage.

Buyers have the alternative of going for an Intel Core i7-8565U after an extra charge of about 115 Euros (~$130), which offers a slightly higher clock speed. Moreover, users can choose between different storage and RAM configurations, and these can be diversely combined in the purchase menu. The Slim 15-RE-E19 can also be acquired without a preinstalled operating system.

The Intel Core i5-8265U is an economical quad-core processor belonging to the Whiskey Lake generation. With a clock speed of up to 3.9 GHz with Turbo Boost, it proves to perform efficiently. The performance of its direct predecessor of the Kaby Lake generation, the Intel Core i5-8250U, is exceeded by around 10%. However, how long the Core i5-8265U can keep up its performance depends significantly on the cooling system.

Our Cinebench endurance test shows that the performance of the Slim 15 Red very quickly dropped by about 17%, after a quite high initial score. Nonetheless, the cooling system can ensure a stable performance here, which only showed minor fluctuations throughout our test. Other devices with the Intel Core i5-8265U like the Asus ZenBook 14, showed similar behavior in our tests.

Considering the individual values obtained when running the Cinebench R15 test, the Schenker Slim 15 proves to reach the expected 10% increase in performance over its predecessor CPU. In addition, our review device performs above average in the single-core test. The multi-core performance falls a bit below the average of other devices with an Intel Core i5-8265U that we've tested though.

The Schenker laptop can ensure itself at least second place in every category of the PCMark 10 benchmark so that the system performance outperforms most competing devices in our test area. This is also reflected in a smooth operation during everyday tasks. In the PCMark 8 Home test, an opposite situation is observed. The score is only good enough to reach the second to last place.

During our testing period, we experienced a smooth operating system with fast file access and programs that launched quickly. The fast SSD is largely responsible for this, which is why prospective buyers should absolutely take it into account when making their decision. 

The results that other systems were able to reach in our tests can be found in our CPU benchmarks page.

Schenker equipped our review unit with a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB SSD. In our benchmark tests, this reached very good write and read speeds and left the storage options found in our chosen competing devices behind. Without any extra costs, Schenker also configures the Slim 15 RED with a 250 GB M.2 Samsung 860 EVO and a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda (5400 RPM). 

The performance reached in our tests by these and other storage devices can be found in our HDD/SSD benchmark list.

The UHD Graphics 620 integrated graphics unit takes care of image-processing in the Schenker Slim 15-RE-E19. This GPU is only adequate for tasks where there isn't much demand for graphics performance, although it does benefit significantly by the use of the dual-channel RAM that is present in our test unit.

The results of the 3DMark benchmarks sit slightly above the average for comparable devices with integrated graphics, whereby the Slim 15 RED Edition finds itself in the upper midfield of our comparison. Light image-editing as well as casual games and older games on low settings are handled without any issues.

The performance offered by other GPUs comparable to the Intel UHD Graphics 620 can be found on our GPU Benchmarks page. 

In our game tests with the now six-year-old BioShock Infinite, we could prove that old games can be played smoothly at intermediate settings. How well a game can run on Intel's UHD Graphics 620 depends strongly on the amount of available RAM. 16 GB of RAM in dual-channel mode boosted the graphics performance significantly on our test device. Users must consider, therefore, that this performance would significantly drop when using less RAM and a single-channel setup.

Games that can run smoothly on the Intel UHD Graphics 620 can be found on our Games on Laptop Graphics Cards list.

Our measurements showed that the Schenker Slim 15 had a power consumption of at least 3.2 watts when idle and a maximum of 42.2 watts under load. The included 65-watt power adapter has therefore sufficient capacity to supply the Slim 15 with enough energy at any time. 

In our practical Wi-Fi test, the Schenker laptop was able to run for almost four-and-a-half hours before it had to be reconnected to a charger, thereby giving the 36 Wh battery a runtime below comparable devices. For the provided capacity, the battery life is acceptable though.