Schenker Vision 14 2023 review: Magnesium ultrabook with very long battery life

Nothing has changed about the Vision 14's case compared to last year and it still uses a magnesium alloy, either in silver or black. Apart from the color, there are no differences, but the black variant is much more susceptible to fingerprints. The stability of the base unit is very good, but the lid is very thin and it twists a little under torsional stress, which did not result in creaking noises or image errors. The weak point this year is once again the hinge, as the lid visibly teeters. The maximum opening angle is around 160 degrees.

The bottom cover is secured with five Phillips screws only and is easy to remove. The WLAN module, the two RAM modules and the M.2 2280 SSD are replaceable. However, due to the large 99 Wh battery, there is no longer a second M2 slot.

Unlike its predecessors, the Vision 14 is only available with the large 99 Wh battery; the slightly thinner (1 mm) and lighter (~1.1 kg) model with the 53 Wh battery is no longer offered and so the weight has increased to 1.27 kg (models with RTX GPU ~1.31). Nevertheless, the Vision 14 is still one of the lighter models. Only the LG Gram Style 14 is noticeably lighter at less than one kilogram, but some devices are heavier at 1.5-1.6 kg.

Depending on the choice of GPU, the Vision 14 comes with either a 130-watt or 150-watt power supply. The 150-watt charger is more modern and compact, but both weigh around 500 grams and use a proprietary charging port.

There is little to criticize in terms of ports because everything you needed for everyday life is available. Thanks to a Thunderbolt 4 port on the right side, you can also connect external graphics cards. In our iGPU variant, the left USB-C port does not support the Display Port ALT function; this only works in the Vision 14 with the Nvidia GPU. USB-C power supplies are supported (min. 65 watts, max. 100 watts).

The fully fledged SD card reader has become slower compared to last year's model and now appears to be connected via USB 2.0, since we determined transfer rates of just over 20 MB/s only. The WLAN module (Intel AX201) is also unchanged and offers solid performance. 6 GHz networks (Wi-Fi 6E) are not supported by the antenna configuration of the Vision 14, which is why no corresponding module is offered. The 1080p webcam serves its purpose.

The Vision 14 M23 is only available with the Raptor Lake Core i7-13700H. As previously mentioned, the GeForce RTX 3050 Refresh with 6 GB VRAM is optionally available (surcharge: EUR 275) and compared to last year's model, DDR5-4800 RAM is now used instead of DDR4-3200 RAM.

Schenker offers two different performance profiles in the preinstalled Control Center: Silent and Performance. In Silent, the maximum TDP of the processor is reduced to 20 watts, while this is 45 -> 40 watts for Performance (as well as for both subprofiles Balanced and Enthusiast). This results in a reduction compared to the predecessor, where the processor was allowed to consume up to 60 watts for short bursts before leveling off at 40 watts. We chose the profile Enthusiast for the following benchmarks and measurements.

The Core i7-13700H is the direct successor of last year's Core i7-12700H (Alder Lake) and the performance values are ultimately identical. In the current Vision 14 M23, however, the processor is only allowed to consume 45 watts for short periods of time instead of 60 watts as in last year's model, which is why multi-core performance is initially worse in the new model. Under sustained load, both operate at the specified 40 watts and are practically on par.

Although the Core i7-13700H is a 45-watt processor, it is rarely used as such and is able to consume more than 120 watts in extreme cases. One might therefore have the idea that a Raptor-Lake P processor (4 P cores) would have been the better choice, but this is not the case. This can be seen very clearly in a direct comparison with the Core i7-1360P in the Lenovo Yoga 9 14. Thanks to higher short-term consumption, the i7-1360P is initially faster, but at 38 watts it clearly falls behind the i7-13700H at 40 watts (~13%).

On battery power, the processor is allowed to consume a maximum of 40 watts (and it takes a few seconds until the consumption is actually at 40 watts), which is why multi-core performance is about 14% lower. More CPU benchmarks are available here.

Our subjective performance impression is very good and all inputs were implemented without delays in everyday use. No problems occured during testing either.