Schenker Vision 14 Laptop in review - Massive Core i7-12700H performance upgrade

The overall design of the Schenker Vision 14 has remained unchanged and there are black and silver models available. While the display bezels consist of plastic, the remaining parts (lid, base unit) are made of a magnesium alloy. The rigidity continues to be excellent, but the screen is very thin, which makes it quite flexible as evidenced by the distortions that occur when applying focused pressure on the back of the lid. During daily use, there are no limitations.

The hinge is still a weakness of the Vision 14. Although the firmness of the hinge has been improved (~0.32 Nm vs. 0.25 Nm on the predecessor) according to Schenker, there is still noticeable teetering when adjusting the angle (up to 160 degrees). Opening the display with one hand is possible on both the new and the old model. The silver version less susceptible to fingerprints and grease than the black model during daily use.

With a 99-Wh battery and a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, our test device's weight of 1310 g (~2.89 lbs) exceeds that of its predecessor by almost 200 g (~0.44 lbs), which makes it the heaviest skew of the Vision 14. The lighter 53-Wh model (~1.1 kg / ~2.43 lbs). At 1269 g (~2.80 lbs), the 99-Wh variant of the Vision 14 without the RTX 3050 Ti is just marginally lighter. Meanwhile, the new 99-Wh models are also thicker by 1 mm (16.6 vs. 15.6 mm / 0.65 vs. 0.61 in).

Comparatively, even the highest configuration of our test device weighs noticeably less than other devices in our comparison with dedicated graphics cards. With 513 g (~1.13 lbs), the included AC adapter is relatively heavy.

There have been no changes in terms of the connectivity, which means users continue to benefit from the same, generous port selection that includes Thunderbolt 4. A fullsize card reader is also available. Schenker still uses the Intel AX201 Wi-Fi module, which reaches good transfer speeds in our testing. Since the antenna setup of the Vision 14 does not support 6-GHz networks, Wi-Fi 6E modules (such as the AX211) are not available.

The sensor of the webcam has been upgraded from the older 720p to a 1080p version. This slightly improves the image sharpness, while keeping the color deviations fairly low overall.

There are once again two base profiles with three subprofiles, each, available on the preinstalled Control Center software (quiet & performance). Conveniently, the base profiles can be switched between via the F3 key. The following table lists the performance data for various power profiles.

There are two noticeable differences between our test device and the older model. While the older Tiger Lake Core i7-11370H was limited to 46 watts, the newer Core i7-12700H has access to up to 60 W. Meanwhile, the RTX 3050 Ti now has to make do with 45 watts (35-watt TGP + 10 watts Dynamic Boost), whereas up to 50 watts was available to the GPU on the older model.

Since the Performance Enthusiast profile offers the best compromises overall, we chose it for our tests. In some of the following sections (and the system noisie section in particular), we will take a closer look at other profiles as well, although users may want to choose one of the weaker profiles to benefit from quieter fan noise in undemanding day-to-day scenrio.

The Core i7-12700H is a 45-watt processor with 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores, enabling it to simultaneously process up to 20 threads. The TDP limits (60/40 watts) are held firmly and the performance is excellent overall. The older Core i7-11370H not only falls behind significantly in the multi-thread tests (the newer model is essentially twice as fast here), but also in the single-thread tests thanks to the new performance cores.

Now for the question whether the Core i7-12700H makes more sense at these TDP values than an Alder Lake-P processor such as the Core i7-1260P (with 4 performance cores). The answer is unequivocally yes, since the number of performance cores is what ultimately matters. As we know, the performance cores become more and more inefficient at higher clock speeds. Although distributing the available TDP between more performance cores results in slightly lower clock speeds, it also results in lower temperatures which in turn benefit the performance. Additionally, the two additional cores more than compensate for the slightly lower clock speeds. While this would also be the case for a Core i7-1280P (same core configuration as the i7-12700H), the OEM does not offer Alder Lake-P chips for the barebone version of the Vision 14 with dual heatpipes.

The advantage of the Core i7-12700H becomes very apparent in a comparison with the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14, which runs the Core i7-1260P at a very similar TDP of 64/38 watts. Regardless, the Core i7-12700H outperforms it dramatically in the multi-thread tests (~18 % in our CB R15 multi loop). That being said, it should be noted that the Core i7-12700H is not able to unleash its full potential here, which would require over 120 watts for the maximum all-core clock speeds. The CPU performance of the iGPU version of the Vision 14 is identical.

In battery mode, the processor is limited to 45 and subsequently 40 watts, meaning the performance level remains fairly high. The performance dropoff becomes more significant at battery levels below 20 %. More CPU benchmarks can be found in our tech section.

The Vision 14's very responsive subjective impression is confirmed by our synthetic benchmarks. During our testing, we did not encounter any issues. Schenker's decision not to use DDR5 RAM (due to cost, according to the manufacturer), does not impact daily use.