XMG announces NEO 15/17 gaming laptops with 1440p 165 Hz screens, includes Black Friday promotion

The first laptops with 1440p 165 Hz screens are now making their market debut through a series of custom laptop OEMs like Eluktronics from the U.S. and Schenker XMG from Germany. We are expecting to see more announcements from big brands at CES in January, as the 1440p standard should diversify the pricing options with a mid-range solution positioned between FHD and 4K. The first XMG models to benefit from these new WQHD screens are the 15-inch and 17-inch NEO gaming laptops, and the German company is also throwing in a Black Friday deal.

As noted in the official announcements, the 1440p panels are technically identical to those included with the Eluktronics laptops and are produced by Chinese company BOE. Only the 15-inch laptops include the WQHD option for now, and these variants will ship in December. Pre-orders for the 17-inch options will be available in mid-December, but these will only ship in January 2021.

If you are wondering about the quality of the new BOE screens, Jerrod’s Tech on Youtube did a quick review of XMG’s pre-production models and it looks like these screens measure quite well against the other options on the market. As far as response time goes, the 17-inch variant is a bit faster with 7.09 ns GtG versus the 15-inch with 7.45 ns. Peak brightness for the 15-inch was measured at 381.2 nits, while the 17-inch was a smidge dimmer at 354.9 nits. Similarly, the 15-inch has a better contrast ratio of 830:1 compared to the 17-inch with 750:1. Color gamut is almost 100% sRGB on both versions and the backlight bleed is tolerable.

We pointed out that these 1440p screens require more powerful builds, and the XMG laptops indeed come equipped with the Core i7-10875H CPU coupled with the RTX 2070 Super discrete GPU as non-customizable parts. From what we see in the test provided by Jerrod’s Tech, not too many games can hit 165 fps at ultra settings in 1440p, but DLSS could prove helpful in future implementations. Also, prospective buyers may want to consider the upcoming RTX 3000 and AMD RDNA2 laptop GPUs launching in early 2021. These solutions will certainly handle 1440p games considerably better, as seen with the desktop-grade variants.

Last but not least, we were mentioning that XMG is offering some Black Friday deals for the 1440p, and these will be available starting November 26 throughout December 2. Both NEO 15 and 17 models benefit from a 250 Euro discount, bringing down starting prices at 1581 Euro and 1503 Euro, respectively (yes, the 17-inch model costs less!).