Introduction

XMG is a brand of Schenker Technologies GmbH, founded by Robert Schenker in 2002. The parent company initially operated as an eBay store and opened its own independent retail solution in 2004. The XMG brand—short for “Extreme Multimedia & Gaming”—was created in 2009, with the Schenker brand from 2013 instead focusing on mobile workstations and prosumer use. XMG laptops have quickly gained the favor of the PC community off late by offering a lot of enthusiast-first features, including an extremely customizable set of different platforms, being fully assembled in Germany where quality checks are also conducted, supporting right to repair and easy upgrading and hardware swapping, and generally providing good value for money in terms of hardware and after-sales software and firmware support. The platforms for the laptops are obtained from companies including Clevo and TongFang, so you will see variations of the same laptops sold under other labels, too. This keeps competition high, and brands such as XMG have to keep delivering each time.

When XMG sent out a press release early January, around the NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti Mobile GPUs announcement, it in itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy. After all, the debuting XMG NEO 15 had recently been updated in 2021, so this was surely just a specifications update? Then I read through the email and realized an external watercooling system was debuting alongside, which certainly piqued my interest. An online product briefing over Zoom commenced, following which I was soon convinced I simply had to see how the XMG OASIS would work in practice. External watercooling enclosures for laptops aren’t new with ASUS having left a strong but commercially unsuccessful impression courtesy a heavy, bulky, and expensive external enclosure for an equally bulky laptop. It’s been a few years since, and PC hardware is again getting all the more power hungry and hot, so is the XMG OASIS a novel solution or another gimmick? I decided to wait until the retail models were ready to test exactly what customers receive, and this review of both the XMG NEO 15 (E22) laptop and XMG OASIS external cooling system was nearly 100 hours in the making. Thanks to Schenker for arranging review samples for TechPowerUp!