OK, I got my Tongfang Aistone X6FR558Y, which is known more as the XMG Neo 16 AMD model, or, like in my case, PC Specialist Recoil 16 AMD. I configured it with the RTX 5080 mobile with 16 Gbytes of GDDR7 and 64 GBytes of RAM. As with all the laptops, there is a strong influence of the device design so before telling about the CPU I would spend a couple words about the system. My previous laptop was still a Tongfang, but it was the model 2023 (with the I9 13900HX) which did not satisfy me because the build quality was poor, especially the keyboard and the plastic chassis were not adequate to the category of the product, and I had to send it back more than a time because there was some incompatibility issue between the screen mounted and the RTX4080 on board, which caused literally the screen to fail. Yep, you read it correctly: the screen failed more than one time, with the bottom third of the screen becoming unreadable. I vowed to not buy again a barebone, but then I saw a friend of mine getting the model 2024 and it was leaps and bounds what I got just one year earlier. I also had the possibility to see one prototype of the AMD version for this year and I gave Tongfang another chance. Now, I got my system and in these days the positive impression has been confirmed, but there are some caveats, for me they are minor but nevertheless some other people could find these annoying.
Let's go with the pluses:
- Build quality. What was really bad two years ago is very good today. The chassis is in metal, very sturdy, and you really FEEL the amount of metal used for the cooling system, as well. The keyboard was horrible on the previous model but in this one it is very good and with a good layout.
- Performance. This thing is fast, even if I am using no liquid cooling system, no clean Windows install (I forgot to take the benches before installing a bunch of things) the benches are very good, even in balanced mode. Cooling is good and when using balanced settings is practically silent at idle and you can start to hear the noise only with heavy gaming.
- Price. I got mine for 3.3K€ which is not a low price in absolute, but it is quite OK for the machine I got, especially with 64 gigs of RAM and 5 Terabytes total of SSD space.
- Screen: while there are for sure better screen around, this one is really good, it is a Mini-LED with 300Hz refresh rate and HDR. It has no G-Sync but frankly I don't miss it.
- Power adapter: with 420W nominal you'd think to get a brick needing its own trolley. In reality it's a power supply which uses SiC power components and it's literally half the size and weight of my previous 330W adapter.
And now the cons:
- Weight. While I don't care until it goes over 4Kg, this thing is not a lightweight. It's almost 3Kgs and while the power brick evens the total weight with the previous versions, it may annoy someone. BTW, a lot of weight went in the cooling system.
- No Wi-Fi 7 on the AMD model. Why? Who knows. there is a slot for the WiFi card, but for some reasons it seems there are not yet WiFi 7 cards compatible with this model. So you have to do with WiFi 6E. To me it's not a big issue, for other people it may be a show stopper. But practically all the other AMD Fire range notebooks out there have WiFi 7 support.
- No USB4. This is really strange because if it was Thunderbolt support only missing, it would have been fair game. But there are plenty of AMD systems with USB4 and even the middle range MSI models have two. Again, I don't understand the reason for this choice. To me it' not a big issue (also, display port is supported, but USB-C is limited to 3.2) but it's definitely a minus.
- Power supply has a short cable going from the brick to the laptop. This is quite annoying, as it asks for you to some compromises in the placement. I will try to get a longer wall-side cable to compensate someway.
And now, about the performance. First of all as I said the laptop utilization feels very smooth already in balanced mode. Please also note that as said the installation was not completely clean and I did not tune the laptop at all.
CPU-Z:
Cinebench 2024 Balanced:
Cinebench 2024 Extreme And with A/C turned on as today there are 32 °C in the room otherwise):
Timespy balanced:
Timespy Extreme:
Firestrike balanced:
Firestrike Extreme:
All the 3Dmark runs were done without A/C.