BIOS and XMG Control Center

It was finally time to boot up the system, complete Win 11 setup, make sure all components were working, and check for any firmware and driver updates. While the laptop was still just a few weeks old when I got it, some dGPU driver updates and a whole new firmware/BIOS update for the mainboard were available. Updating these is not trivial, but XMG does a good job by putting out detailed guides in multiple languages with illustrations and screenshots to comprehend the process. These and other relevant files are found on this page. You will need a USB drive, and the one provided with the laptop will work plenty fine. It took a total of around 10 minutes to install the latest firmware and ensure any bug fixes and hardware and performance improvements were accounted for.


While I was navigating the BIOS, I decided to poke around further and use my phone to take some photos of relevant pages. The user interface is dated but functional, including useful settings, such as changing the default behavior of the so-called performance button alongside the power button to either swap between profiles or turn on/off fan boost. You may also choose the boot profile—the operating mode—and three boot profiles are available. A handy option is to reset any overclock settings in case they lead to an unstable system with BSOD loops, and I was equally intrigued by the keyboard RGB lighting effect settings. Rounding off the BIOS coverage is the most useful feature on this laptop: a MUX switch to run the integrated display off either the iGPU with the dGPU running in NVIDIA Optimus mode—MSHybrid here—or completely disable the iGPU for more performance and worse battery life—the dGPU only option here.

If the BIOS is too archaic for you, perhaps the preinstalled XMG Control Center is more to your liking. This is a feature-rich software suite I made sure was on the latest version at the time of testing, which was v4.9.46.4. It is found on the same page as the laptop firmware and other drivers. This one-stop shop for most other XMG laptops is quite mature and free of bugs, having had years of development and refining. The black and green colors are present throughout, with the home page having several discrete menus. I will let the video above show you the possibilities. These include General Settings, where you may spend a while setting up the laptop and remapping the keyboard. You may also disable NVIDIA Optimus here, akin to what the BIOS allows, after which the laptop is a single restart away from being in the best-possible state for performance or daily use. The Performance Settings section has the three operating modes we saw in the BIOS, and feel free tweak them slightly or even create new modes altogether if you wish. These can be renamed. A dedicated Fan Boost button simply pushes both fans to 100% PWM duty cycle. Associating these profiles with custom fan curves is an option, too. I enjoyed the detailed custom profile performance options, such as setting PL1 to equal PL2, and both to above stock values for the most out of the CPU within thermal and power constraints. The TCC offset is set to +5°C by default and may be increased to +10°C, both of which are within the Alder Lake Intel safety limits for available mobile processors on the XMG NEO 15. GPU overclocking will be second nature to the most TPU reader, but many will probably just activate NVIDIA Dynamic Boost and call it a day.

Profiles can also be generated and associated with applications, and there's a dedicated tab for XMG OASIS we will get to later. Note that the OASIS has to be powered on and running for this section to be used, so just ignore it if you do not have the accessory on hand. Change the battery profiles depending on your user type, which I set to eco mode for general use, but high capacity mode for benchmarking and performance testing on the battery. The Display Settings section will mostly go ignored by many, which is a shame since XMG provides the most color calibration and tweaking options on any laptop I have used to date. At the very least go through the preset modes and see whether the screen colors are more to your liking. Each display came pre-calibrated, and you could have the calibration profiles running here. The Light Settings menu is straight out of a keyboard software program with full control over keyboard backlighting. Several preset lighting effects and associated options present, including per-key lighting with any of the 16.8 M colors. I would have liked input boxes for the 256 bits rather than the three-sliders system involving a lot of guesswork for the exact color you want, or a hexadecimal code input box at least. Basic customization of the LED light bar on the front is present, too—feel free to turn it off if you find it annoying. As the name suggests, Device Information provides a visual overview of the components in addition to their their real-time status. Overall, I was left impressed with XMG Control Center, and I used it extensively throughout testing, which we will get to on the next page.