A look Inside

I cannot stress enough how impressive what I see here really is. This is one absolutely tiny PCB crammed with some of the most powerful hardware possible, a couple of fans, a couple of drives, and really not much else. CPU, GPU, memory and chipset all reside on the small mainboard, while the connectivity side of things is mostly provided by smaller daughter boards screwed to either side of the chassis and connected to the mainboard with ribbon cables.


We find a 97.5 WH battery installed fairly close to the middle, with the memory and drives just above. You get a huge multitude of memory options in the NEO 17 chassis; from a single 8 GB 4800 MHz stick up to 64 GB of high performance 5200 MHz memory is possible, with 5600 MHz 16 GB sticks an option as well.


We find a retail-branded Samsung 990 PRO installed as a main drive; the secondary slot is right below the primary. 500 GB drives up to 4 TB per slot are possible if you have a wallet big enough. XMG supplied me with a 1 TB model of the 990 PRO; I had to add another drive myself. There are several brands and type of PCI-E available for you to choose from. I like all these options for sure, and its nice to see retail hardware here rather than some plain OEM stuff.


The fans are of the type that has a huge number of blades to push the air; each is unique as they direct their airflow slightly differently, which also can lead to you hearing both fans, as they might have a slightly different pitch from each other. That's definitely the case with the NEO 17; with the fans blazing full speed you can definitely tell there are two fans here, but at lower speeds that effect is not as noticeable as it is under high loads (which changes when you have the OASIS LCS running).


The heatpipe arrangement here on the NEO 17 is interesting as well. The heatpipe complex isn't really that complex, with only a few pipes (six in total, plus the OASIS pipe), which means each individual heatpipe is under a fairly significant load. That's potentially 55 W per heatpipe (330 W /6), which is actually a significant number too; that's how much the CPU alone is rated for. So if you happened to notice that 5 of the heatpipes travel over the GPU cooling plate, while three go over the CPU plate with just one pipe alone eccentric with the CPU, the layout here actually makes a lot of sense. Of course, we really have 5 pipes for the GPU, leading to maybe about 35 W total per pipe as it crosses the GPU plate, and although it doesn't exactly work quite that way, its an interesting way to consider what you see here. Clearly there is a lot of focus on the GPU cooling, and not so much (but some) given to the CPU.


Even more interesting is the super-thick thermal pad on the chipset; so often chipsets in laptops get no cooling at all.the underside cover does feature a metal plate and thermal pads for the M.2 drives, to help keep those devices cool.


I did manage to find the CMOS battery, tucked under the main battery. These daughter boards for the I/O are nice, and a clever way of offering all of this connectivity that the NEO 17 features.