Battery Life and Power Consumption

Battery life testing is something I was looking forward to; the current generation of AMD APUs really offer good low-power function that helps extend battery life in a big way. The 45 W AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX laptop APU does feature its own GPU for lightweight rendering duties, and the low 45 W power rating can be extended to 100/110 W, which will affect battery life if in use when the system is unplugged. I wanted to see just how much performance was left on tap here on the NEO 17, and I found it to offer a decent mix of battery life vs performance. Gaming performance was really poor when unplugged compared to plugged in, but when you consider that lowered performance you must also remember that you also can't use the OASIS watercooling if you want to measure actual battery life. I find the OASIS cooler an integral part of the NEO 17 and what it is capable of.

As you can see by the numbers above, battery life is really really good. You do make a sacrifice in performance when unplugged of course, but the system as a whole remained quite quiet throughout battery testing as well as fairly responsive, even in 3D loads. It seems that the XMG NEO 17 makes good use of the AMD APU's abilities while unplugged, as we see battery life numbers that far exceed anything else I've tested before. I used Cyberpunk 2077 for 3D loads here; performance was really low overall, but reduced settings made it somewhat playable. That said, I recommend keeping the NEO 17 plugged into the wall when gaming, so you can get its maximum performance.