If you already know (from my previous posts) or simply don’t care about the story, the recap ends below at the extra-long paragraph break.
About a year and a half ago, I decided to replace my venerable but slow and under-RAMmed Acer Swift 1 with something a little better. Initially, I planned to go for their Swift 3 model with the 3:2 ratio display (I really do not care for 16:9 “shortscreens”), but to my surprise, there was no way to order the one I wanted with terms I could accept. The Swift 3 line, like the Swift 1 and so many other modern laptops, has non-upgradeable RAM, so I had to order it with as much as I would ever want. While I had gotten along surprisingly well on the 4GB the Swift 1 had, I really wanted at least 8, or better yet, 16.
The problem was that the Acer Store only had either really loaded models of the Swift 3 with 16GB. I specifically do not want a touchscreen (it adds weight and power consumption, not to mention that it negates the possibility of an anti-glare display), but the only Swift 3 that I could get direct from Acer that has 16GB also had the touchscreen and a larger SSD (which is fine, if I didn’t have my own ideas about which SSD I wanted… but I did).
The model I wanted was available from only two sources: Micro Center and B&H Camera. Micro Center would not ship the unit, and the nearest store is hundreds of miles away, so that was a no go. B&H would ship it, but they have a no-return policy, and that’s also a no-go. I use Linux, and the machine comes preinstalled with Windows, so I don’t know how well it is going to work with Linux until I try. If it does not work, I need to be able to return it (after I restore Windows).
So I looked around. I had written on this site before about the unfortunate trend of making laptops so thin that the manufacturer ends up with problems like the infamous Apple butterfly keyboard, which is so thin that the tiniest bit of debris inside the key mechanism completely messes it up, and any attempt to pull the keycap off (so that it could be cleaned) generally breaks the butterfly mechanism, which means the entire top cover of the unit has to be replaced, an operation that reportedly cost several hundred of dollars from Apple.
The extreme thin-ness of the Apple laptops left them without enough room to put in type A USB or HDMI ports, so they came only with two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. Thin is fantastic if it can be done without too many compromises, but when you make keyboards that can be vanquished by a speck of dust and can’t include full-size USB ports, that’s too many compromises for me.
I was happy with the dimensions of my Acer Swift 1. It was thin, but not so thin that it did not have type A USB ports. It did, unfortunately, have soldered RAM, but not a soldered SSD like some of the Mac laptops. Again, too much of a compromise.
I was looking for a laptop of approximately the size of the Acer Swift 1 that had non-soldered RAM, a non-soldered SSD, a replaceable, non-glued-in battery (another Apple thing), USB type A and HDMI ports, a display with a better aspect ratio than 16:9, IPS, and with ~95% or more sRGB color gamut. I wanted a glass-surfaced touchpad, as I had worn smooth the center of the touchpad on so many laptops, which actually makes the plastic surface more grabby, not more slick, so my finger would chatter across the surface, and since the unit would be my go-to when I was out and about, it should have long battery life.
I didn’t find one that ticked all the boxes. Even the Acer Swift 3 missed the mark on the expandable RAM bit. Very few models included expandable RAM anymore.
I ended up buying the Dell XPS 13 (9310). It has non-expandable RAM, so I ordered 16GB from the start. It has a replaceable battery and SSD, though the wifi card is soldered (which was not actually something I thought I had to specify, but yeah, I prefer it to be replaceable). The glass surface on the touchpad is present, and the display is IPS (16:10 ratio, 1920×1200) and has the required color gamut.
The XPS is Dell’s answer to the Mac lineup, so it of course has to be so thin that it can’t fit a HDMI port or any USB type A ports, just like the Mac. That was a pretty serious downside, but livable… dongles that provide all the ports necessary are cheap and plentiful.
I like my little Dell a lot, but it has not been perfect. The Sharp LCD panel used in this model has a characteristic where the perimeter of the screen is extra bright, and it’s on all of them, apparently. I have seen three LCD panels in this model, and they all have it.
It seems to be some kind of visual artifact that isn’t really there, at least not to the degree that it looks from normal viewing distance. When I use the macro setting of my digital camera to take a picture of the screen (it can get close enough to see the individual subpixels), or if I just take my contact lenses out and put my substantially nearsighted eyes up really close to it, it looks fine… there’s about a single pixel wide border around the screen that isn’t very noticeable zoomed in, but it looks pretty bad to my eyes at normal viewing distance. It drives me nuts… I know it probably shouldn’t, knowing that somehow my eyes or brain are massively exaggerating a minor thing, but it does.
The Dell is super thin, and as a result, the cooling fans and the heat sinks for the CPU are also super thin. The result is that any kind of work that gets the CPU working at all makes the bottom of the unit quite toasty… sometimes uncomfortably so when used as a literal laptop (on my lap, in other words). It also throttles down to keep within the thermal and power limits with longer workloads, but that’s really not a huge deal, as the intended workload for a laptop like this is bursty. It is not meant for rendering a video, gaming, or stuff like that.
It was coincidental that for a while, my main two laptops were both Dells. I had the G3 gaming model (a desktop replacement) and the XPS (for out and about stuff), but it was not because of any specific love for Dell. I bought the G3 because it was super cheap on a Black Friday sale, and the XPS wasn’t my first choice.
About a year later, I bought the XPG Xenia 15, which I wrote about elsewhere on the site. It’s a pretty nice laptop, and I really like it. I hadn’t really been aware of the XPG branded laptops… they don’t seem to be marketed in any way I can tell, but they are mentioned in the occasional laptop review from one or the other tech websites.
While investigating the Xenia 15, I became aware of its smaller sibling, the Xenia 14. The place I bought the Xenia 15 from had the 14s available cheap too, if I recall, but I dismissed the idea, as I already have the Dell XPS.
As the months passed, I kept thinking about the Xenia 14. I didn’t need one, but I wanted it anyway. It was the laptop I had been looking for when I bought the XPS! It is a bit larger than the XPS, but not by much (though it is a bit lighter). It’s a little bit smaller than the Swift 1. The Xenia 14 has an HDMI port, two USB type A ports, two USB type C ports (one also being Thunderbolt), and a DC input jack (the Dell charges only through the USB-C port). It has two M.2 SSD slots, one of them being PCIe 4 NVMe (capable of 7000MB/sec transfer rate), a replaceable wifi card, a replaceable battery, and get this, two replaceable RAM modules (SoDIMM, DDR4-3200). The glass touchpad surface and 16:10 (1920×1200) IPS display with ~95% sRGB gamut are present too. It is the first unit I have seen that actually ticked all the boxes I had when I bought the XPS.
So I did it. I have no specific use for it, as it would fit the role of the Dell, which works fine, but the reviews I saw for it showed that the display would not have those lines around the outside where it was overly bright (looks white to my eyes).
The unit arrived, and I temporarily took the 2GB NVMe SSD out of the XPS and put it in the new unit, keeping the SSD it came with aside (with Windows 10 still on it). OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (Linux) booted right away, and it seemed to work just fine. I had expected the slightly thicker chassis with its much larger fan to keep the CPU (an i7-1165G7, the next step up from the i5/1135G7 in the XPS) cooler, and it does, which means it throttles far less than the XPS, maintaining much higher clock rates under sustained loads, while keeping the bottom of the unit cooler than before.
The Xenia 14, like its bigger sibling, came with 16GB of RAM, but in only one SoDIMM, which means dual-channel mode is not available. I’d much rather have had two SoDIMMs for dual channel mode (two 8s) than the single 16 (which leaves one slot open for future expansion). I ended up looking at the part number on the SoDIMM that is included (one of Adata’s own) and I bought a twin for it for an additional $48, so now it’s properly in dual-channel mode.
The screen is great. Not quite as much contrast as the Dell’s, but still quite good, and without that bright line that drives me so crazy. Colors are good, and the backlighting is pretty even.
Even though the Xenia-14 comes with a power supply that uses the old-school DC jack (5.5mm x 2.5mm), it can also charge (up to 100w!) using either of the two USB-C ports. That makes it easy; I can just use the Dell’s power supply if needed.
The only real complaint about the hardware is a trait shared with the larger Xenia as well. The lid (which is also the screen) is very thin, and it flexes more than I would like. The hinges are good and tight, holding the display at the desired angle, but it does wobble a bit with movement. The Dell is much more solid by comparison.
On the negative side… the firmware. One of the things I do not like about the Xenia 15 is the paucity of options in the UEFI setup. The Xenia 14 proved to be even a little bit worse, having almost none of the things I have come to expect. While the unit is supposedly rated for Windows 11, I see nothing whatsoever that mentions the TPM (or equivalent). There’s very little in here. By contrast, the equivalent Dells I have for each Xenia have lots of options.
Even worse, Adata has not made any firmware updates for this model available. The section of their support site that hosts the drivers and firmware… only has drivers. Not even the original firmware is posted there, let alone any updates.
There are several other computer companies who make products based on this model… among them Schenker/XMG and Tuxedo (both from Germany) and Slimbook (Spain). The only distributor of this model I am aware of in the US is Adata/XPG.
With the Xenia 15, I can get the firmware updates directly from Intel, as the model (manufactured by Taiwanese Uniwill, or [formerly?] the Chinese Tongfang… the specifics of that being a mystery to me) is also distributed by Intel as the NUC 9 Extreme laptop kit (not sold to end users by Intel, but intended to be rebranded into something like the Xenia 15). This is not the case with the Xenia 14, though, which is not distributed by Intel.
Tuxedo Computers and Slimbook require a visitor to register before they can get access to the firmware, but Schenker/XMG doesn’t. I downloaded the Schenker firmware and flashed it… stupidly deciding not to use the flash utility to back up the factory firmware first.
The new firmware worked, and I had a lot more options in the UEFI setup, not to mention that it was a whole lot newer (more bugs, including lots of security bugs, have presumably been fixed since then). It did have the side effect of shuffling the Fn- hotkeys, so they no longer matched the key markings.
I called XPG and asked them for the firmware update, or even just the factory one. They did not have one, and told me I would have to return the unit to them to be flashed back to stock (at least they didn’t tell me I had voided my warranty by flashing it). But I knew there had to be an easier way than that.
I began scouring the net, looking for some source of the firmware that would fix it, whether from XPG or anyone else. I came upon a post on Reddit where someone had asked the Schenker/XMG rep who regularly visits their support subreddit if it was possible to flash their firmware, since XPG had no updates, and I posted about my experience.
To my surprise, the Schenker rep contacted me and told me he had contacted Adata to try to get them to offer an update. A few days later, he said that Adata had gotten back to them and said that they would work on it.
But then, nothing.
The Schenker rep got back to me and provided a link to the generic firmware (apparently directly from Uniwill, without the modifications Schenker had added), and I downloaded and flashed it. Now I am up to date AND my Fn- hotkeys work, though I am back to the same minimal set of options as with the factory firmware.
It’s unfortunate that I get better support from a rep for a company I didn’t even buy from than I do from the rep for the company I did buy from.
After the flash of the generic image, the BIOS info screen read “Standard” for the system manufacturer rather than “ADATA,” but I was able to find a DMI editor from AMI that was new enough to work on the Xenia 14. I had struggled with this at first, trying one version after another (all from trusted sources), but they all failed with errors, until finally I tried the Lenovo version that was new enough to work. Easy peasy, once I had the right program!
There are a lot of fields in the DMI string tables that simply say “Standard” now, but from what I have been able to find, Adata doesn’t really fill in more than the main block where I changed Standard to ADATA.
The generic firmware also had the AMI Bios logo rather than the XPG logo, so I downloaded the Aptio (by AMI) logo changing tool (a companion utility to the DMI editor) and added the XPG logo (sourced from the XPG site and edited to fit) myself. I could have put anything in, but it just seemed that it should actually have that one, since it’s the way the unit would be normally. Now it looks like the official firmware, but is much more up to date.
I do hope that Adata follows through on their stated intent to offer the firmware for this model on their site.
One thing the Xenia 15 has that the 14 does not is a Linux driver (that I know of!) for the keyboard backlight. I like the backlight always on when on AC, always off when on battery (unless I put it on manually), but it kept turning off after a while whenever I put it on. I knew that XPG had a utility to change the settings for that stuff in Windows, so I thought I might as well try it and see if the setting sticks… so I put the Windows SSD in and set the backlight to never turn off. And even though I did that before I flashed the firmware to the generic image, it still retains my preference to never turn off… and when I unplug the power, it turns off then comes back on again if I plug the power back in. Edit: It was not retaining the Windows setting. I tried setting it in Windows to 10 seconds, and then when I booted back to Linux, it was again back to the UEFI default of 10 minutes. What makes it “stick” is installing the Tuxedo Computers driver “uniwill_wmi.” It was just coincidental timing that made me think it was keeping the Windows setting.
I can’t have the OS change the keyboard backlight brightness (yet… there may be a driver out there, but I don’t know the name of the backlight controller to search for it), but it works as I want anyway. I can manually change it with the Fn+F6 hotkey, but I would like the OS to be able to change it automatically in response to things like the power being plugged in or unplugged.
One thing I did find is that the idle power consumption was much more than expected, given that the CPU is nearly the same as in the XPS (both four-core, eight-thread, and with the same TDP). It was roughly double what I saw on the XPS at idle (and a lot of the time when browsing the web or typing a message as I am now, the CPU is idle, in between keypresses or scrolls). I tried uninstalling TLP, the standard laptop power-saving daemon (service) for many Linux users, and replacing it with the power profile daemon that integrates with the KDE Plasma desktop I use, and immediately the power usage dropped to what I was used to on the XPS. This is surprising, given that I am using TLP on the XPS with good results. I have never seen TLP not only fail to reduce power usage, but actually to make it worse before.
So now I have this lovely laptop that is everything I wanted in a replacement for the Acer Swift 1, and the also-lovely Dell XPS that was almost everything I wanted.
The Dell is almost certainly more sturdy, given how they both feel, and it gets regular firmware updates, and the firmware has more options. That’s substantial. The Dell also is a popular model, which means the parts are plentiful and inexpensive on eBay (my go-to for laptop parts for many years). On the XPG, I really don’t know if I will be able to source the parts myself if (when) I eventually need to. The keyboard will wear out eventually, as will the cooling fan, and the screen could fail or be scratched one day. In the case of the Dell, those parts are abundantly available and quite cheap.
I bought the unit from the Adata store on Amazon, and I got a four year extended warranty with damage coverage for a hundred and some dollars. I have the three year version of that on the Dell through Dell itself, and lemme tell ya, it was more expensive than that. About three times the price, and that was with a promo deal Dell was having at the time.
I really like the XPG 14. Hardware wise, it is solid, other than the overly thin and flexy lid (which I don’t foresee being a problem, but you never know). Firmware-wise, it could use some work, and availability of firmware from Adata could use a lot of work (which would not actually take that much work).
I ran Geekbench 5.0 to get an idea of the performance relative to my XPS. It’s a slightly faster version of the same CPU, so it is not surprising that it got a slightly better Geekbench.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
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. Reason: Got the DMI edit to work (edited post to match)
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