Most gaming laptops fight heat with bigger fans. The XMG Neo 16 (M26) fights it with plumbing. XMG’s flagship 16-inch machine docks with an external liquid cooler, the XMG OASIS, and the dock changes what the hardware inside is allowed to do: an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24 GB of GDDR7, held at power levels its air-cooled configuration cannot sustain.
On air alone, the Neo 16 sustains 240 watts combined across CPU and GPU. Plug in the OASIS and the ceiling rises to 300 watts, with less noise at full load. The laptop sells from €3,399 in XMG’s own store, in stock, with configurations climbing.
Price: €3,399 (default configuration, incl. VAT)
Where to buy: bestware
The water loop does the talking
The OASIS is a separate box that lives on the desk: a pump, a radiator in the 120 mm class and a fan. It circulates distilled water through a cooling channel built into the laptop’s thermal module, pulls the heat out of the chassis and dumps it through the radiator. Self-sealing connectors keep the loop closed when you unplug, and the unit draws power through the laptop’s adapter, so it adds a cable path rather than a second brick.
In XMG’s testing on the top configuration, a combined CPU and GPU stress load holds the GPU at about 173 watts while CPU power climbs from 65 to 110 watts, and GPU temperature drops from 81 °C to 71 °C. A CPU-only Cinebench R23 run sustains 199 watts on water against 159 watts on air, good for roughly 13 percent on the score. At maximum load in the Steel Nomad benchmark, noise falls from 52.4 to 47.4 decibels. Those are the maker’s numbers from the maker’s bench, and they describe the trade precisely: the loop buys sustained clocks and quiet, and it costs a desk tether.
The OASIS Mk2 adds €199 when you select it in the laptop’s configurator, or €219 bought on its own. The laptop never needs it. Every configuration runs at its full air-cooled specification with the loop unplugged, which keeps the OASIS where it belongs, an enthusiast upgrade rather than a ransom.
On air, it is already a 240-watt laptop
Strip the loop away and the Neo 16 is still built to hold power. Two large main fans move the air, a third fan cools the memory, and the GPU sits on its own board, separate from the mainboard, a semi-modular layout carried over from the model it replaces. The RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 configurations ship with a 420-watt adapter, sized to cover the water-cooled ceiling, while 330 watts covers the laptop on air. The sustained 240-watt combined figure is the honest baseline, and it’s high for a 16-inch chassis. With the loop connected, the ceiling climbs from 280 watts on last year’s model to 300.
Pick your panel carefully
Every Neo 16 is a 16-inch, 2560×1600 machine, but the three panels split the lineup into three different laptops. The OLED runs at 240 Hz with 500 nits SDR brightness and up to 1000 nits HDR, full sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage, and variable refresh from 60 to 240 Hz through NVIDIA Optimus. It does not support G-SYNC. The Mini-LED is the gamer’s panel: 300 Hz, 750 nits SDR, 1,000 local-dimming zones you can switch off for editing work, and NVIDIA G-SYNC with Advanced Optimus, validated by NVIDIA.
It costs the same as the OLED and €145 more than the IPS panel. The IPS option runs at 300 Hz and 500 nits, and XMG sells it only with the RTX 5070 Ti.
One ownership detail rides with the Mini-LED: those configurations currently need XMG’s own OEM NVIDIA driver, because the panel’s new G-SYNC hardware ID has not yet landed in NVIDIA’s public driver. It’s a small thing, and it’s exactly the kind of small thing that bites three months into ownership when nobody mentions it up front.
A desktop replacement that admits it
The aluminum chassis measures 356.7 by 259.9 by 27.9 millimeters and weighs about 2.6 kilograms with the OLED fitted, 2.8 with the Mini-LED, before the 420-watt adapter goes in the bag. Nobody is commuting with this by choice. What the bulk buys is ports and headroom: Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1, Mini DisplayPort 2.1, the power input and the OASIS connectors all sit on the rear edge, with three USB-A ports, a second USB-C, 2.5-gigabit Ethernet, a full-size SD card reader and an audio jack along the sides. It drives four displays at once.
Inside, two M.2 slots take up to 16 TB of SSD storage with the primary drive on PCIe 5.0, and XMG’s stated maximum configuration runs to 128 GB of DDR5 memory. The 99.8 Wh battery is the largest a laptop can carry and still fly unrestricted, it unscrews for replacement, and three charging profiles let you cap the charge level to slow wear. The keyboard is per-key RGB with a full numeric pad and N-key rollover, and XMG’s Control Center exposes the tuning this buyer actually uses: performance profiles, manual power and fan limits, RAM tuning and CPU undervolting.
Who should buy the Neo 16
The Neo 16 is a narrow machine, and it knows it. If your gaming laptop lives on one desk, if you render or compile between sessions, and if you want sustained clocks at lower noise than an air-cooled 16-inch laptop holds, the water loop is a real answer rather than a gimmick: 300 watts sustained, 10 degrees off the GPU, about 5 decibels off the fans. If the laptop travels, the loop stays home, and what you have bought instead is a heavy, expensive air-cooled machine, a good one, at a price the larger brands undercut with wider service networks.
Price: €3,399 (default configuration, incl. VAT)
Where to buy: bestware
The boundary is geographic, and it is stated plainly: XMG sells direct from Leipzig, assembled in Germany, through its own store, and there is no US retail or Amazon route at any price. For a European enthusiast with a permanent desk, the Neo 16 is the most interesting gaming laptop of this cycle. For everyone else, it’s the one that got away.
