Schenker XMG P505 review

As a largely by-the-numbers upgrade from the P504, performance has increased by a small amount across the board. The Intel Core i7-4710MQ has been replaced with a more powerful i7-4720HQ running at a base clock speed of 2.6GHz, although our pre-production review unit used a slightly slower i7-4710HQ running at 2.5GHz. It achieved an overall score of 78 in our new, tougher multimedia benchmarking tests. Performance peaked at 88 the image rendering test, but dropped to just 70 in the challenging multitasking test that puts the laptop to work converting photos, rendering 4K video and playing 4K video simultaneously. In real terms, the P504 will be suitable for intense multimedia jobs on top of any gaming you subject it to. It won’t last very long when away from the mains, though: we saw just 3h 6m of battery life in our moderate usage test.

The model we tested came with 8GB of RAM, but you can upgrade this to 16 or 32GB on the mysn.co.uk website. Storage is generous, too; Windows was installed to a 256GB Samsung M.2 SSD while a 1TB Western Digital Blue Slim hard disk leaves plenty of room for files and applications. Cheaper and lower capacity storage is available if you want to spend a bit less; you can get a 256GB Micron M.2 SSD for £71 less on the configuration page.

The Full HD, TN screen is good, although we’d expect nothing less for the price. It ticks the boxes for colour coverage, contrast and brightness levels. We measured sRGB colour coverage at 89.6% and 270cd/m2 brightness, creating pretty vivid onscreen images. Contrast levels were measured at 1096:1 and black levels were pretty low at 0.26cd/m2, meaning there’s plenty of detail visisble in darker scenes. You can’t expect much better from an off-the-shelf Clevo chassis, although the screen isn’t much better than those you’ll find on slightly cheaper laptops.

The Schenker XMG P505 is a powerful and nicely built laptop, perfect for gaming and multimedia tasks. The Nvidia GTX 980M is a powerful piece of kit, although it is a huge premium to pay. At this price, you could consider the slightly more expensive Aorus X7 v2 or the MSI GS70 2QE Stealth Pro, which is cheaper and only slightly less powerful. If none of those fit your needs then check out our regularly-updated Best Laptops and buying guide.

The original version of this review was first published in March 2015 and was revised in April 2015 following the discovery that the review unit we’d been sent had been shipped with a faulty screen. After receiving a fully-functioning unit, we updated our review and its score.