Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021) Review: A Sleek and Vibrant Notebook
by Dr. Ian Cutress on September 28, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Notebooks
- Intel
- Huawei
- Laptops
- Matebook X Pro
- Tiger Lake
System Performance: Web, Emulation, 3D Modeling
As we’ve covered a number of times in reviews of this level of laptop – the offering from Intel compared to AMD is quite different. At the same power level, AMD has up to 8 cores with 16 threads, while Intel only offers half that, in exchange for some go faster AVX512 instructions and built-in on-die Thunderbolt. Also, single thread performance is a key factor of Intel’s design, aiming for a super-fast immediate response for most tasks that are simple point and click on a work device. We saw on the previous page that this 15 W processor will offer up to 38 W instantaneously, and this is likely to be important on a number of our system performance tests.
That being said, we did have some issues running PCMark’s video compute workloads on our machine. PCMark10, no matter that the system was fully updated, would not correctly finish the video display and streaming encoding in its test suite. This is somewhat annoying, as that is the first test in PCMark’s run, and also part of the PCMark battery test. We were unable to find the root cause in our time with the device.
The mix of performance in the 1165G7 is interesting because it clearly lacks on some of the more demanding workloads, but ends up ahead on the lighter workloads like Optane and Dolphin. WinRAR is a mix of multi-thread and DRAM speed, so the Intel is in the ballpark there.
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star-affinity - Saturday, October 2, 2021 - link
What? The MacBook's with their all-aluminum enclosure are more fragile than X1C?gund8912 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
I am still using my 2015 MBP with 5 hours battery life, any windows laptop from 2015 would have 10 mins battery life with fan running at full speed like a jet engine.MobiusPizza - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
Mac OS is a different ecosystem altogether. An average consumer who is looking for Windows laptop will not naturally go and look at Mac Books, just like an average consumer looking at Mac Books will not naturally go and compare with Windows laptops.So any detailed comparison between the two is moot. It's much better to compare in the same ecosystem.
lmcd - Thursday, September 30, 2021 - link
Not much of a bite, you failed to refute the core problem with the prior post. No one is working on a single monitor in a corporate environment and also being specced out a brand-new $1000+ laptop.Where on earth have you been?
sibuna - Thursday, September 30, 2021 - link
This clearly isn't true. New deployments for us are a single 22" monitor. and an HP zbook CAD/standard depending on role.sibuna - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
laptops being used 95% at a desk is prob an understatement, its prob closer to 99%. All we issue is laptops unless its going into a lab. they are almost always docked and if they are not actually docked someone is using one someplace else plugged into the wall. About the only time they are not is in meetings for an hour or so doing a presentation.the other great point is ya a MPA is not powering 2-3 displays when docked like basically every windows laptop does
markiz - Friday, October 1, 2021 - link
Any particular reason you don't deploy desktops then? Give laptops only to those that travel and work from home?star-affinity - Saturday, October 2, 2021 - link
” Macs are *horrible* to use in a corporate environment.”Are they?
It's not early 21st century anymore. :)
Yet I've been dealing with Macs in a corporate environment during this time, and it has been that bad despite many web based business tools requiring the use of Internet Explorer. Citrix and Microsoft Remote Desktop has helped. Well, those days are gone. Heck, even Internet Explorer isn't much of a thing anymore. :)
At least it depends on what software tools the corporate environment you're using – you definitely can have a corporate environment where Macs work well. You can have a corporate environment without relying on Microsoft products at all just as well has you can have a corporate environment that use a lot of Microsoft products.
dandar - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Hardly anyone cross-shops windows laptops with macbooks. Direct competitor is Dell XPS or HP Envy. I'd pick either of those over this XPS13 knock-off anyday.Operandi - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Our team works in enterprise and actually does have a mix of Macbooks and Windows (HP mostly) machines but I agree thats probably not very common. And to really be able to do anything most of us need access to Windows tools so that usually means a VDI.I really like the look of this Huawei. Seems to hit on most of the things I really look for, build quality, keyboard, and display.