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
Graphics Performance
The key part of the name of the processor inside the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2021, the Intel Core i7-1165G7, is that bit at the end. G7 means that it has Intel’s largest deployment of its Xe-LP graphics design. For your hard earned money, this is 96 execution units of what is the foundation of Intel’s graphics portfolio moving forward over the next few years. Each unit has eight threads, providing 768 threads of graphics compute, and this number is more easily comparable to the offerings from AMD.
Huawei has paired the processor with 4x32-bit LPDDR4X-4266 memory, which should offer a theoretical peak bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s, and it’s that number which is usually so crucial for integrated graphics performance. By contrast, a similarly equipped DDR4-3200 system will only achieve 51.2 GB/s, but is also cheaper to produce and more end-user customizable.
That being said, Huawei has enabled this laptop with a 3000x2000 display, which is a 3:2 aspect ratio. For gaming, 3:2 is an uncommon ratio, and so in some cases users may be forced into a more traditional 16:9 orientation, and experience black bars at the top and bottom of the display. Even for the games running at full 3000x2000 resolution, this is three times as many pixels as a standard 1920x1080 display – as we’ll see in the benchmarks below, trying to run at 1080p medium is sometimes a struggle, let alone at full resolution. As a result, be understanding that not all of the screen’s capabilities will be utilized during gaming.
In our synthetic tests, the Intel integrated graphics seem to do a lot better with more complex scenes. With Fire Strike the system is very much ahead of AMD’s best 4000-series offering, but dialing back down to Ice Storm and it now sits behind all the Ryzen 7 systems.
Overall Thoughts
The 1165G7 is definitely in the middle of the pack here. In certain environments it can excel and sits just behind the faster 1185G7, but the 15W extended power limit is certainly a factor when in some titles it struggles to match our Ryzen 4000 series systems. Nonetheless, it is a step up from the previous generation configuration.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
84 Comments
View All Comments
dontlistentome - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
In the UK at least Lenovo are awful re stock. Like you it showed 2-3 weeks delivery. I ordered 5 at 4.30pm and they arrived the next morning. I even spoke to their business sales team (LenovoPro) who had no idea of leadtimes or stock level. Just how many sales are they losing?eek2121 - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Our software does not work on an M1 Mac. They won't be firing me any time soon. They would fire you, however, if you pushed us moving to M1 Macs since our company would not be able to get work done. The estimated cost of moving our software to an ARM compatible solution is 1.1 million dollars. Our software is used by governments around the world. Those governments ALL use x86...we've not had a single request for an ARM port, M1 or otherwise. That includes the 0.45% of users that use a Mac.m00bee - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Most proletary office software doesn't run om macs, at least not on my office.sonny73n - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
@lemurbuttonThe only thing you'll bite is your tongue or the dirt. I've been in IT mostly in networking for over 25 years with a computer degree. I've had 1000s of clients and I haven't seen anyone use a Mac for work. So my conclusion is that you're just a troll spewing craps. I won't waste any more of my time with you.
star-affinity - Saturday, October 2, 2021 - link
@sonny73nI've also been in IT for almost 25 years and Macs has been a part of businesses in parallel with all non-Apple computers where I've worked. It all depends on what the area of work done with the computers. For graphical, typography and design related stuff Macs have often been used while more ”business” stuff such as finance and ”office stuff” has been more of a Windows thing.
gund8912 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
Google has been using exclusively MacBook pros for work, Oracle is offering people MacBook pros when employees upgrade hardware. So almost everything runs on MacOS except few programs (outliers), Apple just introduced ARM Macs will take time to port everything.Windows laptops and Macs have their own advantages.
But for me battery life, trackpad, MacOS work flow/UI are great compared to Windows laptops.
Linustechtips12 - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
I would love to hear you explain to me why pages is better than word or google docs online or would you care to explain why most of the world runs windows and isn't macOS the "easy, clean,bloat-free, anyone can do it" kinda os have you ever even tried to do split-screen on a mac, don't even get me started on "system preferences" horrible layout compared to windows even windows search in windows 11 is fairly competitive compared to spotlight and that's on a still beta OS.star-affinity - Saturday, October 2, 2021 - link
I think Pages is much better than Word or Google Docs when it comes to doing page layout work.Interesting, I don't see how System Preferences is horrible in layout compared to Settings in Windows. And what about having to user interfaces for the settings like it has been in Windows 10 – the ”classic” UI and the ”modern”. If that isn't messy and confusing I don't know what. We also have the fact that most third party apps have different ways of doing the user interface – there is no coherence and many apps still looks like they are designed for Windows 95 or Windows XP.
Good if Windows 11 has a search that is competitive with Spotlight – about time. :D
Agree on the split screen – Windows has better built-in window management than macOS. But I just install the free and open source Rectangle and things are fine: https://rectangleapp.com/
gund8912 - Monday, October 4, 2021 - link
Split screen is easy, what are you talking about ?Did you ever try to switch between virtual desktops in windows how awful it is ? I never used multiple virtual desktops on Windows because it was un intuitive to use, I use it all the time now on MBP.
Kuhar - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
Haha, just be careful not to get a single hair stuck between your screen and your keyboard on MBA... it might break. So fragile, so useless. On the other side you can throw X1C from your desk and it will just continue working with whatever. One could go on and on and on but there is no way to change simple minded fanboy.