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.
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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.