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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gijames1225 - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
The MBA is the default laptop of this category for journalists. Very few other professionals go with a MBA. If they are hellbent on a Mac, they get a MacBook Pro of some size, and otherwise the default is a high-end machine from HP, Dell, or Lenovo.The MacBook Air is a computer for non-professionals or writers / students / journalists. That obviously leads to them having an outsized presence in tech reporting, but I've never seen a developer, graphic designer, or video editor rely on a MBA (even though you no doubt could in a pinch).
It sounds like you have a MacBook Air or at really, really love them, and that's fine; but that's not the default laptop for the overwhelming majority of the world.
skavi - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
you appear to be forgetting about programmers.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Unless you are programming mac apps or iphone apps, the majority use windows laptops, sometimes with linux. The days of Macs being for professionals are over, largely thanks to apple themselves.lemurbutton - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Everyone in Silicon Valley uses a Mac, except for the finance department.Linustechtips12 - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
i would label this more as "California people" as most down there do use MacBooks but its generally because they think windows just sucks because OOOHHHH APPLE GOOD PRODUCTSaolDan - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
So true. California is apple land.vladx - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
Here in Europe, less than 10% of programmers use a Mac so YMMV.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
No, the only people who use Macs are the people who don't do any actual work. Sales, marketing, C-level execs.star-affinity - Saturday, October 2, 2021 - link
Not where I work…Most developers are on MacOS for both Android development and (naturally) iOS development.
Some Android developers are on Linux.
People need to stop the everything is black or white” thinking. You can do a lot if work in various business with a Mac. You can do a lot if work in various business with PC/Windows computer.
They both work pretty well together too, especially nowadays when there's so much ”working in the cloud” going on.
Illyan - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
in the real world developers heavily use macs, dont know where you're getting this "the days of Macs being for professionals are over" idea from