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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Illyan - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
ah youre a gamer that explains ittimecop1818 - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
> No direct comparisons with the latest MacBook Air. No M1 mention at all.nobody gives a shit about apple laptop that doesn't even run windows anymore.
The_Assimilator - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Even though I agree that these Matebooks are stupidly overpriced, your obvious Apple fanboyism almost entirely negates your arguments.Evil Underlord - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
I have never once considered the MacBook Air, nor am I interested in it. I'd say a Dell XPS or a Lenovo ThinkPad is the prime comparator. So, maybe not quite so cut and dried as you suggest.DougMcC - Wednesday, September 29, 2021 - link
Just wanted to congratulate you on this troll. 5+ pages of angry responses!Kuhar - Thursday, September 30, 2021 - link
:DWereweeb - Thursday, September 30, 2021 - link
Matebook and Macbook are not direct competitors, because you can't buy a Macbook. You only rent it from Apple until their self-destructing circuitry fails and you have to buy a new one.Please stop attacking everyone who doesn't simp for your favourite anti-consumer tech corporation.
T4sslehoff - Sunday, October 3, 2021 - link
Honestly I think that your comparison with M1 Apple laptops don't makes any sense.You're talking about two laptops that don't even share the same architecture, what is the meaning to compare an x64 architecture laptop with and ARM one?
There's a ton of software you can't even run on an M1 MB, and you will never run, specially in the business segment where there are tons of legacy software that no one will recompile to ARM architecture, and you can't even run an hypervisor to emulate x64 architecture reliably.
The fact that an M1 MB and this laptop have a screen, a keyboard, ram or an hard drive doesn't mean they can be compared, the hardware is only the tip of the iceberg...
Don't get me wrong, I hope we all get rid of x64 and move to ARM, and all laptop producers move to ARM, but now there's no reason to compare this laptop with an M1 MB, specially because all the advantages of the MB came from the M1 soc, all the rest is quite poor as all Apple products, 90% design and 10% usability at a huge price.
Pacinamac - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
The first word is a typo... Bravo.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, September 28, 2021 - link
Anandtec kuality.