Huawei’s MateBook X Professional lineup is again once more with a mannequin for 2024, but it surely breaks the naming mould – it isn’t the MateBook X Professional 2024, strictly talking, it is the MateBook X Professional Core Extremely Premium Version. However should you do not thoughts, we’ll check with it by its logical identify – the MateBook X Professional 2024.
The identify Huawei insists on, signifies that it comes with Intel Core Extremely chipset – the one two processor choices on this machine are the Intel Core Extremely 9 185H and the Core Extremely 7 155H. There are not any different chip choices – nothing from AMD, and certainly no new ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus.
The brand new MateBook X Professional stays true to the collection’s roots – it is skinny, mild, and fantastically crafted. And it is also a leap ahead by way of processing energy, cooling, and show expertise.
We’ve got the Morandi Blue mannequin with a 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM – the fully-specced out mannequin that prices round €2,200/£2,100. It ships with a full retail field – a 90W charger, a separate USB-C cable, a USB-C to USB-A dongle, and… USB-C headphones, one thing we have not seen in earlier generations of the MateBook X Professional.
Design and construct high quality
We’re followers of the Huawei MateBook X Professional line and have reviewed most fashions since 2018. We will see how the general design and feeling could be traced again to that machine. Those that do not know assume it is a MacBook Air lookalike, those that know will inform you it made the Air appear to be a utilitarian big-bezelled Dell or HP from the mid-naughties again in 2018, and it nonetheless seems higher than Apple’s laptop computer in the present day.
The most recent 2004 mannequin of the MateBook X Professional is a technological masterpiece. Huawei actually has a knack for perfecting these thin-and-light efficiency laptops.
The deck of the MateBook X Professional 2024 has the now-classic full-sized backlit chiclet keyboard with 1.5mm journey and no Numpad. It is flanked by skinny speaker grilles. Beneath it sits an enormous trackpad that spills over the sting like an infinity pool. Huawei calls it the Free Contact, and it has vibrating motors to supply press suggestions – and so they work pretty.
Huawei managed to tuck the MateBook X Professional 2024 just under 1 kilogram at 980g – that is a virtually 30% lower in weight in comparison with the earlier era, regardless of a transfer to a 15% greater 70Wh battery. To realize this, Huawei tinkered with the chassis.
They’ve additionally given the laptop computer a soft-touch end. It is much like the “skin-smoothing metallic physique” of the earlier era however is softer.
The lid has the standard Huawei brand and nothing else. The MateBook X Professional 2024 is a very compact laptop computer when closed. And because of its outstanding weight, you may simply overlook it is in your bag.
Keyboard, trackpad, show, audio
The deck of the MateBook X Professional 2024 is completely symmetrical. The keyboard and trackpad take up many of the area, as they need to. The keyboard stretches virtually to the very edge, save for the skinny grilles for the audio system beneath.
That is the standard excellent MateBook X Professional keyboard. It has a agency, nice really feel to keystrokes and a very good structure. Most Huawei laptops within the retailer have a similar-looking keyboard, however when you evaluate the MateBook X Professional to the cheaper MateBook 14, for example, you will instantly discover a greater, extra optimistic keyboard clicking on the Professional.
The 2024 MateBook X Professional has three USB-C ports – two Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbps, DisplayPort, Energy Supply) on the left, and one other plain USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps, DisplayPort, Energy Supply) on the suitable. The older mannequin had two USB-C’s on either side – this new mannequin swaps one USB-C for a change to disable the digicam drivers because the digicam shouldn’t be hidden beneath a keyboard key however sits above the show.
Ports on the MateBook X Professional 2024
The 1080p digicam sits within the high bezel above the show, flanked by IR sensors for Home windows Hi there.
Alternatively, there’s the standard energy button with a capacitive fingerprint scanner embedded. It helps fingerprint caching, which means a single press will energy on the machine and routinely log you into Home windows as soon as it boots to the login display screen.
The FreeTouch trackpad is a wonderful piece of package. It’s totally huge for the 14-inch chassis, and its glass floor is clean for gesture work. It is a solid-state unit, which means it would not depress however makes use of a vibration motor to simulate clicks. It really works nice and means you may click on wherever on the floor.
The vibration is tuned completely, however you may modify its energy and sensitivity via Huawei’s PC Supervisor app. It allows intuitive gestures – knock twice along with your knuckle to take a screenshot or drag a finger on the suitable fringe of the trackpad for quantity management and on the left edge for show brightness.
There are six audio system and 4 microphones on the MateBook X Professional 2024, the identical as on its predecessor. The sound from these audio system may be very clear with some bass to underline it and provides it some depth. However the quantity is not very spectacular – we have heard stronger speaker setups on similarly-sized laptops.
The show of the MateBook X Professional 2024 is its finest characteristic and the important thing enchancment over the earlier era. Whereas the previoys mannequin has a 90Hz LTPS LCD with a peak brightness of 500 nits, right here we get a 120Hz OLED that doubles the height brightness. Naturally, it is nonetheless a touchscreen panel.
The show retains the 14.2-inch 3:2 facet diagonal with 3210x2080px decision and 264ppi density, however the transfer from LCD to OLED is nice.
The visuals on this show are glorious. Colours pop, and there is an infinite distinction with very deep shadows and amazingly extensive viewing angles. The display screen bezels are skinny and are barely rounded on the edges.
HDR content material simply works on this show – whether or not you are watching YouTube or Netflix.
The panel exhibits nice uniform brightness. We measured 535 nits within the heart, 560 nits within the left corners, and 570 nits in the suitable corners. We additionally measured a peak brightness of 952 nits when displaying HDR content material.
The panel helps the RGB, P3, and sRGB coloration gamuts, and Huawei’s useful Show Supervisor (proper click on on the desktop, then extra choices for the outdated context menu) means that you can select which gamut you need. It is an effective way to tune the show for the content material you will be viewing.
Options, efficiency and battery life
Being a Huawei laptop computer, the MateBook X Professional 2024 comes outfitted with Huawei’s glorious PC Supervisor app. It controls customized capabilities of the laptop computer, just like the FreeTouch trackpad, has an in-depth Huawei Sound menu the place you may tune the audio system and the microphone, and affords the AI Digital camera menu, which lets you tune the digicam system-wide to supply a customized background, beautify your face, or try to preserve you focused always.
You probably have a Huawei cellphone, you should use Tremendous Machine to regulate it from the laptop computer’s display screen. You can too share information between the 2.
However what makes PC Supervisor actually nice is its Troubleshooting menu, which lets you diagnose issues with connections, audio, lags and crashes, system software program, or others. All the system’s drivers are additionally beneath the PC Supervisor’s management. Huawei pushed just a few BIOS updates throughout our time with the MateBook X Professional 2024, and we will say from years of expertise with Huawei laptops that long-term software program assist is superb.
Huawei pushed the {hardware} on this era of MateBook X Professional in a giant means. Up till now, the MateBook X Professional used thin-and-light-targeting 28W TDP Intel processors. This yr, the collection makes use of Intel’s strongest cellular processor – the 45W (40W on this machine) Core Extremely 9 185H. It is a 7nm SoC with a 16-core processor (6 efficiency, 8 environment friendly, 2 low-power environment friendly cores) and a complete of twenty-two threads. The CPU’s P-cores can theoretically hit as much as 5.1GHz, however you will not see a lot previous 3.0GHz.
Graphics are dealt with by the Intel Arc GPU with 8 Xe cores, Ray Tracing assist, and a clock velocity of two.35GHz on the high finish. It is rated at 4.81 TFLOPS to the two.3 TFLOPS of the Xe graphics within the outdated i7-1360P chip.
Lastly, this Core Extremely Premium Version has 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.
To place all of that into perspective, the MateBook X Professional 2024 brings round 20% processing enchancment and almost 50% graphics enchancment, all whereas being a bit of extra environment friendly than its predecessor.
The place the brand new machine is most spectacular is cooling. Huawei claims a 50% enhance to air stress and 22% increased total airflow.
We examined the MateBook X Professional 2024 for workplace work, some photograph enhancing with Photoshop and Lightroom, and a few mild gaming (largely Age of Empires Definitive Version, which scaled to the machine’s 3000x2000px decision and pushed round 100fps). The PCIe 4.0 SSD confirmed nice velocity and sustained efficiency.
Efficiency was glorious. Now, you might argue that such a potent processor might do with devoted discrete graphics, but it surely defeats the thin-and-light design of the MateBook X Professional 2024. A model with Qualcomm’s new ARM processors, however, would make much more sense, but it surely’s unlikely to occur due to Western-imposed sanctions.
Geekbench 6, CrystalDisk
Huawei desires its premium skinny laptops to be quiet and refined, and to not be uncomfortably heat throughout use. The MateBook X Professional 2024 is tuned identical to all of its predecessors we have examined over time – for a stability between efficiency and luxury. Moreover, you may select between two efficiency modes – Balanced, and Efficiency.
We carried out a one-hour CPU stress take a look at in Efficiency mode to see how the MateBook X Professional 2024 will deal with itself.
The CPU briefly ramped as much as 3.2GHz however then instantly dropped right down to 2.66Ghz the place it stayed for the remainder of the take a look at – transferring 100 MHz up or down ever so usually. The laptop computer’s followers have been always on and at their highest RPM, which produced a noise stage of 50dB at arm’s size – completely acceptable in an workplace setting.
Even higher, the laptop computer did not get uncomfortably heat.
Superb warmth dissipation
This yr, the Huawei MateBook X Professional 2024 makes use of a 15% greater 70Wh battery. We ran our traditional YouTube streaming take a look at and a browser take a look at, each in Balanced mode at 400 nits and for the video take a look at, at 80 dB. That is each a shiny show and loud audio system.
The laptop computer managed 7 hours of streaming and 8 hours of searching on a loop. These are stable outcomes.
Charging can be glorious with the offered 90W SuperCharge Turbo adapter. It takes the machine from 0% to full in just below two hours.
Conclusion
As configured, the MateBook X Professional 2024 prices €2,200/£2,100. That is for the top-of-the-line Core 9 Extremely 185H with 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It would not depart you wanting for something by way of efficiency, and we might say the ergonomics, show, and total really feel are second to none.
You realize the phrase “You get what you pay for” – with the 2024 MateBook X Professional, you are getting one of the best ultraportable laptop computer. It makes the 1.24kg 13.6-inch MacBook Air look porkish and has a greater port choice than the Apple machine and than rivals just like the similarly-priced Dell XPS 13.
One factor we’d have wished for is to get a wider alternative of processors. Intel’s Core 9 Extremely is superb, do not get us unsuitable, however Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite would swimsuit one of these machine a lot better. And it will convey out one of the best out of the 70Wh battery in a means Intel’s silicon merely cannot. However a transfer to ARM is seemingly out of the query for Huawei for the time being.
The MateBook X Professional 2024 is a wonderful laptop computer and would not appear to have a single weak spot. It is impossibly mild and really highly effective, it has a beautiful OLED show, and you may take it wherever, and it is as much as any activity you might throw at it. Nice job, Huawei – you have knocked it out of the park!
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