The Huawei MateBook X Pro Review: Calling Out The Competition
by Brett Howse on June 27, 2018 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
One of the sacrifices made when making a laptop as compact as possible with thin bezels is that you’re got less room for a large battery, but Huawei still managed to squeeze in 57 Wh of capacity, which is less than some of the competition, but not necessarily a lot less.
And despite the MateBook X Pro offering a discrete GPU, that’s of course turned off with NVIDIA Optimus when not in use, so for more mundane tasks, the integrated GPU is leveraged to save some power.
We test all laptops at 200 nits brightness, and use the built-in Microsoft Edge browser and Films & TV app for testing.
2013 Light Battery Test
This test is being phased out because it’s become too easy for modern machines, and is almost the same amount of time you’d see for a completely idle system, but we’ve got a long history of devices tested so we’ll likely keep it around for Bench for a while still. Despite the high-resolution display, and average battery capacity, the MateBook X Pro still got over 13.5 hours of battery life on this test.
2016 Web Battery
Our newer test is much more demanding, and impacts battery life pretty significantly, and should represent a more accurate depiction of what you could expect if you were just browsing the web all day on the device. Once again, the MateBook X Pro delivers very solid battery life, at over 9.5 hours.
Normalized Results
By removing the battery capacity from the run time, we can see how efficient each device is. On our lighter 2013 test, the MateBook X Pro gets a very respectable 14.3 minutes per Wh, which is right up there with the most efficient devices we’ve seen, but those generally have a much lower resolution display.
On the 2016 version of the test, the result is the same, with the MateBook very close to the top of our efficiency chart despite the display. Huawei has done a fantastic job of getting as much battery life out of the limited battery size as they could.
Movie Playback
Playing back a locally stored movie on the MateBook resulted in right about 12 hours of battery life.
Tesseract
To put the movie playback in perspective, we divide the run time by the length The Avengers movie to see how many movies you could watch if you needed to. The MateBook would let you watch almost six entire movies before it forced you to go do something else for a while.
Charge Time
Huawei ships the MateBook X Pro with a 65-Watt adapter which is USB-C based, and can charge in either of the USB-C ports. A small complaint would be that there’s no USB-C on the right side, so you’re stuck charging on the left, but that’s not that much different than laptops that charge with a barrel connector so it’s hard to be too upset.
Charge time was fairly average at 161 minutes, but it does reach 50% charge in about 40 minutes which is likely quick enough for most people.
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Brett Howse - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
It does have Touch support. Sorry I meant to have that listed in the spec table. I've added it now.dr.denton - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link
Did I just miss it, or was there no mention of the inherent differences between a fully integrated APU and a CPU+GPU+dedicated graphics memory? To be honest, I don't find it particularly impressive to outperform a 15W R7 with a setup that surely is allowed more power budget, has more memory bandwidth and, I assume, is more expensive to manufacture.s.yu - Saturday, July 21, 2018 - link
Yup, this review is fairly disappointing, it's not as detailed as Notebookcheck's. Sometimes Anandtech does a better job but not this time.s.yu - Saturday, July 21, 2018 - link
This feels like an ad, why on earth is the base model's $1500 "undeniable value", as an ultrabook there's hardly anything of note besides the screen's brightness and resolution(sRGB coverage is basically standard for any ultrabook other than the cheapest, touch is also pretty common). The SSD is triple sourced and you can bet on the other variants to be slower, this speed is typically only seen in mid-high tier Samsungs, I've never seen Toshibas reach this speed for example. The thunderbolt is only two lanes, old problem, while Dell is already moving to fix that. Overall lack of ports for what's supposed to be a more pro-oriented model (they added the MX150, if only the slow version). No Windows hello? Xiaomi's new notebook among others are priced much more competitively for the specs.And the design is really mediocre, the up and down arrow keys for example should be full size, or the left and right should be half sized, as of now the pressure points of the side keys and the down key aren't in a straight line, I've tried such a keyboard before and was very annoyed by the differently sized arrow keys. The webcam placement is downplayed but its angle is even worse than the XPS solution, because it's closer to the user, also because it would be completely unusable on a stand/base commonly used to increase the number of ports and/or improve typing and screen-viewing comfort. From an aesthetic point of view it's also mediocre, choosing a somewhat dated roundish Macbook design (the recent design trend goes bolder, not only the Macbooks but also new XPSs and the new Blade follow this trend, even Xiaomi) and slapping a Huawei logo onto it.
RaymondIT - Tuesday, July 24, 2018 - link
I still don't see why a higher end system like this is using slower memory that takes more power. LPDDR4 or even DDR4 would be a better choice. LPDDR4 uses 40% less power??Joiiyrancher - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Did you guys ever look into the reports that the thunderbolt 3 ports only provided 2 Lane support and therefore significantly compromised eGPU p performance? I think notebookcheck wrote about it. If that isn't the case I would buy one today.