Huawei’s MateBook X Professional lineup is again once more with a mannequin for 2024, however it breaks the naming mildew – it isn’t the MateBook X Professional 2024, strictly talking, it is the MateBook X Professional Core Extremely Premium Version. However in the event 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 now have 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’ve 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 will 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 appears to be like higher than Apple’s laptop computer right this moment.
The newest 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 beautiful.
Huawei managed to tuck the MateBook X Professional 2024 just under 1 kilogram at 980g – that is an almost 30% lower in weight in comparison with the earlier era, regardless of a transfer to a 15% greater 70Wh battery. To attain 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 body” 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 possibly can simply neglect 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 a lot of the house, 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 very good 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, as an illustration, 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 fitting. The older mannequin had two USB-C’s on both sides – this new mannequin swaps one USB-C for a change to disable the digicam drivers because the digicam shouldn’t be hidden below 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 Good day.
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 mechanically log you into Home windows as soon as it boots to the login display screen.
The FreeTouch trackpad is a superb piece of equipment. It’s extremely huge for the 14-inch chassis, and its glass floor is easy 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 possibly can click on wherever on the floor.
The vibration is tuned completely, however you possibly can regulate its energy and sensitivity by means of Huawei’s PC Supervisor app. It permits intuitive gestures – knock twice along with your knuckle to take a screenshot or drag a finger on the fitting 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 could 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 greatest 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 vast 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 reveals nice uniform brightness. We measured 535 nits within the middle, 560 nits within the left corners, and 570 nits in the fitting corners. We additionally measured a peak brightness of 952 nits when displaying HDR content material.
The panel helps the RGB, P3, and sRGB shade gamuts, and Huawei’s useful Show Supervisor (proper click on on the desktop, then extra choices for the previous context menu) permits you to 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 features of the laptop computer, just like the FreeTouch trackpad, has an in-depth Huawei Sound menu the place you possibly can tune the audio system and the microphone, and affords the AI Digicam menu, which lets you tune the digicam system-wide to supply a customized background, beautify your face, or try to maintain you targeted always.
In case you have a Huawei telephone, you need to use Tremendous Machine to regulate it from the laptop computer’s display screen. You can even share recordsdata between the 2.
However what makes PC Supervisor really 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 below the PC Supervisor’s management. Huawei pushed a number of BIOS updates throughout our time with the MateBook X Professional 2024, and we are able to say from years of expertise with Huawei laptops that long-term software program help is great.
Huawei pushed the {hardware} on this era of MateBook X Professional in a giant manner. Up till now, the MateBook X Professional used thin-and-light-targeting 28W TDP Intel processors. This 12 months, the collection makes use of Intel’s strongest cell 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 help, 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 previous 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 practically 50% graphics enchancment, all whereas being just a little extra environment friendly than its predecessor.
The place the brand new machine is most spectacular is cooling. Huawei claims a 50% increase to air stress and 22% larger 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 could possibly argue that such a potent processor might do with devoted discrete graphics, however it defeats the thin-and-light design of the MateBook X Professional 2024. A model with Qualcomm’s new ARM processors, alternatively, would make much more sense, however it’s unlikely to occur because of Western-imposed sanctions.
Geekbench 6, CrystalDisk
Huawei needs 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 steadiness between efficiency and luxury. Moreover, you possibly can 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 – shifting 100 MHz up or down ever so usually. The laptop computer’s followers have been consistently 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 12 months, the Huawei MateBook X Professional 2024 makes use of a 15% greater 70Wh battery. We ran our typical 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 vibrant show and loud audio system.
The laptop computer managed 7 hours of streaming and 8 hours of shopping on a loop. These are stable outcomes.
Charging can also be glorious with the supplied 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 go away you wanting for something by way of efficiency, and we might say the ergonomics, show, and total really feel are second to none.
You recognize 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 opponents 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 great, do not get us flawed, however Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite would swimsuit the sort of machine a lot better. And it will carry out one of the best out of the 70Wh battery in a manner Intel’s silicon merely cannot. However a transfer to ARM is seemingly out of the query for Huawei in the mean time.
The MateBook X Professional 2024 is a superb laptop computer and would not appear to have a single weak spot. It is impossibly mild and really highly effective, it has a stunning OLED show, and you may take it wherever, and it is as much as any activity you could throw at it. Nice job, Huawei – you’ve got knocked it out of the park!