Huawei MateBook 14
Huawei’s back with another affordable ultrabook, but is it enough to stand out in the competitive flagship laptop space?
Huawei’s MateBook 13 scored full marks when we looked at it last year, and with new 10th gen Intel CPUs, upgraded discrete graphics and a bigger battery, everything looks in place for this to be another impressive offering. The most obvious difference is the new 14-inch screen, which returns with the same 2160 by 1440 pixel resolution in a 3:2 aspect ratio that is good for viewing web pages. At 300nits it isn’t the brightest screen available, but it’s bright enough for general work tasks and media playback when cranked right up. The screen also has a decent 90% screen to body ratio with 4.9mm bezels on the top 3 edges after it followed the MateBook Pro X in dropping the webcam to a popup keyboard button.
The chassis looks and feels nice still, but even though the manufacturing has been updated to offer a smoother chassis finish, the overall design is starting to look a little dated next to today’s leading ultrabooks. Sadly there’s no Wi-Fi 6, even though it’s packing 10th gen CPUs and one of the 2 USB Type-A ports is USB 2.0 for some reason, which makes it less than ideal for transferring data with a max speed of 60MB/s. And while the new gesture controls and HDMI ports are welcome inclusions, we can’t help but feel that more established vendors have either conquered these hurdles already, or moved to more advanced solutions.
The MateBook 14 is using an Intel Core i7-10510U CPU, a Nvidia GeForce MX350 GPU and 16GB of RAM, which makes it basically identical to the MateBook X Pro, except with a more powerful graphics card. This makes it a powerful work device that’ll plough through most people’s workloads and stand up to any of today’s best ultrabooks. While this chip isn’t any more powerful than what you got on the MateBook 13, raw CPU tests show up to 22% improvements in PCMark 10’s overall work benchmark. Like it’s predecessor, this GPU also gives it the ability for sub-1080p gaming. You can get playable 30fps frame rates on titles like Total War Warhammer II and Middle Earth: Shadows of War if you turn the settings to low, but you’ll probably want to drop a little below 1080p resolution to ensure stability.
The thing we can see, other than the screen, that makes this device less expensive than the MateBook X Pro is the larger form factor. At 1.53kg and 1.59cm thick the MateBook 14 is just 9.5 percent and 13 percent bigger than its flagship sibling, respectively. Which isn’t a big deal when you consider the price difference. Even the battery was almost identical at 56Wh, which lasts around nine hours in media playback and about three under intensive workloads. So there’s not a heap of difference between this device and an $800 more expensive MateBook X Pro.
That said, we’re in the price bracket of a similarly specced Microsoft Surface Pro 7, Acer Swift 5, Lenovo Yoga 940-14IIL or an MSI Prestige 14 – all of which we’d grab ahead of the MateBook 14.
JOEL BURGESS
A powerful ultrabook with a little extra GPU headroom for light gaming and decent battery life.