Honor MagicBook 14
A superbly made 14in laptop that crushes the competition when it comes to value for money
SCORE
PRICE £458 (£550 inc VAT) from hihonor.com
Four months ago, we printed a glowing review of the Huawei MateBook D 15 ( see issue 307, p64), and now it’s time for the company’s sister brand to shine: the Honor MagicBook 14 is a remarkable budget laptop that’s packed with quality.
The first thing you notice is its all-metal chassis, immediately lifting it above the budget laptop pack, but it has still been built with portability in mind. A 1.38kg weight is roughly the same as the most recent 13in MacBook Pro and makes it light enough to carry around all day without worrying about shoulder ache. Meanwhile, a battery life of 8hrs 15mins means you can leave the USB-C charger behind on day trips – and if you do find room for it, rapid charging means you can go from empty to almost 50% charge in half an hour.
That’s all the more impressive when you consider how much power this laptop packs. Honor eschews
Intel in favour of AMD and employs a 2.1GHz quad-core Ryzen 5 3500U processor with Radeon Vega 8 graphics and 8GB of DDR4 RAM. The one notable drawback is that it only comes with 256GB of storage, but it’s a fast PCIe SSD, hitting 2,456MB/sec sequential read speeds in AS SSD.
This laptop performed admirably in the remainder of our benchmarks. An overall score of 109 in the PC Pro tests demonstrates, once again, how powerful those four Ryzen cores are. The only area where it can’t match the tenth-generation Intel Core chips is in single-threaded tasks, as reflected by a single-core Geekbench 5 score of 878 compared to the 1,308 of the Core i7-1065G7 in the LG Gram 17 ( see p56).
Any resultant high fives in Intel HQ were short-lived, however: the Honor’s Radeon Vega 8 graphics were superior to Intel’s Iris Plus accelerator in both our gaming benchmarks. For example, the MagicBook 14 returned 71fps in Dirt: Showdown at 720p, while the LG managed 53fps, and it edged ahead in Metro: Last Light at 720p with 26.7fps to the LG’s 24.7fps.
Then we come to connectivity, where the MagicBook 14 is positively well endowed. It has two regular USB ports, one full-sized HDMI socket, a 3.5mm audio jack and a USB-C port – but note that this only supports charging and data transfer, not video output. The MagicBook 14 also comes with Honor’s Magic-link 2 tech, which allows you to transfer photos, videos and documents by tapping your Honor phone on the NFC chip below the keyboard (this is identical to Huawei’s OneShare technology).
The MagicBook 14 is even pleasant to use. Its keys have a soft-yet-positive action that bodes well for lengthy typing sessions and there’s no flex to the keyboard base or uncomfortable bounce. The keyboard’s layout is sensible too, with a doubleheight, UK-specific Enter key, large Backspace and right Shift keys, and no weird function doubling.
I’m less enamoured by the touchpad, with a slight rattle that is one of the few signs of this laptop’s budget leanings, but it’s reliable and wide enough to accommodate Windows 10’s multitouch gestures effectively. In fact, the only big problem here is the pop-up 720p webcam, which sits between the F6 and F7 keys. Image quality is okay, but its positioning results in an awkward, up-your-nose
“If you can lay your hands on one – I’m sure there’s going to be a high demand – the Honor MagicBook 14 is an absolute steal”
camera angle that’s all kinds of wrong. Naturally, there’s no infrared camera built into the webcam and therefore no support for Windows Hello, but a fingerprint reader built into the power button is a respectable compromise.
Our tour of the MagicBook 14 finishes with its non-touch 14in Full HD IPS panel. If this was a more expensive laptop, I’d criticise its 278cd/m2 peak brightness and 57.9% coverage of the sRGB colour gamut, but 1,328:1 contrast ratio and excellent viewing angles mean that it’s a fine inclusion – unless you’re going to be doing a lot of photo-editing work where you need colour accuracy, you won’t find better in a laptop of this price.
Honor is clearly singing from the same hymn sheet as Huawei when it comes to laptop production. While the MagicBook 14 might not shine in all departments, it’s certainly good enough for most and undercuts the sweeping majority of its Windows and Mac rivals on price. If you can lay your hands on one – I’m sure at this price there’s going to be a high demand – the Honor MagicBook 14 is an absolute steal. It’s slim, light, handsome, powerful and very pleasant to use – and it’s remarkably well connected to boot.
SPECIFICATIONS
Quad-core 2.1GHz AMD Ryzen 5 3500U
AMD Radeon Vega 8 graphics 1,920 x 1,080 non-touch 14in IPS display 256GB NVMe
SSD 8GB DDR4-2400 RAM 720p webcam 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5
USB-C 3 USB-A 3 USB-A 2 HDMI NFC 56Whr battery Windows 10 Home 323 x 215 x 15.9mm (WDH) 1.38kg 1yr RTB warranty