Huawei MateBook D 15 (2021)
This minor refresh brings Intel’s new Core i5 i and significant speed boost, but old ports hamper its appeal
SCORE ★★★★
PRICE £625 (£750 inc VAT VAT) from consumer.huawei.c consumer.huawei.com/uk
B y now, we know exactly what we’re going to get with the Huawei MateBook D series. Focused on value, these laptops always cram a powerful specification into a metal chassis that rewrote our expectations for budget machines back in 2019. And so it is for this 2021 update of the 15in variant, the MateBook D 15.
What’s less predictable is whether Huawei is going to swing towards AMD or Intel, as it’s equally at home with both chip makers. Here, the benefactor is Intel, with its familiar four-core Core i5-1135G7 inside. It’s an 11th-generation chip with Intel’s fastest integrated graphics, Iris Xe, and Huawei wrings every last drop of power fro from the combination.
To see this, compare the MateBook’s scores with the Core i7-powered Dynabook on p51. The Dynabook is faster in the PC Pro benchmarks, with an overall score of 154 to 140, but in our photo- pho editing test the difference was 65 seconds versus 61 seconds. Things were closer still in Geekbench 5, with the MateBook managing 1,394 in the single-core test to 1,461 for the Dynabook – and it was actually faster in the multicore segment, scoring 4,622 versus 4,482.
Another speed boost comes in the form of the 512GB SSD. This fast NVMe unit returned sequential read and write scores of 2,785MB/sec and 2,395MB/sec, which are spectacular for this price. If you ever need to replace the SSD, remove the chassis bottom with a Torx screwdriver.
The MateBook carried its momentum into our games tests, with 61fps in Dirt: Showdown at 1080p (High quality) to the Dynabook’s 54fps, and 1,221 in 3DMark compared to 1,157. It was also faster in the OpenGL GFXBench Car Chase test, with 76fps versus 70fps. This makes you wonder just how quick it would be with a Core i7, and is one of the benefits of having a larger chassis and the greater cooling this affords. An advantage of Intel’s latest chips is that they bring Wi-Fi 6 with them, but if you were hoping for Thunderbolt 4 then prepare for disappointment. Huawei has stuck with the staid selection of ports as on the previous MateBook D 15, and that means the single USB-C connector remains in the slow lane. Huawei doesn’t state whether it supports USB 3.1 or higher, but with extremely slow transfers during my testing I suspect it’s USB 3.0 only.
Slow ports are something of a theme. The USB-A port on the left supports 3.1, but both righthand ports run at USB 2’s crippling rates. A 3.5mm combo jack and HDMI output round things off well, but Huawei needs to update its port selection: at the very least we need two USB-C 3.2 ports, and one of them needs to output to a display. It also clings on to the webcam tucked away between the F6 and F7 keys – press a button and up it pops – which is superb for privacy and awful for camera angles. The keyboard itself is true to this laptop’s budget roots, with no backlighting and a flimsy action. At least the large keys make it easy to reach high typing speeds, and that generosity of size continues to the 120 x 73mm touchpad.
Then we come to the 15.6in screen. I don’t want to be overly harsh, because something has to give for the price, but I hoped for more than 55% coverage of the sRGB colour space – that means almost one in two colours can’t be displayed. Let’s not even talk about an average Delta E of 5.48, or the maximum of 23.5. This IPS panel’s only plus points are its size and that brightness goes up to a reasonable 250cd/m2 – plenty for indoors.
You’ll want to tap brightness down if you’re running off the battery, with the D 15 giving up after six hours in our video-rundown test. Not that this bulky laptop is suited to life on the road, despite its surprisingly light weight of 1.6kg. The good news is that Huawei’s super-compact USB-C charger won’t take up much room in your bag if you decide to go on a trip.
I’m left with mixed feelings about the MateBook D 15. The port selection, mediocre display and webcam placement let it down badly, but it’s also fast and well-built enough to last for many years. In fact, it’s the best-specified laptop I’ve seen for less than £800. If that’s what you’re looking for then buy it, but I would sacrifice some speed for utility.
SPECIFICATIONS
4-core 2.4GHz Intel Core i5-1135G7 Intel Iris Xe graphics 1,920 x 1,080 non-touch 15.6in IPS display 512GB 2GB NVMe SSD 16GB DDR4 3,200MHz RAM Full HD webcam 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth tooth 5.1 USB-C 3 USB-A 3.1 2 x USB-A 2 HDMI 42Whr battery Windows 10 Home me 358 x 230 x 16.9mm (WDH) 1.6kg 1yr RTB warranty
“The SSD returned sequential read and write scores of 2,785MB/sec and 2,395MB/sec, which are spectacular for this price”