The Huawei MateBook 16 Review, Powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5800H: Ecosystem Plus
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 20, 2021 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- AMD
- Huawei
- Matebook
- Ryzen
- Zen 3
- MateBook 16
- Huawei Share
- Ryzen 7 5800H
System Performance: Balanced and Performance
The design of the MateBook 16 puts it in a smaller sub-section of the market. It’s a laptop designed to be big, but portable, so it has a strong 45 W CPU inside, albeit tuned down to 35 W, and no discrete GPU. That means we’re between a rock and a hard place – it has more performance and sustained performance than anything built with 15 W processors, such as the U-series, but compared to other laptops its size, which have big cooling and discrete graphics, it cannot sustain the high turbos that the others can. The upside is battery life in comparison.
So the MateBook has to play to its strengths, and those involve using the Zen 3 architecture up to 4.7 GHz for strong single-threaded performance, and then pushing all eight cores and sixteen threads when needed. Combine that with strong integrated graphics in Vega 8 (it’s still not RDNA 2 quite yet) and a fast SSD, and it should push through faster than a U-series without the bulk of a gaming laptop.
The Performance mode had little-to-no effect on any of our single thread metrics, however there was a good 4-9% gain in multi-threaded workloads. The longer the workload, the bigger the improvement. In comparison to other processors tested, it carves through the 15 W options, and against the 11th Gen Core-HK hardware it falls behind on general tests that can’t push the frequency or power, but for the traditional tests AMD does well on, it can beat what Intel has to offer.
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Oxford Guy - Monday, October 25, 2021 - link
But it has a screen that will shatter if you put a sticker over the webcam. Think of that advantage.gijames1225 - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
If there's a way to bump this up to 32GB of RAM these could be nice XPS 15 competitors for people who just need the CPU performance.Samus - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
I would consider staying 16GB (2x8GB) to keep with single rank memory. That reduces latency quite a bit which really matters with an iGPU.schujj07 - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
That isn't true at all. At worst the difference in latency is just over 1ns between DR & SR. When it comes to performance, both gaming and application see typically better performance using 4 ranks vs 2 ranks.https://www.tomshardware.com/features/ryzen-5000-m...
EasyListening - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
2 sticks of dual rank is probably the best for Ryzen, but I'm not sure if that applies to the iGPU versions. Gamers Nexus did a story on dual rank vs single rank on Ryzen.schujj07 - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
Tomshardware did one as well for the iGPU. For gaming the 2 sticks of dual rank was never slower than 2 sticks single rank. Granted the differences were just 1 -1.5fps across the 7 games geometric mean. The geometric mean for CPU performance was slightly larger for 2 stick dual rank vs 2 sticks single rank.Oxford Guy - Sunday, October 24, 2021 - link
It has been a few years (the review I read) but a desktop gaming test with a discrete GPU showed considerably better framerates with dual-rank RAM in some games.Prestissimo - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
Pretty much every other laptop with H-CPU can be configured with 32GB. Lenovo, HP, Asus all have that option. Huawei is the exception here, guess they don't know their target consumers usecase.lightningz71 - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
This is SO close... There are a couple of misses here:1) Their "Performance" mode doesn't really appear to be hitting 45 watts. It's more like, we're allowing it to stay at a full 35 watts, as opposed to trying to optimize battery. If they had actually allowed it to push that full 45 watts that the chip is capable of, the benchmarks might have been better.
2) That RAM configuration. Either bite the cost bullet and go with LPDDR4X at 16GB, or go for 32GB of dual rank DRAM, and since it's being soldered on the board, optimize the CL and secondary latency settings. The iGPU in that chip is capable of notably more than what was shown in the benchmarks. Look at the Surfacebook numbers in some of the tests to see what the U chip can do, this is capable of more...
3) That Webcam. It's worth it to me, and most of the laptop road warriors that I talk to to have at least a modest bezel along the top of the monitor that could fit a webcam and allow you to open and close the laptop without getting fingerprints on the screen.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Agreed on the RAM. If youre gonna solder it give us 4733 MHz LPDDR4X.