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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EasyListening - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
You are asking for such a thing while supply chains are completely screwed.GreenReaper - Saturday, October 23, 2021 - link
If you don't ask, you never get.abufrejoval - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
I also see the lack of RAM expandability as the key issue.I have a Lenovo Slim 7 13ACN05 and with all eight cores at 15 Watts it's not really able to pull ahead of a quad core Tiger Lake i7-1165G7 NUC I operate at the same Wattage in 'normal' workloads (say compile jobs, Ansible scripts, juggling VMs etc.), because it needs to downclock too much to sustain the 15 Watt power envelope. It's also maxed out at 16GB for RAM, even a single soldered module seems impossible with an Ultrabook form factor.
64GB in two SO-DIMMs make the NUC quite reasonable machines for light server workloads and I'd sure pay a little extra to include a "KVM", a "UPS" etc. to make it a notebook like this.
At 35-65 Watts an octa Ryzen really pulls ahead of all things Intel quad or hexa in the same wattage rage, but without RAM to expand it's all for naught. With this chassis size replacable RAM should be no issue so it's really sad they go "Apple" there.
While the Tiger Lake Xe 96 EU and Vega 8 iGPUs at 50GB/s offer impressive improvements over plain old "HD", Iris Plus or Kaveri, machine learning and gaming just require completely different classes of hardware, so I'd be happy to sacrifice a bit of DRAM bandwidth and latency for capacity in such a machine.
The Lenovo puts a Windows Hello compatible Webcam in such a small frame on the 16:10 2560x1600 display, I really don't see the point of a snot-cam.
dontlistentome - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Think yourself lucky you get the option of 16GB, in the UK they only sell the 8GB models.abufrejoval - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
I do feel lucky to have the device, because it's generally a well built marvel.But Lenovo is also lucky to have at least offered 16GB, because at 8GB they would have lost that sale for sure.
But I surely would have paid 200% RAM market price for 32 or 64GB.
anandcx - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
@Ian: You missed the LG Gram 16 in comparison, it weighs just 1.19 KG according to LG but i measured my Gram 16 at 1.15 KG. It has 350 nits screen, better keyboard and touchpad and also costs lesser than the 17 inch version. Honestly it is the best laptop in that segment. Hopefully you can review it and it may even work for your personal use.Prestissimo - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Matebook seems really overpriced for what they're offering. I'll take LG Gram 17 any day over this as someone who doesn't need power and just want a big screen on my laptop for watching movies and consuming content.If a laptop doesn't have a dGPU and weighs over 1.3 kg / 3 lbs, it's an immediate deal breaker. There is no need for a "Premium Ultrabook" to be that heavy.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Big battery is a plenty good reason.anandcx - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Gram 16 has 80 Wh battery and weighs 1.1 KG. Gram 17 is 1.3 KG.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Gram 17 only has a 72wh batteryhttps://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17Z990-RAAS8U1-ul...
Gram 16 has 80wh battery but cannot sustain high performance due to cooling limitations due to small heatsink and cooling paths. May as well compare a tablet to this machine.