huawei's matebook X pro it's their top of the line business orientated laptop that has been upgraded
and this is the 2023 model so it's now powered by 13th gen Intel it has the core i7 1360p with 12
cores 16 threads Iris XC graphics and this model that I was sent out is the lower configuration of
it so with 16 gigabytes of ddr5 RAM one terabyte SSD but there are other models with 13 gigabytes
of RAM and two terabytes for your SSD it runs Windows 11 Pro and the screen it's 14.2 inches
it's a touch screen three by two aspect ratio IPS 500 nits maximum brightness and we've
got a backlit keyboard 60 watt hour battery and Thunderbolt 4 support with this model this is what
you'll find in the Box we've got a type c to type a adapter you guessed why we need this because
there's no type A ports on it unfortunately our super so this is 90 watts and then a type c to
type c cable so the model I got sent out here to review from Huawei is the ink Blue version
so this coating over the top of it it's micro Arc oxidation coating and what I like about it the
best is it does not pick up fingerprints nothing so it's a matte finish it looks really good now
you can lift up and open this lid here with just one hand like so and we've got our keyboard here
so travel's about 1.6 millimeters off the top of my head good keyboard so just like the previous
models it is backlit 2 as well and this keyboard I find it really comfortable to type on and I
just demonstrate now the backlighting which is the F3 key here too by the way so this is now
on the most powerful setting so it's two-stage or just off which is reasonably bright I'm not
doing it just as here it looks a lot better in person I've got a little bit of ambient light
coming in but it's very good the backlighting on here automatically does time out too by the way
so we do have Huawei sound with it and it's got six speakers in total there will be a sample of
what it sounds like later on in the video but the Palm rest here still using that same coating there
so it does feel really good power button I love that it's separated away from the keyboard so you
don't accidentally touch it it's never happened to me so far in about the week or so I've been
using it and we've got a fingerprint reader here incorporated into this power button so you can use
that with Windows hello and also with the front facing 720p webcam so the touchpad nice smooth
glass like finish to it really nice and large too I like the way they've extended it right down to
the front here and I find it one of the best touch pads that I have used in a long time I don't need
to go and plug in a mouse it's accurate and when you move the cursor about it goes where you want
it doesn't skip or jump around either so very nice keyboard touchpad everything here is absolutely
Top Notch it's a slim laptop too so only 15.6 millimeters with the model I've got here and it's
1.2 kilos so light now on the right hand side we have two type c ports here now these are USB 3.8
two gen ones but we do have the two Thunderbolt 4 ports here on the right side and they did not do
away thankfully with our 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support so you see just here there's
a vent so that's for the cooling either side does have those Vents and notice that there's no vents
on the bottom here I do like this look it keeps it very elegant looking I think and more streamlined
and again we still have that same coating so it's metal build to it but that weight being
really quite nice and light at the only 1.26 kilos so the hot air was blowing out the back
here unfortunately I'm not allowed to show you the internals with these lone units can't open them
up but we cannot upgrade the RAM the only thing you would be able to change is the SSD matebook
X pro does have four microphones you can see them here at the front so the six speakers Huawei sound
and these four mics MacBook X pro webcam sample so it's a good webcam but it's HD it's not full
HD unfortunately now through the software if you go into their PC manager you find camera you can
choose a virtual background so you can see I've selected like this very nice looking office here
with a bit of a view you can change this over it does affect the frame rate a little bit you
can just below the background if you want to I can make it out that look hey everyone I'm on holiday
I'm at the beach here I like the fact that this has a bit of movement to it it's got the animation
now the microphones they are the four at the front that you're listening to so good mics good quality
here and overall not bad I do like these virtual backgrounds I think they're really cool and there
is a better look at the exhaust fan so the hot air will be pushed out the back here and here so by
default it's 28 Watts but if you use the function shortcut and put it into the performance mode it
will increase the power limit then up to 30 watts to boost the performance but only marginally
so the screen is touched it's fully laminated IPS panel and it's 14.2 inches three by two aspect
ratio and this is the furthest that goes back not exactly amazing some other brands you can
lie the screen down completely flat there but I think for most users this is not really going to
be an issue if you're sitting on a table using it then you're going to be able to get your Optimum
angle that you need anyway so that's not really a big issue and because it doesn't have Stylus
support you probably don't need to lie the screen flat anyway but it's nice sometimes to be able to
do that especially if you've got the laptop in front of say another monitor I often want to
push the screen right down so touch support is 12 touch points and I find the accuracy to be
absolutely fine a resolution is 3120 by 2080 and it's a 60 hertz or 90 Hertz panel so when you run
it at 90hz you do see the difference it's a lot smoother we've got 1500 to 1 contrast ratio and
500 nits as their claim for maximum brightness but I've measured uh close to about 440 Nets PPI right
264 so you don't see pixels it's very sharp the color coverage here well 100 of srgb ntsc is 87
Adobe RGB is 89 and P3 is 97 so it is a fantastic panel I do like it I like the slim bezels the fact
it's fully laminated brightness is good but I would like to see in future models this is just
me it's not a nitpick it's just the suggestion OLED screens I think is the next step after using
a lot of OLED laptops recently so for our audio the speakers Huawei sound there's six of them and
very good considering how slim this is it's only about 15 millimeters but it's packing some very
decent speakers so I'll give you a sample this is going to be a little bit different this time
around because I'm going to play here the Huawei watch for pro just reviewed it but you'll be able
to hear what it sounds like me talking with my video 3D speakers I think it's excellent they're
very rich sounding speakers a little bit of bass to them very good volume so raise to wake as you
can see that is working well and I do think it's a great looking watch on my wrist here and I do like
these new watch faces they have gone with these are called the planet Quest watch faces so you
get information the matebook X pro 2023 Edition is running Windows 11 Pro we have the core i7 1360p
now this has 12 cores 16 threads maximum turbos 5 gigahertz and it's a 28 watt part Iris XC graphics
and it is the 96 executioner unit so it's very potent everything I do within Windows is very
quick and snappy I don't see any lags at all so a couple of areas that they have improved upon from
the previous model last year or should I say the previous two models they did release last year
is the ram speed so I'll just show you that right here that before they were using slightly slower
Ram now we're at 5600 megahertz this is good to see so we're getting uh definitely that's going to
Aid now the performance of especially the iris XE graphics and the other is the ssds so I criticized
them on the last models of using pcie three ssds uh instead of pcie 4.0 ssds which they are finally
using now so we've got a boost in our performance here mostly the sequential reads and rights but
it's still not the fastest in terms of pcie 4.0 we could have 7 500 reads and writes sequential
speeds there but we're getting around about the 5 000 marks still that's a welcomed increase from
what we had before which was about three thousand three thousand five hundred so that's two areas
key improvements there in the performance so built-in software we have their PC manager very
handy software now they do push out updates so if you go into the optimization tab you'll see here
we've got performance modes you've got the power mode here increasing the power limit or balanced
so being in performance the fan noise you'll hear it a little bit more but you get a boost
in performance and when you do go into this menu highly recommend you run this so drivers
have already done it there was a bias update a few other Drive updates so the all in this one
little Hub here which is great now their software you can connect up with your other devices you've
got Huawei share you can share the screens say from your mobile phone your Huawei p60 Pro on the
laptop here itself which is very handy drag and drop your files there's also other bits and pieces
you can do so it's handy there's no like bloatware there's no McAfee that they have included either
which is very good other brands should take note on that definitely so those speeds are good but
what about our benchmarks so there is a boost in benchmarks performance now going 13th gen a little
bit better than what we had with the 12th gen so the single core score there for geekbench six big
Improvement multi-core score as well very good so it's got plenty of power and as I mentioned this
everything's just really Snappy and quick when I use this laptop impressed with the performance and
here is opencl with geekbench 6. now you can run this it's a free Benchmark on your own existing
Hardware to see what kind of improvements you're going to gain and Knight raid so this is a 3D Mac
score here so testing out the iris XE graphics you'll see that it's a good score either by
the fact we have the faster Ram speeds this time around so slightly better than the previous models
and Times by again if you wanted to run this you could yourself and check out this compared to
what you're using now for your current Hardware but very potent uh it would be nice if we had a
dedicated graphics option and the 32 gigabyte RAM option would be another great thing to have so
the last Benchmark is cinebench so yes I did run this for the full time so it stresses it out for
10 minutes you hear the fan when you do that and we've got to score just over ten thousand if you
run it just once it's about 11 or 12 000 points but it does drop down as The Thermals increase it
throttles a little bit and the single core score that you can see is very good so really fast with
that five gigahertz maximum turbo out of this uh particular chipset here so video decoding if
you're wanting to play some really demanding video files well this is one here that I always test out
so it's 10 bit hebc 140 megabits per second to run it okay it stutters in the beginning this
is a bug with Windows I've noticed with Iris XC Graphics it seems to do it it's dropping frames
a little bit and yes I'm running off the power too you can see how it's still doing that stuttering
seems to settle down once it's running once you get rid of that transparent kind of menu That's
popping up now if you do install the Codec Pack and you get the classic media player
it doesn't seem to affect it but this is what is built in just running from
stock here so again a few drop frames at the start it's smoothing out a little bit but video playback
performance here a little bit disappointing but it seems to be an issue with the iris
XE graphics and windows 11. I noticed with the AMD machines I'm reviewing say with the 680m or
the 780m it's completely Flawless no dropped frames at all but here it does it then what
about streaming decoding YouTube 4K 60 is what I'll test out here and before I get into it I
wanted to comment about the touchpad I think it's fantastic I don't feel the need to go for a mouse
I'm more of a mouse person but this touchpad is absolutely brilliant I love how accurate is
smooth's moving about it's just very good one of the best so this is the demo check out and
okay that's already in 4k and I'll enable those stats there so there we go uh nine drop frames
10 but then it shouldn't really drop anymore but for some reason it's dropped a couple but now
that's stabilized the same sort of thing starts out okay drop in just a couple you never notice it
anyway when it's 60 frames per second and that's smooth so very good playback decoding vp9 codec
that it's using with chrome and YouTube and if you decided you wanted to edit a 4K video on this
Hardware well you can thanks to the RS XE Graphics but nothing too demanding okay so this timeline
here the files I'm using 100 megabit per second 4K and the playback and the timeline speed is very
good Iris XE can handle this so that is fine but what I'll test out now is how long will it take to
export one minute of footage at the YouTube preset okay so that is all set the one minute of footage
and the YouTube preset now I want to make sure I'm in the performance mode it's plugged in of course
so function p no not balanced but yes performance mode I imagine that this is going to be very quick
and around about 25 seconds or so is my guess but it could be wrong you can see that steaming ahead
it is going to be quick I'll skip ahead to the end result
okay finishing up now a little slower than I thought so approximately 29 seconds there isn't
the fastest using the same clip across other Hardware the best I've seen is around about 24
23 seconds but still very good speeds for encoding 4K video here with Adobe Premiere Pro so thermals
and throttling when you do push it really hard like cinebench R23 that I'm currently running
you will see that it does get up to 95 degrees Celsius it triggers thermal throttling it lowers
the clocks down a little bit and I'm seeing this with a lot of Intel laptops especially as thin
as ones like this now the fan noise is pretty good you do hear it it's not an offensive kind
of noise it's just a whooshing noise so here's a sample of it under full load with cinebench R23
then finally Linux support So if you're wondering if it's working yes I have Linux banjaro with the
open source drivers running everything wireless connected up audio does seem to be working uh the
only thing is the touch accuracy is off so where I touch on the screen it's miles off I don't know
why that is it's literally about always about five centimeters to the left of where I touch so that's
just something you need to sort out with the drivers and hopefully that can be corrected but
it's looking promising for Linux support with the matebook X pro a battery life on this model here
is not amazing it's a 60 watt hour battery we're packing some powerful Hardware in here so when you
do unplug it you cannot get that performance mode so you don't get the the Boost there it goes into
the balance mode I set the brightness to 30 here with Windows which may not seem enough but for
indoor use it is and it's not at 90 Hertz either the screen then it's at the 60 hertz and I get
67 hours I don't find that to be amazing at all it's okay it will probably work for most people
but you really do need to baby um the battery here because if you do anything slightly demanding that
battery life really drops down to then about four or five hours I hope that with future revisions
of this model maybe next year's release Huawei can figure out a way to try and cram in and fit
in there just a slightly larger battery like a 70 watt hour maybe even larger than that and 80
would be absolutely perfect now I cannot fault this model here when it comes to the keyboard
the touchpad the build quality is absolutely superb it's so good I love that furnish resists
fingerprints really well speakers on this they sound fantastic and then typing on that backlit
keyboard is really good the screen the 14.2 inches three by two aspect ratio very practical
good decision there I think from Huawei for a business laptop and the touch accuracy is good
I do like that there and this is the furthest it will go back the hinge of the screen I wish
it was a little more but hey that's not bad and I would love to see optional more models maybe
next year with OLED an OLED screen would be great but it would be a big thumbs up from me and even
one with a optional dedicated GPU I mean the iris XC Graphics is good and the 14th gen is probably
going to be even better maybe even better than the 780m from AMD but it would be nice to see that and
just more options with this would be really good now the type C ports you get the Thunderbolt 4 on
this you get the two other type c ports I would love to have seen a type A and you have to carry
around an adapter or a dongle but that's just the way it is it's all up it is a very classy
business focused laptop here really good plenty of power amazing speed the real weaknesses are
just the battery life not amazing no type a port on this and yeah you probably guessed it
it is expensive sure the quality is absolutely amazing it's a little pricey I hope that Huawei
can just work on notching that down a little bit because it's at the time of this video over
2 000 Euros is what it's going to be selling for which is uh I think it's it's a little bit of an
ass there so thank you so much for watching my review here of the 2023 model of the MacBook X pro