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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anandcx - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Gram 17 has 80wh battery, you have linked a two years old model you fool. Since 2020 all Gram 17's have 80wh battery, this is the link for 2021 model: https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90p-k.aas9u1-u...Prestissimo - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
What? Battery is quite small for a 45W CPUbenedict - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
I'm amazed companies keep pushing laptops with 512GB SDDs and pretend they are not crap. 1 TB of storage is the absolute minimum any new pc or laptop should have if you don't want to buy a second SSD in a few months.stephenbrooks - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
I guess people can use them with external drives, but yes, if a laptop or PC has under 1TB of built-in storage it better be priced economically.Tomatotech - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
Yup. People don't realise that many SSDs slow down quite a lot as they get full up. My 1TB NVMe SSD is one of these that fold empty TLC space into a SLC buffer. What that means with my particular SSD is that it only runs at max speed up to about 66% full then after that it slows down, as shown in benchmarks and daily feel if it goes over around 650GB full.Practically, I treat it as giving me around 600GB of long-term working storage plus another 350GB of emergency / temporary storage. I knew this before buying it and I'm happy with it, though I would like my next SSD to be 2TB as I'm hovering round the 550GB long term storage mark at the moment.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Not everyone compiles videos from 8k120hz video all day. 512GB is not a hindrance to most. And you can just upgrade it yourself instead of paying a premium to get it pre installed.Prestissimo - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
My laptop running W11 has a 128GB SATA 3 SSD and it's blazing fast for everyday tasks. All my data's on my internal storage as well, synced up to Google Drive. We don't need higher capacity PCIe 4.0 SSDs driving up base laptop prices for the general public.Stop speaking for everyone else, it's arrogant and presumptuous.
schujj07 - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
If all you aren't storing boat loads of videos, photos, music, or games then 512GB is plenty for OS/Application drive. My work laptop has a 256GB SSD and that isn't an issue as a lot isn't stored on the laptop.fishingbait15 - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
The people who would buy a device like this are probably 50/50 web cloud and 50/50 local stuff. It doesn't have a dGPU so no AAA gaming and no content creation. People who are doing full stack programming or virtualization would likely opt for CPU with more cores. The days when people had massive libraries of purchased iTunes videos and TV shows are over ... that stuff is streamed now.DominionSeraph - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
My C:\ drive is using 286GB, 200GB of which is games. Very few people use laptops for much more than internet/office tasks which doesn't even take 50GB if you nuke the hiberfil file. 512GB is overkill for most users.