Huawei MateBook D Review: Sleek, Attractive AMD Ryzen Powered Ultrabook
Huawei MateBook D: Storage, Productivity and Content Creation
To start things off and get a sense of how the Huawei MateBook D's storage components perform, we fired-up ATTO for a quick sanity check on sequential disk transfer speeds across various file sizes with both read and write workloads.
ATTO Disk Benchmark, Testing NVMe Solid State Storage
The SanDisk SSD housed in the MateBook D isn't the fastest drive we have seen, but the performance was top-notch for a laptop in this price range. In our testing the SSD had sustained read and write speeds of over 2.5GB/s and 1.8GB/s, respectively.
Cinebench R15, Geekbench 4
We kicked off our general-purpose benchmarks with a cross-platform CPU compute benchmark called Geekbench, and then ran Cinebench R15, a 3D rendering benchmark that tests both the CPU and GPU engines in the processor. Cinebench is developed by Maxon, which is better known for its Cinema 4D software employed in professional 3D rendering and animation studios. We use both of Cinebench’s integrated tests for CPU and GPU.
In Cinebench we can really see the absolute value of the AMD Ryzen 2500U processor. When testing multi-core performance it was nearly on par with the Intel Core i7-8650U processor. Though we don't show single core performance we felt it important to discuss. With the current gen processors in this review Intel still has an advantage when it comes to core-vs-core performance. However, the cost per-core of AMD's processors is lower, so you get more cores at the same price point. You can see some single-core / single-thread performance in this next test...
While Cinebench had the Ryzen 2500U nipping at the heels of the Core i7-8650U, Geekbench showed a slightly different story. This time around the 2500U fell just between Intel's 7th and 8th generation mobile processors. Still, the multi-core performance was extremely good. In this test though you can see the single-core performance, which was lower than all the current gen Intel processors we have tested.
PCMark 10 Benchmark
Next, we'll move from pure content creation in Cinebench, to productivity and mixed usage with PCMark. We're representing all tests from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, Digital Content Creation tests performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization workloads.
The AMD-powered MateBook D finished near the bottom of the pack in PCMark 10. In the DCC and Essential tests, the MateBook D was competitive with more expensive notebooks, but in the overall score and Productivity tests, it didn't fare quite as well.
