Huawei MateBook D Review: Sleek, Attractive AMD Ryzen Powered Ultrabook
Huawei MateBook D: Battery Life, Acoustics and Thermals
In the following benchmarks we employ two very different battery life tests, Battery Eater Pro and a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows 10 Quiet Hours has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40 - 60% brightness setting. Since laptop displays significantly affect power consumption and battery life, it's important to ensure a level playing field with respect to brightness of the display for battery testing. However, since many laptop displays vary in brightness at each respective setting in Windows, this calibration with the meter is critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness as possible before testing.
Battery Life - How We Test:
Our custom HotHardware video loop test takes a 1080p HD video with a 16Kbps bit rate and loops it repeatedly, with 1 minute break intervals in between. A timer log file increments minutes of up-time every minute -- along with the grand total -- before system shutdown is stored in the log. This is a lighter-duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than many office productivity tasks, but it's not nearly as taxing as the load Battery Eater puts on a system.
The MateBook D had middle of the road battery life. In our video loop test the system was able to sustain power for five and a half hours unplugged. That's under the advertised 8 hour span, which is to be expected since this test keeps the screen lit up and never idles, but not too bad for a laptop in this price range.
BatterEater Pro pushes a system with a heavier workload and keeps it there for the duration. In this test the MateBook D was able to remain at a sustained load for over two hours. Just like was saw in our custom test, the MateBook D finished about in the middle of the pack.
