Huawei MateBook X Pro: Performance And Value In A Sleek Ultraportable
Huawei MateBook X Pro: 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 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. And, since many laptop displays vary in brightness at each respective setting in Windows, this calibration with a meter is critical to ensure all displays are set to as near identical brightness output as possible, before running battery tests.
Huawei MateBook X Pro Acoustics & Thermals
The MateBook X Pro is exceptionally thin with a 0.57-inch waistline, while weighing less than 3 pounds. Keeping things cool in such a thin and light package is always a challenge, particularly if it's running discrete graphics, as is the case here. Huawei manages to do it without allowing the MateBook X Pro to sound like a hair dryer.
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 and logged. This is a lighter-duty test that is still a bit more strenuous than many office productivity tasks, but it's not nearly a taxing as the load the Battery Eater test we'll have next puts on a system.
Huawei claims the MateBook X Pro can squeeze up to 12 hours of 1080p video playback, 14 hours of office work, or 15 hours of web browsing from the laptop's 57.4Wh battery. We didn't see those kinds of numbers ourselves. In our home brewed video loop test, the MateBook X Pro stayed running for 393 minutes, or just over 6.5 hours before running out of juice. And in the more strenuous BatteryEaterPro test, it ran for 174 minutes, or nearly 3 hours before before needing a nap.
While we didn't observe the MateBook X Pro reaching its rated battery life, it performed fairly well, considering the display resolution. Full HD 1080p laptops tend to last longer, but among the portables that have a higher resolution, the MateBook X Pro kept pace for the most part. Of course, battery life will ultimately depend on how you use the system. For lightweight activities and productivity chores, it's reasonable to expect the MateBook X Pro to get you through a typical workday.
Huawei MateBook X Pro Acoustics & Thermals
The MateBook X Pro is exceptionally thin with a 0.57-inch waistline, while weighing less than 3 pounds. Keeping things cool in such a thin and light package is always a challenge, particularly if it's running discrete graphics, as is the case here. Huawei manages to do it without allowing the MateBook X Pro to sound like a hair dryer.We found that the cooling fan was quick to turn on when putting any kind of load on the system. However, outside of a slightly high-pitch whir, it stays fairly quiet, especially compared to other ultraportables that we've tested. Our only real complaint is that the section above the keyboard on the left side warms up pretty fast and is uncomfortable the touch. We saw the same thing on Dell's XPS 15 2-in-1, which is where the CPU and GPU are located.
