HUAWEI MateBook D16 :
This is the new Huawei matebook D16 and what it has now is a slimmer body, it now measures 18 mm, its weight has been reduced for a 16-inch laptop, it is very good, only 1.68 kilos and it comes with the core i 93900 h, my configuration that Huawei sent me for review contains 16 GB of LP DDR 4 ram, a 1 TB SSD, which is PCI E 4.0 Pro.
It has Wi-Fi 6, it runs Windows 11 home, and it also has a larger battery, this is another one of those key changes, it’s 70w hours.
Now, which is a little bigger than the previous year, which had a 60w hour battery, inside the screen, it’s a matte screen it’s 16 inches, and it works with a resolution of 1200p aspect ratio of 16 x 10, it’s a little more than 300 nits.
The brightness included with the matebook D16, you will find a quick start guide, our supercharged Huawei charger so that it has a type-c connection, and it is very light this charger is just 210 G, and the laptop which weighs only 1.68 kilos, so they have reduced the weight and it is 18 mm, the thickness so both thinner and lighter the total travel weight is just 1.88 kilos, which is excellent for a 16-inch laptop.
The lid has very little Flex, just a tiny bit, felt very solid, and it is a gray matte paint job finish, which gives it a metallic look, which looks great resists fingerprints very well.
Can you open the lid, with one hand no, you can’t, you’re going to need to use two to make the hinge feel good, it’s nice and rigid.
it’s not going to fall apart, and the screen the good news about it, is that you can lie completely flat, it’s great if you’re going to say plug this into an external monitor, you can lie this screen completely flat sort it out by the way the touchpad it’s smaller than the mbook pro series, of course, it’s not a complete high-end model.
This is the most affordable model that makes sense, there is a good keyboard, a nice size, I have the German layout, but they are in quirt Z with the Zed and the Y they are exchanged around the 1.5 mm numeric keypad, on the move with these keys, and typing on them, it’s very nice it’s a nice keyboard I like the return of the keys.
I need to adjust my camera settings, but it’s good, good brightness is distributed evenly there are no spots, or darker areas, with this flip keyboard palm rest, it feels good there is no bending with the palm wrist.
There are no problems with the build quality of HUAWEI MateBook D16, I can see everything it’s very good to press it, don’t hear any squeaking noise, whether it’s like no keyboard bounce or power button, it has a built-in fingerprint reader, at the bottom we have a large rubber foot on the back, with a little space in the middle, for air circulation two frying speakers, up to the rubber feet, at the front and there are two fans for cooling.
HUAWEI MateBook D16, has a 60w hour battery, so they have increased the capacity of the previous models previous generation, and there is I believe just a single M. 2 SSD slot, it does not have a double slot on the left of the matebook D16.
in the HUAWEI Mate Book D16 we have a type-c port, which supports video output data, I believe it’s USB 3.1 speeds, from that, so 20 GB per second, we have a USB 3.2 gen 1, and it’s still the 20 GB per second HDMI 1.4 3.5headphone jack, 5 mm with mic support and this is a status LED, and on the right side you will only find a USB 2.0 port, so it will be ideal to plug in your mouse if you are right-handed.
Now let’s take a look, at this 16-inch panel so that it has a matte coating, anti-ar which is good, it means that it is very usable, you don’t get annoying reflections from it, and it is flicker-free certified, so they use pulse width modulation, DC diving.
Now, the brightness of the screen is very good for the style so it goes up well their claim, is 300 nits, and it’s actually 310 exactly, what I measured with my spider Pro, the things on the screen that I find a little disappointing is that it’s 60 HZ only the panel.
Now for office work, and things like that, it’s going to be perfectly fine, but you if you are for example in Chrome, scrolling at 120 is nice, or 90 HZ would have been a little better, if you move things around, that it’s just not going to be as smooth.
I use 120 HZ, all the time, I think 90 with this panel, would have been great.
Now the huawei resolution is 1920×1200, that is, an aspect ratio of 16 x 10.
A laptop, which is of course in a category, which is below their upper end, it’s more the input label on their part, it’s a good passive screen, I just wish it offered a slightly higher resolution, and 90 HZ, would have been much better than 60 HZ.
The frames of the screen, are matte so they reduce the reflections that you will actually get, no reflection from them and a webcam located at the top, it’s 720p I would have preferred 1080p, but a sample in action, for this sample I turned off my powerful studio lights, and just put a normal room, the lighting that most people would use, you can see the quality of the camera for 720p, there is a bit of Rin.
But what I like is that Huawei includes what they did with their more premium range, the matebook pro series, it’s what matches your virtual backgrounds and other things, so what you can do if you want is go change that it’s called the meeting room.
Now, when you insert the virtual backgrounds, it affects the frame rate of the camera a little, it becomes a little more jerky, so there is a bit of a compromise.
The microphones, now these two microphone phones are closer to you because they are right in front of the touchpad, which is why it probably sounds a little better than normal most of the time.
The microphones are on each side of the webcam, we are on Windows.
Now, the screenshot because it makes things a little clearer so that we can all see that, so it’s this 1920 by 1200 resolution, which I talked about before with the screen, that’s why we have the borders on each side, because it’s not 16 by 9, it’s 16 by 10.
I trigger a few gestures with the touchpad to talk a little about this touchpad, I use it at the moment, I find that the accuracy, is good does not jump or jump everywhere, which is another positive point.
So the SSD is a terte, and take a look at how Huawei always does this, they partition it,yeah a little strange because they what they do is they put a 200 GB Windows partition, and then the rest as a spare data drive.
Some people might like that, because if you have files on it, and you do a Windows reset, it will only be formatting and resetting the Windows partition of the window, and you still have your data left.
Now I have a mate pad Pro connected, and that’s because, I use Huawei share, and it’s very convenient, so you’ll see it’s with the built-in software, I can go to this control panel, and I have this mate pad connected camera.
I can turn off the audio devices, and I used a great device.
Now a great device it allows me to seamlessly transfer files, between devices, between my PC, and it’s a really handy software to have, I really do I like it.
You will find more in PC manager, so PC manager, you can use it to update the drivers, I already had a biased update, but if you go to my devices, that’s where I have this mate pad connected, so I can drag and drop the files.
I can also use it as a wireless screen, so extend it, or mirror the screen of my PC, the software is very handy, especially with updates, so the other thing is the performance modes, for all benchmarks.
I’m about to show you that I ran in performance mode, so that you can use it via PC manager, or function and P, to switch between balanced and performance mode, so that’s it for the included software, which they give us their Huawei, and that’s the internal storage speeds, so it’s a pcie 4.0 drive.
But definitely, not the fastest I’ve seen and could you please upgrade it if you removed the back cover, you could add a 2TB drive later, but I believe there is no spare disk in there.
Unfortunately, so geek benchmarks bench six, excellent single core score not being affected by our Ram speeds, which I want to show you very quickly, the ram runs at 3,733 megga or megahertz transfers, as indicated with Windows, so it is lpddr4 X and not LP ddr5.
A faster RAM would benefit, especially the iris XC integrated graphics, but in terms of general performance it doesn’t really make too much difference, with synthetic benchmarks the multicore score is really good.
So it’s not bad at all and cinebench 23, shows again that we get very good performance, of course if we had the fastest Ram, the geekbench score would be slightly better.
The integrated graphics performance would take the biggest advantage from this, so the speed of the corona 93 900h is very good, at this maximum turbo of 5.4 GHz, and I’ll just show you, in the device manager just a few other interesting things that you see, it’s listed there 20 times, 20 threads but it has 14 cores, so it has a lot of power and so it’s great to have that on board.
The iris XE graphics, which I talked about before and the other interesting thing, is that it uses WiFi 6, but not the 6E, and this is Intel’s ax21 the wifi signal strength, about this we have to talk about it is speeds, brilliant transfer, I was very fast and I just noticed that it was picking up many different networks, which I don’t even usually see on.
Laptops, because the configuration of the antenna in the matebook D16, is just that very good wireless thermoses, with the matebook D16 have been interesting, so they have increased up to 99° C, have triggered a thermal limitation.
Now, when this happened, it was only for a brief period, Then the fan accelerated, so it is a little slow to react, but the fan curve is somewhat understandable pulling 65 Watts, but still reaching 99 not good to see.
It’s really only for a few seconds, that he was doing it that later, the temperatures really drop, so much by pulling that 65 Max, really nothing else, to show that the xe graphics reach 1.5 GHz, and the fan noise do you hear it well, most of the time, it’s very quiet, it’s only when you push it very hard, with benchmarks or games, that you will hear this fan it’s not an offensive noise, it’s just a very light wishing noise.
I’m sure this question will come up, you didn’t show just the day-to-day Windows task what about Chrome surfing stuff like that, everything is incredibly fast very fast, I have no problems with it, it works fine start manual pop-ups, we’re talking about a core I9, with these 20 threads, so it’s pretty self-explanatory, that its performance with Wi-Fi 6.
Excellent signal strength, and all that is good, so document the spreadsheets all this kind of general computing, it’s going to be very fast and smooth with our matebook D16, and what do the other speakers like with our matebook D16, they are not too bad down.
So a lot of this sound will of course be reflected, up and down, but they have a bit of a Base to them, the volume is ok and I don’t think they are bad at all for the laptop style, they even sound a bit like some of the gaming laptops I have tested in the past.
So we know, that this is not a 100% gaming laptop, all except the ir6 graphics are perfectly suitable for older titles, this is GTA 5.
Now you can adjust to normal settings, it’s 1080p, I could lower the visual settings a little, to improve performance, and we get about 70 frames per second, so an average of about 60, a little more than 60, it’s playable.
But something like say the ryzen 7000 series, with the Radeon 78m, which makes this game run a little better not a gaming laptop, but if you were I don’t know between meetings a little bored, you wanted to play an older title on the side like GTA 5, maybe even Counter Strike, you can get a pretty decent frame rate.
Finally, what about the battery life, so a 70 W battery, can last for 9 hours, even above that, if you set the brightness, to 30% and you only do light tasks, such as office browsing, multimedia playback, things like that, that’s fine.
Now, their claim is 15 hours with video playback, which is probably fair, maybe they put it in airplane mode for that too, but when you use it with Wi-Fi enabled, it’s around 9 hours, which is excellent, very good, so it’s an improvement over previous models, performance, of this core a 93900 h, excellent fast performance, single core.
And of course, there are the 14 cores and 20 threads, which is a lot, so you can do a lot with that, but the weakness of this model, is the graphics will go 60, now in 2024, it is definitely not the fastest, we now have Intel’s meteor Lake 2, so the timing when this model comes out so late is not exactly brilliant.
Because now we have the new 14th generation, or the multimedia lake with the faster integrated graphics that are about twice as fast as that, the RAM also reaches 16 GB, so for desktop browsing and things like that, it’s okay everything is fine, but for very heavy tasks to be accomplished, maybe of all those cores out there, you probably want 32 GB, RAM that they just don’t offer, there is no second M.2 slot with this we get only one type- C port.
The screen is also only at 60 HZ, which is another minor thing there, but an excellent keyboard, an excellent touchpad webcam for 720p, is not really a pity these very practical virtual backgrounds.
Conclusion :
I still really like that you have the great device from Huawei, which is very convenient to have there and at the very top, it’s a good laptop but yes of course, I hope there will be a future model coming out next year.
This year, hopefully, with the new mete chips that will be really nice to see, and maybe they can refresh this Huawei screen with a different model, with maybe a higher resolution and a slightly better refresh rate, because 60 while being very good does not seem as smooth and as good as 90 HZ, or 120 HZ, with the refresh rate.
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