Huawei MateBook X Pro Core Ultra Premium Edition review

2024-11-20

Huawei's MateBook X Pro lineup is back again with a model for 2024, but it breaks the naming mold - it's not the MateBook X Pro 2024, strictly speaking, it's the MateBook X Pro Core Ultra Premium Edition. But if you don't mind, we'll refer to it by its logical name - the MateBook X Pro 2024.

The name Huawei insists on, signifies that it comes with Intel Core Ultra chipset - the only two processor options on this machine are the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H and the Core Ultra 7 155H. There are no other chip options - nothing from AMD, and indeed no new ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus.

The new MateBook X Pro stays true to the series's roots - it's thin, light, and beautifully crafted. And it's also a leap forward in terms of processing power, cooling, and display technology.

We have the Morandi Blue model with a 2TB SSD and 32GB of RAM - the fully-specced out model that costs around €2,200/£2,100. It ships with a full retail box - a 90W charger, a separate USB-C cable, a USB-C to USB-A dongle, and... USB-C headphones, something we haven't seen in earlier generations of the MateBook X Pro.

Design and build quality

We're fans of the Huawei MateBook X Pro line and have reviewed most models since 2018. We can see how the overall design and feeling can be traced back to that machine. Those who don't know assume it's a MacBook Air lookalike, those who know will tell you it made the Air look like a utilitarian big-bezelled Dell or HP from the mid-naughties back in 2018, and it still looks better than Apple's laptop today.

The latest 2004 model of the MateBook X Pro is a technological masterpiece. Huawei really has a knack for perfecting these thin-and-light performance laptops.

The deck of the MateBook X Pro 2024 has the now-classic full-sized backlit chiclet keyboard with 1.5mm travel and no Numpad. It's flanked by thin speaker grilles. Below it sits a huge trackpad that spills over the edge like an infinity pool. Huawei calls it the Free Touch, and it has vibrating motors to produce press feedback - and they work lovely.

Huawei managed to tuck the MateBook X Pro 2024 just below 1 kilogram at 980g - that's a nearly 30% decrease in weight compared to the previous generation, despite a move to a 15% bigger 70Wh battery. To achieve this, Huawei tinkered with the chassis.

They've also given the laptop a soft-touch finish. It's similar to the "skin-smoothing metallic body" of the previous generation but is softer.

The lid has the usual Huawei logo and nothing else. The MateBook X Pro 2024 is a truly compact laptop when closed. And thanks to its remarkable weight, you can easily forget it's in your bag.

Keyboard, trackpad, display, audio

The deck of the MateBook X Pro 2024 is perfectly symmetrical. The keyboard and trackpad take up most of the space, as they should. The keyboard stretches almost to the very edge, save for the thin grilles for the speakers underneath.

This is the usual superb MateBook X Pro keyboard. It has a firm, pleasant feel to keystrokes and an excellent layout. Most Huawei laptops in the store have a similar-looking keyboard, but once you compare the MateBook X Pro to the cheaper MateBook 14, for instance, you'll immediately notice a better, more positive keyboard clicking on the Pro.

The 2024 MateBook X Pro has three USB-C ports - two Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbps, DisplayPort, Power Delivery) on the left, and another plain USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps, DisplayPort, Power Delivery) on the right. The older model had two USB-C's on each side - this new model swaps one USB-C for a switch to disable the camera drivers as the camera is not hidden under a keyboard key but sits above the display.

The 1080p camera sits in the top bezel above the display, flanked by IR sensors for Windows Hello.

Alternatively, there's the usual power button with a capacitive fingerprint scanner embedded. It supports fingerprint caching, meaning a single press will power on the machine and automatically log you into Windows once it boots to the login screen.

The FreeTouch trackpad is an excellent piece of kit. It's very big for the 14-inch chassis, and its glass surface is smooth for gesture work. This is a solid-state unit, meaning it doesn't depress but uses a vibration motor to simulate clicks. It works great and means you can click anywhere on the surface.

The vibration is tuned perfectly, but you can adjust its strength and sensitivity through Huawei's PC Manager app. It enables intuitive gestures - knock twice with your knuckle to take a screenshot or drag a finger on the right edge of the trackpad for volume control and on the left edge for display brightness.

There are six speakers and four microphones on the MateBook X Pro 2024, the same as on its predecessor. The sound from these speakers is very clear with some bass to underline it and give it some depth. But the volume isn't very impressive - we've heard stronger speaker setups on similarly-sized laptops.

The display of the MateBook X Pro 2024 is its best feature and the key improvement over the previous generation. While the previoys model has a 90Hz LTPS LCD with a peak brightness of 500 nits, here we get a 120Hz OLED that doubles the peak brightness. Naturally, it's still a touchscreen panel.

The display keeps the 14.2-inch 3:2 aspect diagonal with 3210x2080px resolution and 264ppi density, but the move from LCD to OLED is great.

The visuals on this display are excellent. Colors pop, and there's an infinite contrast with very deep shadows and amazingly wide viewing angles. The screen bezels are thin and are slightly rounded at the edges.

HDR content just works on this display - whether you're watching YouTube or Netflix.

The panel shows great uniform brightness. We measured 535 nits in the center, 560 nits in the left corners, and 570 nits in the right corners. We also measured a peak brightness of 952 nits when displaying HDR content.

The panel supports the RGB, P3, and sRGB color gamuts, and Huawei's helpful Display Manager (right click on the desktop, then more options for the old context menu) allows you to choose which gamut you want. It's a great way to tune the display for the content you'll be viewing.

Features, performance and battery life

Being a Huawei laptop, the MateBook X Pro 2024 comes equipped with Huawei's excellent PC Manager app. It controls custom functions of the laptop, like the FreeTouch trackpad, has an in-depth Huawei Sound menu where you can tune the speakers and the microphone, and offers the AI Camera menu, which allows you to tune the camera system-wide to offer a custom background, beautify your face, or try and keep you centered at all times.

If you have a Huawei phone, you can use Super Device to control it from the laptop's screen. You can also share files between the two.

But what makes PC Manager truly great is its Troubleshooting menu, which allows you to diagnose problems with connections, audio, lags and crashes, system software, or others. All of the system's drivers are also under the PC Manager's control. Huawei pushed a few BIOS updates during our time with the MateBook X Pro 2024, and we can say from years of experience with Huawei laptops that long-term software support is excellent.

Huawei pushed the hardware on this generation of MateBook X Pro in a big way. Up until now, the MateBook X Pro used thin-and-light-targeting 28W TDP Intel processors. This year, the series uses Intel's most powerful mobile processor - the 45W (40W in this machine) Core Ultra 9 185H. It's a 7nm SoC with a 16-core processor (6 performance, 8 efficient, 2 low-power efficient cores) and a total of 22 threads. The CPU's P-cores can theoretically hit up to 5.1GHz, but you won't see much past 3.0GHz.

Graphics are handled by the Intel Arc GPU with 8 Xe cores, Ray Tracing support, and a clock speed of 2.35GHz at the top end. It's rated at 4.81 TFLOPS to the 2.3 TFLOPS of the Xe graphics in the old i7-1360P chip.

Finally, this Core Ultra Premium Edition has 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD.

To put all of that into perspective, the MateBook X Pro 2024 brings around 20% processing improvement and nearly 50% graphics improvement, all while being a little more efficient than its predecessor.

Where the new machine is most impressive is cooling. Huawei claims a 50% boost to air pressure and 22% higher overall airflow.

We tested the MateBook X Pro 2024 for office work, some photo editing with Photoshop and Lightroom, and some light gaming (mostly Age of Empires Definitive Edition, which scaled to the machine's 3000x2000px resolution and pushed around 100fps). The PCIe 4.0 SSD showed great speed and sustained performance.

Performance was excellent. Now, you could argue that such a potent processor could do with dedicated discrete graphics, but it defeats the thin-and-light design of the MateBook X Pro 2024. A version with Qualcomm's new ARM processors, on the other hand, would make a lot more sense, but it's unlikely to happen thanks to Western-imposed sanctions.

Huawei wants its premium thin laptops to be quiet and refined, and to not be uncomfortably warm during use. The MateBook X Pro 2024 is tuned just like all of its predecessors we've tested over the years - for a balance between performance and comfort. Additionally, you can choose between two performance modes - Balanced, and Performance.

We carried out a one-hour CPU stress test in Performance mode to see how the MateBook X Pro 2024 will handle itself.

The CPU briefly ramped up to 3.2GHz but then immediately dropped down to 2.66Ghz where it stayed for the rest of the test - moving a hundred MHz up or down ever so often. The laptop's fans were constantly on and at their highest RPM, which produced a noise level of 50dB at arm's length - perfectly acceptable in an office environment.

Even better, the laptop didn't get uncomfortably warm.

This year, the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 uses a 15% bigger 70Wh battery. We ran our usual YouTube streaming test and a browser test, both in Balanced mode at 400 nits and for the video test, at 80 dB. That's both a bright display and loud speakers.

The laptop managed 7 hours of streaming and 8 hours of browsing on a loop. Those are solid results.

Charging is also excellent with the provided 90W SuperCharge Turbo adapter. It takes the machine from 0% to full in just under two hours.

Conclusion

As configured, the MateBook X Pro 2024 costs €2,200/£2,100. That's for the top-of-the-line Core 9 Ultra 185H with 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It doesn't leave you wanting for anything in terms of performance, and we'd say the ergonomics, display, and overall feel are second to none.

You know the phrase "You get what you pay for" - with the 2024 MateBook X Pro, you're getting the best ultraportable laptop. It makes the 1.24kg 13.6-inch MacBook Air look porkish and has a better port selection than the Apple machine and than competitors like the similarly-priced Dell XPS 13.

One thing we would have wished for is to get a wider choice of processors. Intel's Core 9 Ultra is excellent, don't get us wrong, but Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite would suit this type of machine much better. And it would bring out the best out of the 70Wh battery in a way Intel's silicon simply can't. But a move to ARM is seemingly out of the question for Huawei at the moment.

Pros

• Extremely light at just under 1kg
• Well-built, premium feel
• Impressive OLED display with 500 nits of SDR and 950 nits of HDR brightness
• Good port selection with charging options on both sides
• Solid performance, good battery life
• Great package - 90W charger, USB-C to USB-A dongle, USB-C earbuds

Cons

• Expensive
• Only Intel processors, no AMD and no ARM
• no USB-A or HDMI ports
• OLED panel draws more power than LCD of old

The MateBook X Pro 2024 is an excellent laptop and doesn't seem to have a single weak spot. It's impossibly light and very powerful, it has a gorgeous OLED display, and you can take it anywhere, and it's up to any task you may throw at it. Great job, Huawei - you've knocked it out of the park!