Laptops - Appuals

The 5 Best Laptops for Small Businesses in 2024 [All Budgets]

Khalid Ali — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 23:11:52 +0000

Laptops are a must-have for every business, much like a second brain, but better at managing spreadsheets, processing orders, video meetings with many people at once, and creating presentations for upcoming product releases.

Laptops are the go-to tools for small businesses until we can connect with our phones through virtual reality. Choosing the right one from the thousands available can be challenging, but don’t worry. We’ve done the legwork by consulting IT pros and business owners to narrow down your search.

In this guide, we’ll show you what to look for in the best laptop for small business and review the top 5 options to consider.

What should the best laptop for small business have?
The Best Laptops for Small Business
Why we selected these 5 laptops for small businesses?
Which one should you pick for your small business?

What should the best laptop for small business have?

Choosing the right laptop is crucial for small businesses, directly impacting productivity, efficiency, and overall operations. To ensure that your business is equipped with the best tool for the job, it’s essential to consider a range of factors that align with your specific needs and priorities.

Here are some features and considerations when selecting the best laptop for your small business:

Performance: The laptop must feature sufficient processing power and RAM to handle business applications seamlessly. Minimum RAM should be 8GB, with 16GB recommended for more demanding tasks.
Portability: Opt for a lightweight and compact design for easy mobility. Laptops weighing around 3 pounds or less are ideal for portability.
Battery Life: Aim for a battery life of at least 8 hours to sustain productivity throughout the workday.
Security Features: Essential security features such as fingerprint scanners or TPM for encryption should be included to protect sensitive business data.
Connectivity: Essential ports such as USB Type-A, USB Type-C, HDMI, and Ethernet should enable seamless connectivity with peripherals and networks.
Budget: While considering features and specifications, ensure the laptop falls within your budget range without compromising essential requirements.

The Best Laptops for Small Business

We’ve researched the market and compiled a list of the top five laptops from well-known brands. These laptops have long-lasting batteries and strong processors, giving you all you need to excel in business activities. Keep reading to discover which one is the perfect match for you.

1. Apple MacBook Air M1

Best Value for Money

Pros

The M1 chip gives amazing speed
Apps made for Intel chips run smoothly
Long-lasting battery
The screen is sharp and colorful
You can use iPhone and iPad apps on it

Cons

It only has two USB-C ports for plugging things in
It still has thick bezels
Heating issues are normal

Check Price

Specs

Processor: Apple M1 8-Core Processor
Memory: 8-16 GB RAM
Display: 13.3-inch Retina Display, 2560 x 1600 resolution
Battery: Up to 15 hours of web, up to 18 hours of video playback
Weight: 2.8 pounds

The MacBook Air M1 is a top pick for anyone running a small business due to its powerful M1 chip by Apple. This sleek laptop packs a punch, making it perfect for those needing strong performance to complete their day-to-day tasks.

It’s about more than just speed; this laptop is great at handling multiple tasks at once. Whether it’s dealing with numbers, creating designs, or editing videos, the MacBook Air M1 does it all smoothly, keeping your work flowing without any hitches.

MacBook Air M1 | Apple

You can choose up to 16GB of RAM and a massive 2TB of SSD storage, giving you plenty of space and speed for all your projects. The visuals on this laptop are also something to talk about. With its impressive Retina display, everything from presentations to video meetings and bringing your ideas to life looks better than ever.

Connectivity is another strong point of the MacBook Air M1, a plus point for small businesses. It comes with Thunderbolt 3 ports, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.0, making it easy to connect to the internet and other devices anywhere your business takes you.

The M1 chip means this laptop performs much better than older models, with tests showing faster CPU and graphics speeds. It runs on macOS 13.2 Ventura, which adds handy features for screen sharing and staying connected.

Whether you’re working from your home office, seeing clients, or on the go, the MacBook Air M1 is an excellent laptop for small business owners.

2. Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon

Best Overall

Pros

Good speed and battery lasts a long time
Top-notch keyboard for typing
Thin and lightweight still has lots of plug-in spots
Decent speakers
Very durable and built to last

Cons

Missing slots for SD or microSD cards
It costs a lot of money
You can't get it with a 4K screen anymore

Check Price

Specs

Processor: 13th Gen Intel Core i7-1365U vPro
Memory: 16 GB LPDDR5-6400MHz (Soldered)
Storage: 1 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 Performance TLC Opal
Display: 14″ WUXGA (1920 x 1200) IPS, Anti-Glare,
Battery: 57 Watt-hour battery (13 hours and 45 minutes battery life)
Weight: 2.5 lbs

If you’re running a small business and need a powerful laptop that is easy to carry and great for all kinds of tasks, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a solid choice. It’s stylish and packed with top-notch features, perfect for work.

This laptop is super light, weighing just 2.5 pounds, so it’s easy to take anywhere. But don’t let its slim and light design fool you—its MIL–STD–810H certification makes it tough enough to handle drops and everyday challenges, meaning your investment is safe and sound.

The X1 Carbon runs on an Intel Core i7-1365U vPro. This gives it plenty of power to multitask, run business programs, and keep up with your busy schedule without lagging, especially with 16GB of RAM supporting smooth operations even with heavy software.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon | Lenevo

The 14-inch touchscreen makes everything look clear and sharp, though it might need to be brighter and more color-accurate than other laptops. Still, it gives you enough space for work, like managing spreadsheets, documents, and presentations.

Security is key for small businesses, and this laptop has you covered with a fingerprint reader on the power button and an optional face-recognition camera for secure logins. It also comes with the same tough durability certification, ready to take on the demands of daily work life.

For plugging in extras, the X1 Carbon includes several ports: Thunderbolt 4, USB 3.2, HDMI, and a headphone jack. You can easily connect to other devices, screens, and accessories.

With its portability, power, and strong security features, this laptop is ideal for small businesses and startups. It ensures that you stay productive and secure wherever you are.

3. HP ProBook 450 G9

Best for Performance

Pros

High-performance Intel Core i7 processor.
Durable with spill-resistant keyboard with wide numeric keypad.
Sufficient storage with 512 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.
Integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics for quality visuals
HP security management tools for enhanced protection

Cons

Limited GPU performance with power constraints.
Standard brightness at 250 nits may affect outdoor visibility.
There is only 45% NTSC color gamut on the display.

11 Reviews

Check Price

Specs

Processor: Intel Core i7-1255U Intel Turbo Boost Technology
Memory: 8 GB DDR4-3200 MHz RAM
Storage: 512 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD
Display: 15.6″ diagonal, FHD (1920 x 1080), IPS
Battery: HP Long Life 3-cell, 42 Wh Li-ion
Weight: Starting at 1.74 kg

If you are finding a strong and high performing laptop for your small business, the HP ProBook 450 G9 is an excellent example of high efficiency and strong durability. It is designed for small business people who need dependability and power in their work tools.

It stands out in the ProBook series by offering a good mix of features that suit everyday needs and demanding tasks, all without costing too much money.

This laptop is powered by Intel’s Core i7-1255U processor, making it very efficient. It’s part of the Alder Lake-U series and competes well with similar processors. The ProBook 450 G9 works quietly and stays cool, even when used for challenging tasks.

HP ProBook 450 G9 | HP

With Intel Iris Xe Graphics, the ProBook 450 G9 does well with graphics-heavy activities, like editing business videos or working with demanding graphic design software.

Its 15.6-inch Full HD screen is bright and clear, showing sharp and vibrant pictures. The screen also has a special coating to reduce glare, so you can work long hours without your eyes getting tired, keeping you productive even in bright or reflective environments.

The laptop has plenty of storage and memory, with a 512 GB SSD and 8 GB DDR4-3200 MHz RAM. This means it starts quickly and can handle many tasks at once without slowing down.

The HP ProBook 450 G9 has a versatile range of ports, including one USB Type-C port capable of 10Gbps data transfer, which also supports power delivery and DisplayPort connections. It also offers three USB Type-A ports with a 5Gbps signaling rate, including one for charging and another for power, alongside an AC power input.

It also has an HD webcam that, together with HP’s noise-reducing software, makes business meetings great in both visuals and sound.

Security is taken seriously, with options like a fingerprint scanner, TPM 2.0, and HP Wolf Security to protect against online threats, making it ideal for startups. The ProBook 450 G9’s keyboard is resistant to spills so that a little accident won’t ruin your day.

4. Dell XPS 13

Best for Multitasking

Pros

A lightweight & portable design ideal for travel.
High-performance 12th Gen Intel Core i7 processor
512GB SSD offers ample storage space
Bright and clear FHD+ display enhances visuals
Integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics for quality graphics

Cons

Limited port selection requires adapters
High specs may impact battery life
Premium features at a higher price point

Check Price

Specs

Processor: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1250U
Display: 13.4″, FHD+ 1920×1200, Anti-Glare
Memory: 8 GB LPDDR5, 5200 MT/s
Storage: 512 GB PCIe x2 NVMe SSD
Battery Life: 3 Cell, 51 Wh, Up to 12 hours with FHD+ non-touch
Weight: 2.59 lb (1.17 kg) minimum

A reliable and powerful laptop is crucial for small businesses. The Dell XPS 13 is a solution and a game-changer with its top-notch features and strong performance.

The Dell XPS 13’s main attraction is its 12th-generation Intel Core i7 processor. This four-core beast makes multitasking and demanding tasks seem effortless. Despite its base speed of 1.3GHz, which can boost up to 3.9GHz, it’s built to perform well without draining the battery quickly.

The Dell XPS 13 stands out with its storage and memory capabilities, featuring an 8 GB LPDDR5, 5200 MT/s memory, and a 512 GB PCIe x2 NVMe SSD. These specs ensure the laptop handles storage demands and multitasking efficiently, making it suitable for various small business’s tasks.

The XPS 13 stands out for its connectivity features. It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports for quick data transfers and connecting to various displays or devices, boosting productivity. A microSD card reader lets you add more storage, and Wi-Fi 6 offers speedy and stable internet connections, which are essential for any business.

Dell XPS 13 | Dell

One of the Dell XPS 13’s standout features is its 13.4-inch FHD Anti-Glare InfinityEdge display. The nearly edgeless screen makes everything from presentations to video calls look fantastic, with sharp and precise details. The option for a touch screen adds an extra level of interaction, which is ideal for presentations and other hands-on tasks.

Its design is both stylish and tough, ready to handle daily business tasks and light enough to take on the go, weighing only 2.59 lb. This makes the XPS 13 perfect for traveling to meetings or business trips.

For small businesses, security is a big deal, and the XPS 13 takes it seriously with a fingerprint reader built into the power button. This, along with Windows Hello, provides a secure and quick way to access your laptop, keeping your business information safe.

5. Microsoft Surface 5

Best Efficiency

Pros

Sleek & minimalist design with a new sage green color option
Comfortable viewing without aggressive PWM
Magnetic Surface Connect port for convenient charging and docking
Decent battery life for productivity tasks
Premium touchpad and keyboard experience

Cons

Lacks a card reader for direct media access
No Ethernet LAN port for wired internet connections.
It is missing a security lock slot for physical device security.

303 Reviews

Check Price

Specs

Processor: 12th Gen Intel Core i7-1255U, Intel Evo platform
Memory: 8GB, 16GB LPDDR5x RAM
Storage: 56GB, 512GB Removable SSDs
Display: 13.5″ PixelSense Display, 2256 x 1504 (201 PPI
Battery Life: Up to 18 hours
Weight: Fabric 2.80 lbs, Metal: 2.86 lbs

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 is an excellent tool for small business owners, blending a stylish look, strong performance, and great flexibility. It runs on the latest 12th Gen Intel processors, ensuring it can keep up with the fast pace of today’s business tasks.

You can choose between an Intel Core i5-1235U or Core i7-1255U processor. Moving to these 12th-generation CPUs means better efficiency and more power, letting business people handle demanding tasks like analyzing data or creating content smoothly.

The Surface Laptop 5 excels in performance and storage capacity, equipped with 8 GB or 16 GB of LPDDR5x RAM options and removable SSDs ranging from 256 GB to 1 TB. This configuration ensures the laptop can efficiently manage various tasks and store significant data, making it a versatile choice for both work and personal use.

The Surface Laptop 5 stands out for its thin design and light build, especially the 13.5″ version that starts at just 2.80 lbs for fabric and 2.86 lbs for metal. It’s perfect for small business people who are always on the move.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 5 | Microsoft

The touchscreen PixelSense display works with the Surface Pen and Surface Dial, offering bright colors and sharp details that can boost your productivity and creativity. The screen’s 3:2 aspect ratio also means less scrolling when working on documents or online.

The Surface Laptop 5 features a range of connectivity ports, including a USB-C port that supports USB 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4 for high-speed data transfer and external display capabilities.

It also includes a USB-A 3.1 port for traditional USB devices, a 3.5mm headphone jack for audio connections, and a Surface Connect port, enhancing its versatility in connecting various accessories, charging, and docking.

The 13.5″ model can last up to 18 hours on a single charge, making the Surface Laptop 5 ready to support long workdays. It’s easy-to-carry design makes it simple for small business owners to switch between the office, client meetings, and work from anywhere.

Why we selected these 5 laptops for small businesses?

Selecting the ideal laptop for small businesses involves balancing performance, cost, and reliability. We’ve chosen these five laptops for small businesses based on critical criteria that meet the diverse needs and constraints typical of smaller operations. Here’s why these models stand out:

Budget-friendly without compromise

Budget friendly without compromise | AlexanderImages vis Canva

All selected laptops are within a modest price range of $600 to $1200. This range is particularly appealing for small businesses with significant budget constraints.

Despite their affordability, these laptops do not compromise on essential features such as performance, durability, and battery life. They offer the best value for money, providing small businesses with the necessary tools without breaking the bank.

Availability of refurbished and used options

The market for the chosen laptops is extensive. Along with new ones, you can easily get refurbished and used ones. This availability is crucial for small businesses looking to optimize their expenditures further.

Refurbished and used laptops are often in excellent condition and come from businesses that regularly update their IT equipment. These options allow small businesses to access high-quality laptops at a fraction of the cost of buying new ones, making premium features and robust performance more accessible.

Battery life & performance

Battery life and performance | triloks via Canva

These laptops are chosen for their ability to keep businesses running smoothly, long battery life, and strong performance. They’re equipped to handle multitasking and business applications efficiently, ensuring productivity isn’t hindered by frequent recharges or slow processing.

Durability & reliability

These laptops are designed to withstand the demands of small business operations with their durable build and proven performance reliability. They’re built to minimize downtime and maintenance costs, ensuring businesses operate smoothly without frequent interruptions.

Connectivity options

Connectivity options | AnderwAngelov via Canva

These laptops are made to easily fit into different work setups with their wide range of connection options. They come with modern USB-C/Thunderbolt ports, HDMI, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth for easy and fast connections to devices and the internet, helping work and teamwork flow smoothly.

Which one should you pick for your small business?

If you’re looking for the perfect small business laptop, we’ve explored options like the Lenovo X1 Carbon, Dell XPS 13, Microsoft Surface 5, and HP ProBook G9 450. Each offers strengths from powerful performance and durability to flexibility, meeting various business needs efficiently.

The Apple MacBook Air M1 is the prime choice for its supreme performance, battery life, and reliability. The revolutionary M1 chip redefines what’s possible in a lightweight laptop, offering blistering performance that can easily tackle any business task.

Its exceptional battery life ensures you can work through the longest days without searching for a power outlet, while the robust build quality and macOS ecosystem offer reliability and a seamless user experience. The MacBook Air M1’s connectivity and security features make it a wise choice for businesses prioritizing data protection and versatility.

The post The 5 Best Laptops for Small Businesses in 2024 [All Budgets] appeared first on Appuals.

Best Laptop for Working From Home in 2024

Kamil Anwar — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 16:08:47 +0000

The global spread of COVID-19 pushed many businesses to implement more remote work policies. If you’ve recently made the switch or are considering switching to working from home, there’s one piece of equipment you must have, a personal computer. While most people can make do with Chromebooks, sometimes a true laptop is what you need.

Despite the widespread use of desktop computers, most remote workers favor laptops due to their accessibility and versatility. But the question is, which laptop is ideal for working from home? Here we’ll help you choose the most suitable laptop for remote work. Not only that, but we also compiled a list of our top picks for laptop computers for remote working.

1. Apple MacBook Pro M2 (16-inches)

The Flagship Laptop

Pros

Industry-leading battery life
Top-notch performance
Highest quality audio
Beautifully vivid screen

Cons

Expensive RAM and SSD upgrades
Distracting notch in the display
Doesn't support facial recognition

CPU: Apple M2 Pro or M2 Max (up to 12 cores) | GPU: Up to 38-core GPU | Memory: Up to 96 GB | Display: 16.2

Check Price

If you’re looking for a top-of-the-line laptop that can handle almost everything, your best bet is the new MacBook Pro 16″, the finest laptop for working from home. It has Apple’s largest Retina display, the fastest processor, and every other feature you need to get work done, making it one of the most powerful laptops Apple has ever produced.

You can choose from five configurations of the 16-inch MacBook Pro, each with its chip, solid-state drive (SSD), and graphics processing unit (GPU).

In this new MacBook Pro, apps can now efficiently communicate data between the CPU, GPU, and neural engine due to the M2 processors’ lightning-fast unified memory, which provides a single pool of high-bandwidth, low-latency memory.

Because of its efficiency, unified memory allows your Mac to run more applications concurrently without slowing down. To facilitate multitasking and the management of large files, the MacBook Pro can be outfitted with up to 32GB of RAM (with M2 Pro) or an astounding 96GB (with M2 Max and 38-core GPU).

Apple MacBook Pro M2 | Apple

Support for faster WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, as well as HDMI 2.1 with resolutions up to 8K, greater maximum RAM, and longer battery life, are all new additions to the 2023 MacBook Pro.

The new M2 Pro chip provides noticeable performance improvements over the already very fast M1 Pro chips, with benchmarks showing increases of up to 14% in CPU speed and up to 22% in graphics performance. That makes it competitive with the finest laptop chips from Intel and AMD but with much lower power consumption.

All modern Macs run the macOS 13.2 Ventura operating system, including this one. It functions the same way as earlier versions and is not too dissimilar to Windows. Still, it has helpful screen-sharing and proximity features, allowing you to use a modern iPad as a second screen or operate it remotely.

The top and sides of the screen have thin bezels of 3.5 mm, and there is a notch at the top of the display to accommodate the 1080p webcam. Both screens use ProMotion technology, allowing for variable refresh rates between 24 and 120 Hz.

2. Dell XPS 15 OLED

Best High-End Option

Pros

Extremely fast processing thanks to latest Alder Lake CPUs
Extended battery life
Excellent heat management system
Ergonomic keyboard and touchpad

Cons

Limited to only USB-C ports
The GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU isn't super-fast
The 720p webcam is a disappointment

Check Price

If you’re a professional who values speed, flexibility, and portability, go no further than the Dell XPS 15 OLED laptop. This laptop is perfect for pros who require a robust machine when working from home because of its 15.6-inch OLED screen, Intel Core i7 processor, up to 64 GB of RAM, and 8TB of the latest solid-state storage.

The screen of the Dell XPS 15 OLED laptop is a major selling point. Colors are more brilliant, and blacks are deeper on OLED screens than on LCD screens, giving a more lifelike viewing experience. Professionals regularly using high-quality pictures, films, or design software will value the screen’s 3456 x 2160 pixel resolution.

The Core i7-12700H comes from Intel’s 45-watt mobile CPU, Alder Lake-H. Intel’s new hybrid architecture combines high performance with power-saving cores. A total of 20 threads are spread over its 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores.

Dell XPS 15 OLED | Dell

With the standard 16GB of RAM installed, it can run multiple browser tabs simultaneously, multitask between Office applications, and easily create basic documents and presentations.

Compared to the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H commonly found in competing products, this chip is slightly more powerful and leagues ahead of the low-power Core i7 CPUs utilized in lighter laptops. The XPS from Dell is never too warm to the touch or too noisy to be a nuisance.

Dell’s unique Mobile Connect function is built in, allowing you to sync up your device with a smartphone for simple file sharing, screen mirroring, and other mobile device integration tasks. Signing in using a fingerprint reader or Windows Hello camera is smooth.

The two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, one USB 3.2 Type-C connector, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an SD reader, and a wedge-shaped lock slot should be sufficient for most individuals, and Dell includes USB-A and HDMI adapters in the box.

The XPS has Intel Killer WiFi 6 1675 (AX211) 2×2 + Bluetooth 5.2 Wireless Card, similar to what is featured in many of Dell’s dedicated gaming notebooks. Bluetooth 5.2 links peripherals like a headset, gamepad, or mouse.

3. Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5

Best Mid-Range Option

Pros

Strong and easily portable
Good enough resolution with sufficient space
The keyboard is easy to type on
Features pen input for handwritten notes

Cons

Battery life is compromised
The laptop-only version with integrated GPU isn't powerful enough for intensive tasks
Reflections are a problem on the glossy screen

Check Price

The Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 is a powerful, adaptable 2-in-1 notebook perfect for telecommuting workers. The Flex 5i is distinguished from other Lenovo laptops by its convertible design, allowing a smooth transition between laptop and tablet modes.

The laptop’s 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor delivers a robust and responsive experience even when working on intensive projects. In addition, it has an Intel UHD Graphics card, which can handle graphics tasks such as running games at lower settings or graphically heavy programs.

The 14-inch Full HD IPS touchscreen display provides sharp, detailed images with true-to-life color reproduction. The screen is anti-glare, so you can work for long periods without experiencing any discomfort in your eyes.

Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i | Lenovo

The laptop has a 512GB PCIe M.2 solid-state drive and up to 16GB of DDR4 memory. The laptop can run multiple programs simultaneously easily and quickly by combining RAM with an SSD. The IdeaPad Flex 5i includes an HD 720p fixed focus webcam with a privacy shutter for video conferencing and online meetings.

The laptop has multiple connectors for hooking up to other devices, such as monitors and hard drives, making it convenient to use with various peripherals. These include two USB-A 3.1 Gen 1 ports, one USB-C (Gen1 with PD) port, a 4-in-1 card reader, and an HDMI 1.4b port. Fast and reliable wireless connectivity is ensured by the inclusion of both WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0.

Those who work from home and require a versatile and powerful laptop will find the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i an ideal choice. This convertible is dependable for the long haul and on the go owing to features like its fast 2×2 WiFi 6 802.11 ax connection and sizable battery.

A privacy shutter and fingerprint reader (optional) are available for a security. Lenovo digital pen and keyboard backlit make this machine a complete package.

4. Microsoft Surface Book 3

Best Premium 2-in-1

Pros

Detachable screen with 3:2 aspect ratio
Powerful 10th Gen CPU
Excellent keyboard and trackpad
Brilliant display
All-day battery life

Cons

Screen might be small for some
No Thunderbolt support
Unstable screen

600 Reviews

Check Price

The Surface Book 3 has the most powerful graphics of any Surface notebook due to the latest NVIDIA® GeForce GTX GPU, up to 16 GB of memory, and 2TB of storage. This laptop runs Windows quite well.

What is new, or at least new for the Surface Book 3, is the 10th Gen Intel processor, in this case, an Intel Core i7-1065G7. It is a quad-core CPU that can boost to 3.9GHz on a single core and has a base clock of 1.3GHz. It’s more of an efficient processor than a performance one. Still, with four real Intel cores, it should be able to handle heavy computational jobs beyond just casual web browsing and video streaming.

The Surface Book 3 has a full-size SDXC card reader, 2 USB-A (version 3.1 Gen 2) ports, and a more adaptable 1 USB-C (version 3.1 Gen 2 with USB Power Delivery revision 3.0) port. A Surface Connect port for charging and connecting an expensive dock and a 3.5mm jack can be found on the Surface Book 3’s keyboard dock.

Microsoft Surface Book 3 | Amazon

The crisp PixelSense touchscreen display, which comes in at either 13.5″ or 15″, supports touch, Surface Pen, and Surface Dial. The 15-inch screen can be detached with a button and used as a covert tablet. This means that, unlike conventional laptops, the Surface Book 3’s components are in the lid rather than the bottom.

With Windows Hello and its TPM 2.0 module, the Surface Book 3 13.5 can be unlocked only with a glance. No additional safety features, such as a fingerprint reader, are available.

5. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10

Flagship Alternative

Pros

Conveniently small; lightweight; and sturdy
Flexible setup options
Both the keyboard and the audio system are top-notch
Discreet
high-definition 1080p webcam

Cons

Poor battery life
There is no SD/MicroSD card slot
No specialized GPU

2 Reviews

CPU: Intel Core i7-1280P | GPU: Intel Iris Xe Graphics (integrated) | Memory: Up to 32GB LPDDR5 5200Mhz | Display: Up to 14

Check Price

The 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 is a beautiful notebook for work-from-home professionals. It is quite lightweight despite being well-built. It has various configuration options (including mobile broadband), a fantastic keyboard, superb speakers, and the 1080p webcam essential for modern work.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 features the iconic nipple mouse pointer and a two-level backlit keyboard. Given the compact size, Lenovo provides all the necessary connectors, including two USB Type-A ports, a full-size HDMI connector, and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports.

The Gen 10 model of the Lenovo X1 Carbon was released with a few minor updates, such as a new 16:10 display in place of the previous 16:9 screen and two standard Thunderbolt connections in place of Lenovo’s semi-proprietary docking port.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 | Lenovo

The only visible difference between the Gen 9 and Gen 10 models is a slightly elevated area above the webcam on the display’s bezel on the Gen 10 model, likely to accommodate the higher-resolution 1080p webcam (the Gen 9 used a 720p one).

The Intel Wireless AX211 (2×2) is a new addition compared to the previous one. The AX211 is an upgrade over the AX201 since it is compatible with the latest WiFi standard, 6E. For better low-light performance, Lenovo increased the resolution from 720p to 1080p for their camera, and the X1 Carbon G10 also has an f/2.0 aperture.

Many different ThinkPad configurations are available. Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Carbon G10 further complicates matters by offering two distinct CPU classes: Intel Alder Lake in its U15 and P28 guises and vPro Enterprise and vPro Essential editions.

Neither AMD processors nor separate graphics processing units are being considered. The soldered memory can now hold up to 32GB of LPDDR5-5200 memory. The M.2 2280 slot on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2022 can still hold up to 2 terabytes of data.

Factors to consider when choosing work from home laptop

Deciding which laptops are the best for a home office cannot be easy. Several factors like weight, portability, extended battery life, and many more should be considered.

Weight, size, and form

An easy to carry laptop for working from home | blackCAT Via Canva

Laptops are intended to be portable, but their portability depends on their weight, size, and design. Typically, laptops range in size from 11.6-inches way up to 17.3-inches. It’s more inconvenient to take around a larger laptop weighing anywhere from 1.8 kg to 3.6 kg.

So you should probably stick to a smaller, thinner laptop that weighs less than 1.5 kg. Just verify and pick the proper balance of features, as some smaller laptops do not support high-end Intel Core or AMD Ryzen CPUs and discrete GPUs.

Battery life

Choosing a long battery life device might help you limit your options. A laptop with eight to ten hours or more battery life is ideal for working from home. This way, you won’t have to worry about finding a charging station every few hours.

The standard recommendation is eight to ten hours. Excellent laptops that can be used for 18 hours on a single charge are now available. Battery ratings can be checked in Watt-hours (Wh) or milliampere-hours (mAh), but they don’t exactly represent real-world usage, so make sure to check reviews before deciding on one.

Processing Power

A super fast processor (CPU) | 12963734 Via Canva

To put it simply, a laptop’s processor is its brain. In a significant way, it affects how quickly and efficiently a laptop operates. A better CPU allows quicker load times, smoother multitasking, and less lag when doing CPU-intensive tasks.

The number of cores don’t matter today as much as they used to 5 years ago, due to the advent of Intel’s big.LITTLE hybrid architecture and Ryzen cores getting more and more powerful each year. A quad-core CPU should be more than enough for day-to-day tasks in 2023, but aim for 8-core or higher if you plan on doing intense tasks like video editing.

For example, an Intel Core i7 11th generation CPU will typically perform better than an older Intel Core i7 8th generation CPU but will cost more. It’s also important to note that newer CPUs may consume more power, affecting battery life.

As for the memory, get at least 8GB of RAM, but going higher will only help you future-proof your system and ensure it doesn’t slow down under load. You need more memory if you plan on working with videos or images as editing them takes up a good chunk of your RAM which will generate lag if there aren’t enough resources.

Usability

An easy-to-use laptop with no setup will be a lifesaver when constantly moving. A laptop’s usability is greatly enhanced by the thoughtful design of its keyboard and touchpad. Try to find a keyboard with a layout and spacing that works well for you, preferably one with backlighting so you can type even if the lights are out.

A 2-in-1 laptop can serve two purposes, depending on your preferences and requirements. These touch-screen devices are versatile, serving as both a laptop and a tablet due to the screen’s ability to rotate 360 degrees.

Security

While working from home, the security of your system is a major concern. As most offices have built-in security for their systems and networks, this is not the case while working from home. So a laptop with excellent security features will serve best for this purpose.

To unlock and gain access to any files on a personal laptop running a modern version of Windows, a PIN code or even a facial scan can be required. Ensure that your perfect laptop has features for added security.

Webcam

Video call meetings are common while working from home | fizkes Via Canva

Since your zoom meetings and presentations will be conducted online, you must have a high-quality webcam if you work from home. If you don’t have this, you can have trouble accessing the necessary web content for your job.

Final Thoughts

As remote work continues to be the norm, a reliable laptop is essential for anyone who wants to work from home effectively. The Apple MacBook Pro M2 and the Dell XPS 15 OLED are excellent choices for anyone needing a high-performing laptop.

The MacBook Pro is a top-of-the-line laptop with a large Retina display, fast processing speed, and all the features you need to get work done, while the Dell XPS 15 OLED has a powerful processor and an OLED display that produces brighter colors and deeper blacks.

Ultimately, the choice between the two comes from personal preference and specific needs. Still, both laptops are excellent options for anyone looking for a reliable, high-performing laptop for remote work.

The post Best Laptop for Working From Home in 2024 appeared first on Appuals.

The 9 Best i7 Windows Laptops To Buy In 2024

Hassam Nasir — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 23:24:28 +0000

The Intel Core i7 CPUs are among the fastest and most powerful processors that are available for laptops. The Core i7 line offers much better performance than the Core i3 or Core i5 CPUs, but it is not as power-hungry or super expensive as the Core i9 family of CPUs.

This makes the Core i7 a perfect balance for most laptops out there, be it for office work or heavier tasks such as gaming. Be sure to check out our picks for the best motherboard for i7 13700K as well.

We have selected the very best Core i7 Windows laptops on the market and ranked them to find out which laptop truly stands out from the crowd. You can be sure to find the perfect Core i7 laptop for your use case in this list.

Let’s jump right in.

The Best Performance Core i7 Windows Laptop – Our Picks

#	Product Name	Award	Details
1	Dell XPS 13 9310	Best Overall i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
2	MSI GL66	Best Gaming i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
3	Dell Inspiron 13 5310	Best Office i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
4	Acer Nitro 5	Best i7 Windows Laptop In Thermal Performance	Check Price
5	ASUS TUF Dash 15	Best Budget i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
6	Razer Blade Pro 17	Best 360Hz i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
7	Acer Predator Helios 300	Best Built i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
8	ASUS ZenBook 14	Best Designed i7 Windows Laptop	Check Price
9	Lenovo Legion 7i	Most Robust i7 Windows Laptop	17 Reviews Check Price

#	1
Preview
Product Name	Dell XPS 13 9310
Award	Best Overall i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	2
Preview
Product Name	MSI GL66
Award	Best Gaming i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	3
Preview
Product Name	Dell Inspiron 13 5310
Award	Best Office i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	4
Preview
Product Name	Acer Nitro 5
Award	Best i7 Windows Laptop In Thermal Performance
Details	Check Price

#	5
Preview
Product Name	ASUS TUF Dash 15
Award	Best Budget i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	6
Preview
Product Name	Razer Blade Pro 17
Award	Best 360Hz i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	7
Preview
Product Name	Acer Predator Helios 300
Award	Best Built i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	8
Preview
Product Name	ASUS ZenBook 14
Award	Best Designed i7 Windows Laptop
Details	Check Price

#	9
Preview
Product Name	Lenovo Legion 7i
Award	Most Robust i7 Windows Laptop
Details	17 Reviews Check Price

Last Update on 2024-04-26 at 01:44 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Why you should trust us when it comes to buying laptops

At appuals.com, we love to test out laptops. Our highly enthusiastic team is well-versed in the intricacies of laptops and we look forward to upcoming innovations in this field.

Hassam Nasir, our resident PC hardware guru, has been writing laptop reviews since the time of the Compaq Presario.

You might say that he enjoys delving into the finer points of PC hardware, such as thermal evaluation, acoustic testing, display analysis, and so on. Since he has been fixated on PC technology since the days of the Apple Powerbook G4, his knowledge should come as no surprise.

In spite of this, we don’t only depend on our past knowledge; we test each laptop thoroughly before reporting about it. We check for issues with performance, thermal competence, and acoustic profiles among other aspects.

Quality and durability testing of laptops is where our team really shines. When writing our reviews, we always keep the user’s perspective in mind. We can help you in your search for a suitable laptop, whether you require a cheap alternative or the best one available.

1. Dell XPS 13 9310

Best Overall i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Impressive OLED Display
Solid Internal Specs
Great Keyboard
Excellent Build Quality

Cons

High Price

Check Price

The Dell XPS 13 9310 is our first recommendation as the best overall i7 Windows laptop. It’s a superb business laptop, and it has a stunning, borderless screen that’s great for watching movies or playing games.

While the XPS 13 comes with a number of different configurations, we advise going with the tried and true combination of the 11th Gen Core i7 processor with the Intel Iris Xe Graphics. This synergy provides superior efficiency in both routine and more demanding productivity activities.

The XPS 13 9310’s specs are sufficient for its use as a general-purpose work or study laptop. Like other laptops in this price range, Dell’s claims of a 10-hour battery life do not stand out from the rest of the crowd.

The XPS 13 9310’s superior build quality is another one of its many outstanding features. The laptop’s materials are high-quality, and it has a sleek, professional design. If you plan on making this laptop your primary computer, this is a nice complement.

Dell XPS 13 9310

Moreover, the screen’s resolution of 1920×1200 is both astounding and visually beautiful. Having a movie night with a large group of friends will be even more enjoyable thanks to the slim bezels, vibrant colors, and broad viewing angles.

Thanks to its superior OLED display, which provides darker blacks and more contrast compared to the competition, this laptop ranks at the top of our selection. In particular, the dynamic range appears to be far greater than on comparable business notebooks in the same price range. While a higher resolution may appeal more to some, 1080p appears fairly sharp on a 13.3-inch OLED Panel.

When it comes to sound, the XPS 13 is a little lacking. The speakers can be turned up to a respectable volume, but the quality they provide is below par for the asking price. The sound quality of rival products like the Apple MacBook M1 range is significantly higher.

Be sure to also check out our ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 Review for a solid alternative.

Consumers may be irritated by the lack of ports, but it is to be anticipated from such a lightweight and small laptop. The XPS 13 only has two USB-C ports, so you’ll need to buy a bunch of dongles if you want to take advantage of its full potential.

If you also need a powerful laptop for business or education, the Dell XPS 13 9310 is a good choice. It may get rather pricy when outfitted with high-end features, but its adaptability more than makes up for the initial outlay. Depending on your needs, you may use it as a workstation, a student laptop, or even for recreational purposes.

The all-round nature of the XPS 13 lends it great credibility in multiple different applications. With the powerful Core i7 CPU under the hood, this laptop is definitely one of the most powerful Windows laptops you can buy right now.

2. MSI GL66

Best Gaming i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Powerful RTX 3070 GPU
Great 144Hz Display
Nice Design
Modern 11^th Gen Core i7 CPU

Cons

Premium Price

Check Price

As a result of the presence of the GeForce RTX 3070 within this price range, the MSI GL66 is without a doubt the absolute best gaming i7 Windows laptop on our list. It has been selected as our second choice pick thanks to its supreme performance as well as a reasonable value proposition.

In order to make the GL66 one of the top choices available at this price point, MSI equipped it with a CPU from the 11th generation of the Core i7 series and a graphics card from Nvidia’s RTX series. Since it is capable of reaching clock speeds of up to 4.6 GHz, the Intel CPU is well-suited for high-end, current gaming.

In addition, the RTX 3070 is a graphics processor that is among the most potent gaming GPUs that are currently on the market, which is an outstanding accomplishment in and of itself.

You shouldn’t have any issues playing any of the most recent AAA games or eSports games if you have this mix of components. If you alter a few settings, the RTX 3070 is capable of gaming at resolutions as high as 1440p 144Hz and even 4K at 60Hz; however, the GL66 can only support gaming at 1080p at 144Hz owing to the screen it uses.

MSI GL66

In terms of the display, MSI has equipped the GL66 with a regular 1080p 144Hz screen, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for a modern gaming laptop. You will be able to get a competitive advantage in numerous multiplayer games, including Call of Duty, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Rocket League, CS: GO, and others, thanks to the fast refresh rate.

The GL66 does not deliver exceptional performance in terms of how long its battery life seems to last. The battery life is only rated to last for three hours after a full charge, which is really pitiful in this day and age. It is safe to assume that you will always need to have the charger for this laptop on hand with you.

Additionally, the GL66 weighs around 4.63 pounds, which is considered to be fairly hefty for a gaming laptop. The fact that the laptop is cumbersome to carry about in addition to having a short lifespan for its battery implies that the vast majority of consumers will not use this laptop as a daily driver.

When compared to the various alternatives available at this price point, the MSI GL66 emerges victorious because of the amazing specifications it possesses, in particular the option of the RTX 3070.

It does have a few weaknesses, but the price-to-performance ratio is so compelling that it makes up for the majority of those shortcomings and wins our recommendation.

3. Dell Inspiron 13 5310

Best Office i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

High Resolution Display
Solid Battery Life
Great Specs
Lightweight Chassis

Cons

Weak GPU for the price

Check Price

The Inspiron 13 5310 stands out as a promising option among Dell’s Inspiron 13 models for our intended use. This laptop’s combination of high-end components makes it a terrific all-around buy.

Primarily, the Inspiron’s 2560×1600 resolution display is ideal for people who prefer to watch movies and TV shows on their laptops. Moreover, the panel has excellent peak brightness and color accuracy. It also has excellent viewing angles which take this display up to a whole new level.

Since its debut, the Inspiron 13 has been primarily marketed toward business users. However, there are other options, such as the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch and the HP Elitebook x360. The price of the MacBook Pro is prohibitive, and the convertible nature of the Elitebook may not appeal to everyone.

Due to this, the Inspiron 13 might be a superior option for the majority of consumers and is our choice for the best office i7 Windows laptop.

Dell Inspiron 13 5310

The Inspiron’s audio quality is excellent, making it ideal for viewing movies and consuming content. The volume can be turned up to a respectable level without distorting, and the overall sound is clean and enjoyable.

Moreover, The Inspiron 5310’s battery life shouldn’t be a problem. The 12-hour battery life that Dell advertises should be enough to get you through a typical workday with light to moderate use. Most of the time, its battery life exceeds that of comparable products on the market.

Dell has included a 65W USB-C power converter, in addition to the powerful battery, for rapid recharging. This is a thoughtful addition that will make your life much easier.

Additionally, the low weight and excellent build quality of the chassis will win you over. The 2.78-pound Inspiron is one of the lightest laptops available. Those who prefer to travel with their laptops will appreciate how easy it is to use.

To add to the good news, the Inspiron 13 5310 operates admirably. Of course, there are a wide variety of configurations to choose from; we went with one that has an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce MX450 GPU.

Not many laptops in this price range come equipped with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive. However, the significant heat production of the CPU and GPU causes certain thermal difficulties, which have been observed.

Related Review: Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Laptop Review

Any productivity workload may be completed more quickly with the aid of a specialized GPU like the MX450, such as video editing, picture retouching, 3D modeling, animation, etc. With this configuration, you might also be able to squeeze in some light gaming during your downtime.

It’s hardly a gaming laptop, but it has some nice extras like a fingerprint reader and a 16:10 QHD display with blue light reduction. With this feature, you may enjoy your content without worrying about eye strain.

The laptop is expensive and not really practical if you want to use it for regular browsing and word processing. If you’re in a position to take use of the Inspiron’s powerful hardware, you should give it first priority.

All in all, the Inspiron 5310 should definitely be on your list as it is a reliable option thanks to its Intel Core i7 processor and excellent screen.

4. Acer Nitro 5

Best Cooled i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Excellent Thermals
Option of 1TB SSD
Decent Screen
Latest 12^th Gen Core i7 CPU

Cons

Poor Build Quality

Check Price

The Nitro series is designed to deliver high specifications to the mid-range market; however, our particular configuration of the Acer Nitro 5 does not place a strong emphasis on pricing. In reality, of course, it is a somewhat pricey laptop; nevertheless, the fact that it features the most high-end specifications of any laptop on our list justifies the price tag.

Since it can be purchased in such a wide variety of personalized configurations, the Nitro 5 has quickly become one of the most sought-after gaming laptops on the market today. The vast majority of its variations provide a great price-to-performance ratio, and the option that we chose is consistent with this pattern.

The Nitro 5 from Acer features an Intel Core i7 mobile processor from the 12th generation, as well as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. The internal GPU is not the most impressive for high-end gaming considering the price, but the Core i7-12700H is competitive with the very best CPU options out there.

You should be able to play the vast majority of current eSports and multiplayer games at 144Hz on 1080p with this combination; however, you may need to make some adjustments to the graphics settings in order to do this.

Acer Nitro 5

When it comes to AAA titles, you should have no trouble reaching 60 FPS on the vast majority of current games in a steady fashion. The Acer Nitro 5’s capacity to maintain effective control over the temperatures of its many components is the device’s crowning achievement. Though a 3060ti might fit better as it has that extra performance boost.

There are several laptops in this price range competing with the Acer Nitro 5, such as the ASUS TUF F15 and the Dell G15 5511, so the Acer Nitro 5 does not have the market to itself.

The Nitro 5, on the other hand, offers a more well-rounded experience than its rivals by providing a display that is superior, a CPU that is exceptional, and more SSD storage than the competition.

On the other hand, the Nitro 5 is not exactly a lightweight choice, as it comes in at just under 6 pounds in total weight. In addition, the life of the battery is estimated to be somewhere about 8 hours, which is satisfactory yet average.

Our ASUS Vivobook S14 Review suggests that it can be a decent alternative for this spot as well.

The build quality of this laptop, in addition, is very disappointing, which is one of the few areas in which the Nitro 5 falls short of the mark. The general design language of this laptop does not do it any favor, and the materials that were selected are, at most, pretty average. The internals are of high quality, but the outside does not give the impression that it is.

Even while it falls short in some areas like the battery life and overall fit-and-finish, Acer’s product is still deserving of consideration at this price range due to its other advantageous features. Due to this laptop’s high-end gaming performance and supreme cooling system, it is our pick for the best cooled i7 Windows laptop.

5. ASUS TUF Dash 15

Best Budget i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Affordable Alternative
Decent Battery Life
Modern Nvidia GPU
Thunderbolt 4 Featured

Cons

Unremarkable

Check Price

The ASUS TUF Dash 15 is our recommendation in the event that you are interested in a Core i7 Windows laptop that is friendlier to your wallet. The option that was chosen costs only a bit less than $1000 in this configuration, and offers an outstanding value for the money in terms of gaming and streaming.

You can also check out our ASUS TUF Gaming A15 laptop review for another ASUS TUF alternative.

You will have an easier time using CPU encoding when streaming thanks to the fact that the TUF Dash 15 comes equipped with an 11th Generation Core i7 processor. The CPU can hit 4.4 GHz on all 8 of its threads, which makes it simpler for the laptop to handle several activities at once.

This processor is paired with the Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics card from ASUS, which has a total of 4 gigabytes of video RAM (VRAM). Although it is not the most potent member of the RTX 3000 series, the RTX 3050 Ti is undeniably a good graphics card. You will also be able to make use of technologies such as ShadowPlay, Reflex, and NVENC encoding when you use a GPU from Nvidia.

There are several laptops in the budget category that are comparable to the ASUS TUF Dash 15. Both the Acer Aspire 7 and the MSI GF65 are comparable options priced under $1000 that can be taken into consideration. However, the TUF Dash 15 provides better value for money due to its lower price tag.

ASUS TUF Dash 15

The TUF Dash 15 also comes with a number of additional fantastic features. At this price point, you get an incredible feature of a Thunderbolt 4 USB-C connector that is located on the side of the laptop. The Thunderbolt connection may be utilized to connect high-speed peripherals, as well as displays that need a significant amount of bandwidth.

The battery life of the ASUS TUF Dash 15 is rated to last for a fairly healthy 12 hours according to the manufacturer. Considering that it is a gaming laptop, this shouldn’t be problematic. On a full charge, you should be able to get around four to five hours’ worth of playtime at the very most. However, the TUF Dash 15 does have a few drawbacks to consider as well.

Related Review: ASUS TUF Gaming FX505DV Laptop Review

Although on paper the 1080p 144Hz display looks like it should be pretty excellent, the actual quality of the panel is rather disappointing. The dynamic range and color reproduction are both well below par, and the former could have been a lot better. In addition, the keyboard does not have RGB illumination, which is a rather small flaw but is nonetheless worth mentioning.

However, when everything is taken into consideration, the ASUS TUF Dash 15 is an excellent choice that is definitely worthy of consideration if you are looking for the best budget i7 Windows laptop. While it may not quite live up to expectations in some areas, the total package is simply too appealing to pass up.

6. Razer Blade Pro 17

Best 360Hz i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Extraordinary 360Hz Display
Superb Build Quality
RTX 3060 GPU

Cons

Extremely Pricy
Quite Heavy

Check Price

Razer’s Blade Pro 17 is a phenomenal gaming laptop that comes equipped with an extraordinary treat for its users. Your gaming experience will be taken to a whole new level thanks to its outstanding display that runs at a rate of 360 hertz (Hz), which is on par with the most advanced monitors available today.

For another “Pro” alternative, you can check out our Honor MagicBook Pro laptop review as well.

To begin, the Blade Pro 17 is equipped with a number of high-end components on the inside. It is remarkable that a laptop CPU can achieve boost clock speeds of 5.1 GHz and have 8 cores, as is the case with the included 10th Generation Core i7 processor. This processor has no trouble with CPU encoding or multitasking at the same time.

Especially considering that the CPU is accompanied by a superb GPU from Nvidia, namely the RTX 3060, the laptop’s performance is on another level. The RTX 3060 is offered in the configuration that we have decided to go with since it provides the optimal price-to-performance ratio not just for gaming but also for streaming.

When it comes to GPU encoding using the NVENC encoder, the RTX 3060 will breeze through the process without breaking a sweat. Additionally, it is able to play all current games with high framerates, even when set to Ultra quality at 1080p.

Razer Blade Pro 17

In regards to the framerate, you will want such performance in order to be able to take use of the exceptional display offered by the Razer Blade Pro 17. The display is unlike any other we have seen in any of the gaming laptops on our list since it has a resolution of 1080p and a refresh rate of 360Hz.

Even in the PC monitor market, there are not a lot of displays with a refresh rate of 360Hz, with the exception of a few monitors designed specifically for eSports competitions.

Helpful read: Response time Vs Refresh rate

The Blade Pro 17 distinguishes itself from the other products on the market by virtue of its superior design and build quality. The materials have a high-end look and feel, and the design language used throughout the laptop is straightforward and uncluttered. In the world of laptops, Razer is well-known for this approach.

The Razer Blade Pro 17 is not without its flaws, however, since the battery life is just about 7 hours, which is only about average for the category. In addition, the notebook weighs something in the region of 5.5 pounds, which is quite substantial for a Razer Blade laptop.

In addition, the keyboard does not include a number pad, which may prove to be an annoyance for certain users.

When looking for a gaming and streaming laptop, the Razer Blade Pro 17 is a model that provides a lot of compelling features. The RTX 3060 in the chosen configuration offers a reasonable compromise between cost and performance, despite the fact that it is a little more expensive than its competitors.

Also check out our roundup : Best RTX 4090

Given the fact that it has a display capable of 360 hertz as well as a fantastic i7 processor, it is also our top pick for the best 360Hz i7 Windows laptop.

7. Acer Predator Helios 300

Best Built i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Solid Build Quality
Excellent Internals
Overclockable Core i7 CPU

Cons

Bulky
Poor Battery Life

Check Price

The Predator brand is known for its stunning designs, and the Helios 300 continues this trend with its high-end specifications and aesthetics.

Acer has outfitted the Helios 300 with the Intel Core i7-10750H CPU from the 10th generation, which is a chip with 6 cores. Depending on the amount of power and cooling that is available, it has the potential to turbo up to 5 GHz.

The fact that the CPU can be overclocked in the Helios 300 is a significant benefit, as it enables enthusiasts to coax even more performance out of the CPU if they so want. However, when you overclock a laptop, thermals might become a problem since there is not a lot of room for cooling potential in such a small space.

This makes the problem more difficult to solve and ultimately, the overclocking function ultimately amounts to little more than a marketing ploy. However, even with the default settings, the CPU already has more than enough power to handle gaming and streaming.

Acer Predator Helios 300

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a fantastic mid-range graphics processor, and the Helios 300 comes equipped with one. This GPU is capable of handling pretty much any modern game you can throw at it. The 3060 is equipped with all of the specialized features that are exclusive to Nvidia, such as Reflex and NVENC, which may improve both your gaming and streaming experiences.

Helpful comparison : 3080ti vs 3090

The Helios 300 from Acer is equipped with a display that has a standard resolution of 1080p and a refresh rate of 144 Hz, making it an ideal companion for the RTX 3060. You should be able to play the majority of recent games with a frame rate of between 100 and 144 FPS using this combination, depending on the graphical settings. The fact that it comes with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of solid-state storage is a really nice bonus.

The build quality and design of the Acer Predator Helios 300 are quite remarkable and truly distinguish the laptop from other options available at this price point. The Predator design language is instantly recognizable, and the high-quality materials that were utilized to manufacture the chassis give it an upscale appearance and feel.

This is why we have selected the Helios 300 as our best built i7 Windows laptop.

The Helios 300 from Acer is reported to have a battery life of around 6 hours, which is about par for the course when it comes to gaming laptops. There is a possibility that competing products from the likes of ASUS and Razer will have longer battery lives while having comparable specifications.

The Helios 300 weighs around 5.5 pounds, which places it on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to the weight of gaming laptops.

When compared to the competition in this space, the Acer Predator Helios 300 is a very sensible alternative despite the fact that it does not come cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Since it provides a well-rounded experience across the board, the Helios 300 has earned our recommendation if you want a high-end Core i7 laptop.

8. ASUS ZenBook 14

Best Designed i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Superb Battery Life
Thunderbolt 4 Inclusion
ScreenPad Feature

Cons

Very Pricy
Basic 1080p Display

Check Price

ASUS has designed the ZenBook 14 with a number of special features aimed specifically at winning over the hearts of students and professionals. It can be the perfect option if you are in the market for a competent all-rounder laptop that covers all bases and becomes your perfect companion for the office or school use.

We also covered another ZenBook product in our ASUS ZenBook Duo laptop review.

One of the most notable aspects of the ZenBook 14 is its long-lasting battery life, which clocks in at an impressive 14 hours. Since the battery life is so good, you won’t need to worry about bringing your charger to your school or office. The battery life is long enough to get you through a normal workday without worrying about recharging.

The performance of the Asus ZenBook 14 ought to, for the most part, be fully satisfactory. On the subpar MX450 GPU, one should not anticipate professional editing or intensive workflow animations, but other than that, the overall performance should be suitable for most of the office or school work that is to be expected from this laptop.

We have a more detailed review of the ASUS Zenbook 14 if you want more information.

It is able to easily manage presentations, study materials, word processing, content consumption, and general productivity tasks without a hitch.

ASUS ZenBook 14

Docked windows may be effortlessly moved between your primary display and the display of the ScreenPad thanks to the neat little App Switcher that is located on the ScreenPad. Since it is so sensitive and convenient, the ScreenPad is also perfect for making short notes on the go. It also has the capability of transforming into a numeric keypad.

In 2022, the huge laptop’s 1080p resolution is unremarkable and offers nothing special. Due to the fact that it has stiff ergonomics thanks to its 14-inch screen, it is also difficult to carry around. The all-around competence of the ZenBook 14 in a variety of different areas is, however, the device’s savior.

Also check out our review for ASUS Zenbook 15 Pro which is a slight upgrade.

The inclusion of Thunderbolt 4, which enables users to manage multiple high-resolution screens, is a welcome improvement that adds value to the product. The heat management on this laptop is remarkably good, and the general build quality of the laptop is quite outstanding.

It is important to highlight the fact that the sound system is of a high enough quality to warrant praise.

In essence, the ZenBook 14 is another high-end option that you should shortlist if you are interested in buying a new Core i7 Windows laptop. Its superb design and supreme aesthetics earn it the award of the best designed i7 Windows laptop in our roundup.

9. Lenovo Legion 7i

Most Robust i7 Windows Laptop

Pros

Impressive 240Hz Panel
RGB Implementation

Cons

Expensive Option
Previous Generation Internals
Poor Battery Life

17 Reviews

Check Price

When general consumers are looking for a competent gaming or streaming laptop, the vast majority of them do not consider Lenovo since their laptops are so closely associated with business and office work. On the flip side, the Lenovo Legion 7i is an exceptionally excellent offering that should be taken into consideration for this category.

The Legion 7i is powered by a 10th-generation Core i7 CPU that features 6 cores and has a maximum clock speed of 5 GHz. Given the limited cooling potential, that is a rather outstanding turbo frequency for a laptop’s CPU. This processor gives an edge to this laptop over competitors in this price bracket

Even if you are using CPU encoding like h.264, this processor shouldn’t have any trouble keeping up with the streaming workload. Alongside the Intel Core i7 processor is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 GPU, which is part of Nvidia’s Turing family of products. While it is still a fairly powerful GPU by today’s standards, the RTX 2070 does not quite live up to current standards in terms of efficiency and features.

How we picked and tested

Picking the various Core i7 laptop contenders for this roundup was a bit of a challenge. It’s not really as simple as choosing the latest laptops from each company with a Core i7 CPU inside. Our team of hardware experts laid down a stringent vetting process to select the very finest options out there.

Our very first priority was, of course, the CPU itself. We only selected laptops that offered a Core i7 processor option, preferably from the recent 2-3 generations. We gave priority to the laptops that offered a better value Core i7 option for the asking price.

We only chose Windows laptops for this roundup, so any MacBook or Linus laptops were excluded. We also excluded Google’s Chromebooks, since those run on their own Chrome OS operating system.

After narrowing down our CPU choice, we shifted our focus toward the graphics processor. You don’t necessarily need a dedicated GPU if you plan to use the laptop for basic school and office work, but it is crucial for gaming and streaming applications. Accordingly, we chose the laptops that offered better GPUs.

Of course, the display of the laptop is one of the most critical components and another one of our priorities. For gaming laptops, we selected variants that offered a high-refresh-rate display, while for general-purpose options we looked for high-resolution screens with excellent colors and angles.

Yet again, we thought about how the laptop’s weight and dimensions might affect portability and posture. Keeping a bulky, hefty laptop on one’s lap for long amounts of time is not ideal for anyone, and is even worse while traveling.

If you often use your laptop for entertainment purposes, such as watching movies or playing games, the battery life is extremely crucial. In this evaluation, this was one of our top concerns.

The ratio of the product’s cost to its level of performance was, in the end, the decisive element in our roundup. Laptops that offered the greatest possible value for the price were given higher placement on the list.

In the testing process, our dedicated team of hardware specialists left no stone unturned. We especially focused our analysis on the thermal competence and overall performance of the laptop. The team also evaluated subjective elements like the build quality and ergonomics.

One of the key factors in our testing was the battery life. We cycled the selected laptops through a complete charge in order to get an objective measure of their full battery lives. Moreover, our team also evaluated the laptops’ displays through a series of rigorous tests.

Ultimately, the testing data combined with the subjective analysis of the price-to-performance ratio offered by the different laptops helped in the formation of this roundup. Keeping all these factors in mind, our team has curated a list of the very best Core i7 Windows laptops out there.

Buyer’s Guide

Browsing your favorite online retailer’s website for a new laptop can be a daunting task. Even if you know that you are looking for a new Core i7 laptop, you can be overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of options and alternatives out there.

Fret not, as we have compiled a comprehensive buying guide that will help you select the very best laptop for you. This buying guide is tailored for our Core i7 Windows laptop roundup, but it can be consulted for purchasing any laptop.

Operating System

When choosing a laptop, it is important to select the operating system first. The operating system is a software program that runs on a computer and acts as an intermediary between the user and the computer hardware. You may be familiar with the name Microsoft Windows but there are other operating systems as well.

Laptops nowadays can also have other operating systems such as Mac OS from Apple, Linux, and Chrome OS from Google. You can find Mac OS in Apple’s MacBook series of laptops, while Google’s Chrome OS is often at the heart of Google Chromebook laptops.

The former is prevalent on the expensive end of the price spectrum, while the latter is often found in the budget segment. Linux-based laptops are rare, and they are often quite specialized and not the most user-friendly devices.

If you tend to use your laptop for gaming, streaming, consuming content, or for general office or school work, a Microsoft Windows laptop is the way to go. Windows laptops have the highest level of compatibility, convenience, as well as ease of use.

The Processor (CPU)

Your laptop’s central processing unit (CPU) is its “brain” and is responsible for all of the computing work done by your laptop. In addition to this, it is a significant aspect that determines how well your laptop does in gaming and streaming.

The central processing unit (CPU) in modern games is in charge of managing artificial intelligence, physics, world-building, and other general computations that are necessary for complex AAA games. As a result, it is essential for the CPU to have sufficient performance to complement the graphics processing unit (GPU).

Outside of gaming, the CPU is still a very crucial component for general-purpose productivity. It handles all the day-to-day tasks that your laptop performs, and is necessary for complex tasks such as streaming as well. A faster CPU is one of the most noticeable upgrades in day-to-day usage.

Naturally, the central processing unit is also in charge of other productive duties, such as multitasking, etc.

The Core i7 line of processors from Intel has just reached its 13^th Generation, and it is one of the most popular and competent collections of CPUs for laptops. With a Core i7 CPU, you strike a balance of performance as well as value, and it can be a great choice for high-end gaming laptops as well. While you are at it also check out our picks for the best motherboards for the i7 12700k.

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

The graphics processor is the most integral part of any gaming laptop or desktop computer. The graphics processing unit, also known as a GPU, is a silicon chip that is at the heart of a normal graphics card. It must shoulder the burden of processing graphical tasks when it comes to laptops because full-sized graphics cards cannot be accommodated within them.

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is responsible for all of the graphical processing that your games demand. In addition to that, it is in charge of encoding as well as rendering if it is required by the system to do so. Most people think graphic cards are usually meant play games and while they are good at it, graphic cards are also used for work like video editing etc.

If you want the best possible gaming and streaming experience in 2022, you should focus on getting a modern GPU, such as one from Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 series.

There is a detailed review of the best 1440p graphice cards on our website to help you in picking out what you need.

You may also go for the graphics processors that are based on Turing architecture and are part of the RTX 2000 series; however, anything older than that is likely to perform below average when used with recent games.

Display

Considering the display of the laptop is an essential step in the buying process. First, you have to decide what do you intend to use the laptop for. If the laptop is to be used for gaming or streaming, you will need a high refresh rate display on your device.

Even if your laptop has a high-end CPU and a fast GPU, your gaming experience might still be poor if the display is unable to keep up with these components.

When purchasing a laptop for gaming, it is of the utmost need to ensure that the screen has a high refresh rate. In gaming, a resolution of 1440p or 4K is not really required; nevertheless, you should surely go for a panel that has 144Hz or 240Hz refresh rates if you have the choice.

In order to provide a high-quality gaming experience, the display in question should have respectable color reproduction, viewing angles, and dynamic range. These parameters should also be considered if you plan to use the laptop for just general content consumption and office use.

On a standard laptop that is not to be used for gaming, you should prefer a bigger screen and a higher resolution panel over high-refresh-rate. Choosing features like 4K resolution makes a lot of sense for content consumption and general-purpose use.

Battery Life

The amount of time a laptop’s battery will last is another factor that should not be overlooked when shopping for one in the modern ecosystem.

The technology behind batteries is making incremental advances, but the components themselves are becoming more powerful all the time. In many instances, manufacturers are required to strike a compromise between lengthy battery life and performance.

Obtaining a laptop with a battery life rating of at least 10 hours on a single charge should be your primary priority. This rating differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, thus it is important to look at reviews written by third-party sources as well.

The majority of today’s laptops will either feature a backlit keyboard or a retina display, both of which have the potential to drain the battery in the background. Moreover, powerful components like Core i7 CPUs and high-end GPUs also increase battery drain.

Therefore, if you have a decent battery life, you should consume content, play games, and perform general tasks on your laptop without worrying about recharging.

You may use the laptop as a business or school device, and then later, when you have some free time, you can use it for entertainment without having to plug it in.

Portability

Nobody enjoys spending their day lugging around a cumbersome and large laptop. When you add in the fact that you may have to use the laptop in a portable setting on a daily basis, the discomfort level soars.

When it comes to buying a new Core i7 laptop, you should go for one that is both lightweight and thin. First, you have to decide the use case of the laptop in question.

If your intended use is for office and general purpose usage, try to find laptops that weigh less than three pounds. There are some laptops that are even lighter than 3 pounds, but those can be prohibitively expensive.

Gaming laptops, on the other hand, are heavy and bulky. If you can find a gaming laptop around 4 pounds, then that is quite lightweight in comparison to the majority of other gaming options.

In the current market, there are a lot of great lightweight laptops available from different manufacturers, and you don’t even have to make any sacrifices in terms of performance. The laptop’s product page will often provide information on the weight of the laptop.

Best i7 Windows Laptop - FAQs

Which generation i7 is the best?

The best Core i7 generation is the Intel 13th Generation, which is the latest one. Technology is advancing every day and new processors are released on a yearly basis, which is why this crown will keep changing hands.

Is i7 better than i5?

A Core i7 processor is generally better than a Core i5 processor since it usually has more cores (or threads). However, this is not a hard-and-fast rule. It depends on many factors including the generations of the two CPUs and their clock speeds, etc.

Can I game on an i7 laptop?

You can game on an i7 laptop if the CPU belongs to a recent generation and is paired with a dedicated GPU. The most important thing for gaming is the GPU, but any modern i7 is also good to have in a gaming laptop.

Should I buy a Core i9 laptop?

You should buy a Core i9 laptop if you want the best of the best in terms of performance. These laptops can be considered if you want the ultimate productivity and gaming performance, and you do not have any issues with pricing or thermals.

Is Core i7 better than Ryzen 7?

It is hard to say whether or not a Core i7 CPU is better than a Ryzen 7 CPU. It depends on which Core i7 CPU specifically is compared with which Ryzen 7 CPU. They are very comparable in terms of performance as well as price.

The post The 9 Best i7 Windows Laptops To Buy In 2024 appeared first on Appuals.

Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Review: Powerful Intel Machine For Average Consumer

Hassam Nasir — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 17:08:31 +0000

These days the laptop realm is extremely competitive. It’s to the point that things have become cut-throat because almost all laptops are great these days. However, while the bigger players are focusing on bells and whistles with their pricey laptops, there’s still one aspect everyone keeps forgetting about.

Honor MagicBook 14 2021 In All Its Glory!

That aspect is what we call value for money. That’s the focus of this review today, as we’re taking a look at the Honor MagicBook 14, the 2021 version.

PRODUCT INFO

HONOR MagicBook 14

Manufacture Huawei

Available at View at Hihonor

PRODUCT INFO
HONOR MagicBook 14
Manufacture	Huawei
Available at	View at Hihonor

In the past, we reviewed the previous version of the MagicBook 14 and the MagicBook Pro as well. A few things have changed since then. Formerly, Honor was owned by Huawei, but the company sold off Honor to a Chinese conglomerate. With that said, Honor is still doing its thing and making the products we know and love. This year’s MagicBook 14 has newer hardware but in the same body as last year’s model. Ultimately, that’s a good thing, as the 2020 version was solid all around.

Honor MagicBook 14 2021

The MagicBook 14 uses new Intel Tiger Lake processors, a slightly faster SSD, and Wi-Fi 6. We dubbed the MagicBook 14 “The Best Budget Laptop For Students”. Fortunately, we’re happy to report that not much has changed, and the 2021 version is just as good, if not better.

System Specifications

Intel Core i7 1165G7
Integrated Intel Iris Xe Graphics
16GB DDR4-3200MHz
56Wh Battery
14-inch 1080p IPS Display
512GB PCIe 3.0 SSD
Intel Wi-Fi 6
Bluetooth 5.1
65W Type-C Charger

Connectivity

1x USB Type-C
1x USB 3.2 Type-A
1x USB 2.0 Type-A
1x HDMI
1x 3.5mm headphone jack

Dimensions

Height: 214.8 mm
Width: 322.5 mm
Depth: 15.9 mm
Weight: 1.38kg

Design And Build Quality

Honor did not want to focus on too many bells and whistles with this laptop. They wanted to make a laptop that hit all the fundamentals, at the right price. This same philosophy follows through with the design of the MagicBook 14. At first, it might fly under your read, especially when seeing it through pictures and videos. However, once you get it in your hands, that’s when you start to appreciate the minimalistic design language.

Sleek Design

So, the design here is clean and simple. It makes sense since the laptop is designed for students who focus on getting work done. The edges are smooth and polished, and that aspect blends beautifully with the aluminum chassis. Speaking of which, this chassis feels rugged and great considering the price. It’s understated sure, yet it happens to be one of the better-looking laptops at the same time. The off-center Honor logo is also a nice touch.

More Core i7 laptops: Best i7 Windows Laptop For Gamers and Professionals

This laptop is available in two colors, Space Gray and Mystic Silver. We have the space gray finish on our hands, and it looks quite appealing. In terms of dimensions, it’s thin and light. Mind you, it’s not thin as something like the XPS 13 or the MacBook Air, but it does the job quite well. You will not feel it too much when it’s sitting in your backpack. Most of the weight comes from the dense aluminum chassis. Fortunately, that metal chassis adds a lot of ruggedness to the design, similar to the ASUS TUF Gaming A15 FA506IV or FX505DV, we reviewed in the past.

. You won’t notice scratches after carrying it around all day for the most part.

A very minimalistic design approach.

The ports and the speakers are present on both sides of the laptop. Once, you open the laptop you’ll be greeted with an excellent screen. It has an 84% screen-to-body ratio, with very thin bezels all around. The hinge is flexible, and this screen can be laid flat at 180-degrees. Other than that, we have a massive trackpad just below the keyboard. The keyboard is backlit and feels good to type on. More on that later.

Bottom of the MagicBook 14 2021

You will quickly notice that there is no webcam anywhere near the screen. That’s because the MagicBook 14 has a popup camera hidden in the keyboard. We’ll talk about that in detail later, but it caters to people who care about privacy. The top right corner has a fingerprint scanner, which is always convenient. This scanner is located on the power button, plus it is accurate and fast. Overall, the design works quite well. It looks elegant while also being minimalistic, and also feels quite durable. No complaints in this department.

11th Gen Tiger Lake Intel CPU

Before we move on to the rest of the device, let’s talk about the main internals for a second. With the 2021 version, you get the latest Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors. You can pick between either the i7 1165G7 or the i5 1135G7. Both of these are very capable processors when it comes to performance. We have the i7 on our hands here today. It’s an energy-efficient quad-core SoC that works well for sleek Ultrabooks.

It has eight cores and eight threads. This processor has a base clock of 2.8GHz and can boost up to 4.7GHz. When running all-core are running, the boost frequency is limited to 4.1GHz. Tiger Lake has multiple improvements over Comet Lake and Ice Lake. It is compatible with DDR4-3200. This is perfect since the MagicBook 14 has 16 gigs of DDR4 memory running at 3200MHz.

The processor also has native PCIe 4.0 support for up to 4 lanes. It is based on the second-gen 10nm Intel SuperFin process. Depending on the task at hand, this processor can compete with similar 7 nm TSMC Ryzen 4000 processors. You also get 12MB of L3 cache with this processor, for both the CPU cores and integrated GPU. The TDP is 28 Watt

The GPU

Just like the previous version, the Honor MagicBook 14 does not have a dedicated graphics card. Instead, this laptop uses Intel integrated graphics. Specifically, it uses Iris Xe Graphics G7. This is based on a new 12th Gen architecture. In comparison, it is quite a bit faster than the previous Iris Plus G7. It features 96 EUs (Execution Units). It can use all of these 96 EUs between 400 to 1300 MHz. This allows the graphics to drive up to 4 monitors at a 4K resolution.

Image Credit: Intel

So, while the integrated graphics aren’t going to replace a dedicated GPU, they get the job done. The improvement is good enough that you will be able to play some games on this. Although, you’ll mostly be playing eSports titles like CS:GO or older games on this. It can also run games that aren’t demanding, such as small indie titles. For playing casual games, the performance is good enough.

An Excellent Display

The display on this laptop is surprisingly phenomenal. It’s important for a laptop that caters to students to have a good display. You’re likely going to be watching a lot of lectures, writing documents, and maybe even editing some photos here and there. An excellent screen is what makes a decent laptop into a great laptop. Thankfully, the display here is well-rounded in every aspect.

It uses a 14-inch Full HD IPS display for the panel. Since it’s Full HD, the resolution is 1920 x 1080, which is plenty for this screen size, ultimately very good for content creators. The bezels are 4.8mm thick and the screen-to-body ratio is around 84%. Quite impressive for a value-focused laptop. The smaller bezels really make it feel like a more premium laptop. It elevates the value of the entire experience. In fact, this screen is good enough to compete with some of the high-end contenders.

Fantastic Display for an average consumer

Since it uses an IPS panel, the viewing angles are good as one can expect. The image quality is crisp no matter what angle you are viewing it from. The brightness is decent as well, as this panel can hit 370 nits of peak brightness. Combine that with the anti-glare coating, and we find that this panel is perfectly usable outdoors.

Last year, the brightness was a bit of an issue with the previous version. This year, the panel is about 60% brighter than last year. It’s easy to say that the display is flawless this time around for an average consumer. Of course, it also has the usual blue light filter to prevent eye strain. Finding a decent viewing angle is also easy since you can lay the screen completely flat.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Considering that this is a 14-inch Ultrabook, the MagicBook has a very familiar keyboard and trackpad layout. Like other Ultrabooks, it uses the standard chiclet-style keys. These keys have a travel of 1.3mm. However, these keys are not dead silent, as there is some sort of acoustic feedback. This is unlike other slim laptops that don’t generate much noise at all. With that said, the sound doesn’t bother anyone around you. That sort of thing matters in environments like libraries, schools, and offices.

The top row consists of all the function or Fn keys. These are used to control brightness, the microphone, Wi-Fi, and also for multimedia functions. Another one of these keys allows you the change the backlighting of the keyboard. Other than that, everything feels quite familiar. However, it might take some time to get familiar with the left shift key.

Aerial view of the keyboard of MagicBook 14 2021

It’s shorter than what you might see on say, a MacBook. If you are a writer who is used to their current keyboard, this will be a minor issue at first. However, this is the sort of thing that you will get accustomed to after a couple of hours of typing.

On the other hand, the trackpad is flawless. It is quite large and takes up a lot of the palm space. The surface feels smooth and premium. It only responds when you want to use it, so there isn’t any sort of strange ghosting stuff going on. The trackpad detects multi-touch gestures easily as well. There are no separate buttons for the mouse clicks, as they are built into the trackpad. Speaking of which, this experience feels similar to the trackpad on the MacBooks. This is a good thing since the MacBook trackpads are the gold standard.

Connectivity and Speakers

Before we finally get into the in-depth testing and performance, let’s go over a few things quickly. The I/O ports on the MagicBook 14 are present on either side of the laptop. Like many Ultrabooks these days, the number of ports is a bit lacking. We can’t quite blame Honor for this, as this does seem to be an industry trend right now. Either way, here is what the ensemble looks like.

MagicBook 14 2021 Ports: Right side

On the right side, we have one 3.5mm audio jack and one USB 2.0 port. Usually, it makes sense to have one of these USB 2.0 ports instead of a USB 3.0 port. If you’re going to connect a mouse or keyboard, you don’t need that extra speed. However, in this case, it’s a bit disappointing since we only have two USB Type-A ports in total. Not a major deal, but something worth mentioning.

So, on the left side, we have another Type-A port but this one is USB 3.2. We also get a USB Type-C port along with a full-fledged HDMI port. We are glad that even budget laptops are using Type-C ports these days. They are more power-efficient and universal. The MagicBook 14 takes use of this port to charge the battery. This is a good thing, but remember you’re going to lose that port if you want to use the laptop while charging.

MagicBook 14 2021 Ports: left side

The speaker grilles for this laptop are located near the side of the laptop. While this positioning is not bad, it would be better to have them on the front beside the keyboard. A lot of people make the argument that your hands block the grilles that way, but it still sounds better than side or bottom placement. With that said, the quality of these speakers is quite good, and they get decently loud. We can’t ask for more here. They sound better than a lot of laptops in this price range.

The Webcam

We touched on the webcam very briefly in the design section, so we’ll get into a bit more detail now. The function keys of the keyboard hide the webcam underneath, specifically under the F7 key. Press on this key and the camera will pop open from underneath. Press it again and the camera will close. The mechanism feels solid, and we are not worried about it malfunctioning or anything like that. The webcam itself is bad, but we can adjust it through software.

MagicBook 14 2021 Pop-up webcam

The question is why do something like this? Well, the obvious answer is privacy. There is a lot of talk these days about protecting yourself online. Blocking your camera on the devices you use is a good way of doing that. Sure, this might be going a bit overboard with the entire idea, as you can buy webcam covers for quite cheap. Still, it is a unique design quirk that we can’t help but appreciate.

So, while this position provides privacy benefits, there is a small problem. The angle of the webcam feels quite strange. It is rather steep and low, so when talking to people on Zoom, it appears as if you’re looking down at them. Some people might be bothered by this so keep it in mind.

Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Benchmarks

So, all of the above pretty much covers all of the design and physical aspects of the laptop. We mentioned earlier that this is a laptop for students who want to get work done. So the laptop needs to perform accordingly, while also being quite portable in the process. To figure out the relative performance, we performed some in-depth testing including benchmarks. We’ll explain the tests as we talk about them, but here’s a quick overview.

The tests were performed with the laptop plugged in the wall outlet to maximize the performance. No extra cooling pads were used and the ambient room temperature in which we performed these tests was about 25-degrees Celsius.

Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, Geekbench 5, 3DMark Advanced Edition, and PCMark 10 Advanced Edition were used to testing CPU performance. Unigine Superposition, Geekbench 5, and 3DMark Advanced Edition were used for GPU. And Furmark, CPU-Z stress test, and AIDA64 were used for thermal throttling test of this laptop.

Moving on, screen testings and color uniformity testings were done after calibrating the screen with SpyderXElite. For media-encoding tests, we used Adobe Premiere Pro and Handbrake.

CPU Benchmarks

The version of the MagicBook 14 on our hands uses the Intel Core i7 1165G7. We already talked about the specs of this chip, so let’s take a look at our benchmark results.

3DMark Time Spy Results

Starting off with 3D Mark Time Spy, things are looking good for the i7 chip in the MagicBook 14. We get a CPU score of 3507. This is quite an improvement over the 2020 version, and it means that the processor will handle work-related tasks quite well. If there was a separate dedicated GPU here, the processor could handle that with ease as well.

Next up, we have Geekbench 5. This is a widely used program that measures both single-core performance and multi-core performance, and the difference between the two. It does so by assigning a series of tasks to the CPU. It then measures the time taken to complete those tasks. A higher score means that a smaller amount of time was taken by the specific processor. In our tests, the i7 1165G7 inside of the MagicBook 14 scores 1537 in single-core performance. The multi-core test shows a score of 5054.

Geekbench 5 Results

Afterwards, we further tested the CPU via Cinebench R15 and Cinebench R20. The i7 chip scores 223 in Cinebench R15 with the MP ratio being 4.09. Considering the lightweight build of the laptop, this single-core performance is quite impressive. It actually competes with most other ultrabooks in this price range.

Cinebench R15 Results

The results were quite decent in Cinebench R20 as well. The single-core performance gave us a score of 572 and an MP Ratio of 3.31. Again, this is quite an improvement over last year’s version. Cinebench R20 is more complex and demanding compared to R15. That’s why you can’t quite compare the results of R15 and R20.

Cinebench R20 Results

PC Mark 10 Benchmark Results

Last but not least, we used PCMark 10 that gives us a score of 4839. PCMark is more of a general test and checks to see how well the PC performs in terms of office-related work. You can see what we mean by taking a look at the picture above. The video editing score comes in at 5328, which happens to be quite good for this laptop.

GPU Benchmarks

As we mentioned before, the MagicBook 14 2021 uses Intel’s integrated Iris XE G7 graphics. Intel’s XE graphics are stronger than previous integrated graphics, and we can see so in our tests. Our first test was done with Unigine Superposition, and it gives us a score of 1818.

Superposition Benchmark

This is quite decent considering that this is a lightweight laptop not quite intending for gaming or GPU-heavy tasks. Of course, the GPU will bottleneck in newer and demanding titles, but that is not what this laptop is going for.

GeekBench OpenCL score

We also used Geekbench 5’s OpenCL benchmark test. This test gives us a result of 15067 for the Iris XE G7. While it’s not going to blow any gaming laptop out of the water, the score is quite decent for the price segment.

Display Benchmarks

For content consumption, this is a great display. Watching Netflix, playing some games, browsing the internet, all feel great on this screen. Of course, it’s not a high-grade professional display, and that’s simply not possible on a laptop at this price. With that said, let’s have a look at the benchmarks for those of you who care about accurate displays. We are using the SpyderX Elite for these benchmarks. The images below describe different parameters of the screen itself.

First off, the black levels are quite standard for a display of this caliber. It’s also close to other laptop screens near this price range. After some calibration, the display is able to hit the correct gamma value of 2.2.

Various Details Of MagicBook 14 2021 Display capability

The above picture shows the brightness level, contrast ratio, and white point measured at different brightness settings. At 100% brightness, the display reaches 374 nits. This is plenty enough for both indoor and outdoor use. The 1170:1 contrast ratio is also quite good at max brightness. Of course, this contrast ratio decreases as you lower the brightness.

Color Gamut

Color gamut is something that this laptop improves on compared to the previous version. It covers 99% of the sRGB color gamut, 75% of AdobeRGB, and 74% of DCI-P3 coverage. This is up to par with many other laptop screens at this price.

Color accuracy test

Color accuracy is also something that is much better here. In non-colored areas, it has a Delta-E score of less than 1, Most of the other colors don’t have a higher deviation either. The average is 1.15, which is quite good in all honesty.

Screen Uniformity

Finally, here’s the screen uniformity test. At max brightness, we can see that the display has up to a 13.4% difference. To be clear, it is an improvement from last year, but not by much. If you were thinking of using this display for professional workloads like photoshop, video editing, filmmaking, etc, it’s not a great choice.

So, the display is quite improved from last year. The average student who is buying it to write code, do some research, and watch lectures will be quite happy with it.

SSD Benchmarks

The Honor MagicBook 14 2021 uses a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD. Surprisingly, the SSD here is quite fast for the price of the laptop. Here are our results in CrystalDiskMark.

CrystalDiskMark Score

The sequential read and write speeds are 3419.08 MB/s and 2717.80 MB/s, respectively. If you know anything about SSDs, you’re aware that these numbers are quite impressive. This laptop is going to hold up quite well for your workflow. The 4K speeds are 51.05 MB/s while reading, and 240.59 MB/s while writing. Again, those numbers are quite good and should help out a bit when it comes to light video editing.

Battery Benchmark

Thanks to the efficient 11th gen Intel chip inside, the battery performance is quite good for the price. To test the performance, we conducted a battery benchmark. First off, we left the laptop in an idle mode where no tasks are performed. The brightness is left at 50% for this test. At idle, the laptop was able to last for 17 hours. This is quite good, but the real test is regular usage.

We tried to recreate a scenario and performed tasks that an average user would. This includes browsing the web, watching Youtube videos, writing documents, etc. This test was also done at 50% brightness. In this environment, the laptop lasts up to 7 hours and 50 minutes. That’s near the 8-hour mark which is quite impressive for a slim and inexpensive laptop like this one.

Finally, we stress-tested the laptop at 100% brightness to see when the battery finally gives up. We used the Unigine Heaven benchmark for this purpose. In this environment, the laptop lasted for 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Content Creation Performance

The MagicBook 14 should perform well in rendering software like Adobe Premiere Pro. This is mostly thanks to the Tiger Lake chip inside. We used a 4K video with a duration of 1 minute and 32 seconds. The video is in 60 FPS. For this test, we utilized Handbrake and Adobe Premiere Pro. We used 4K, 1440p, and 1080 presets along with the fast encoder preset. The codec was H.265.

In Adobe Premiere Pro, we used 4K, 1080, and 720p presets in the H.265 codec. You can take a look at the results below.

Thermal Throttling/Cooling Solution

The Honor MagicBook 14 has cooling vents on the bottom instead of the sides. On any other laptop, this would be a problem as the bottom vents can get blocked. However, for a laptop of this niche, it’s not too much of an issue. During regular usage, the laptop does not get too hot which is a good thing. A laptop like this does not require large heat pipes or loud fans.

Thermal Throttle Testing

Still, we wanted to test the thermals limits of this laptop. We did just that by using HWMonitor and HWInfo 64 for checking the metrics. To put the laptop under some real stress, we used AIDA64 Extreme. The results can be seen below.

While starting out, the CPU hits 4.6GHz at max usage. The temperature is at around 95c here. Although that is hot, the processor does not stay at that measurement for long. This is where throttling starts to kick in, usually around the 2-minute mark. At this point, the processor was hovering between 2.4 to 2.6 GHz with temperatures in the 60s. There is about 27% thermal throttling. Again, most of this will not matter to the casual user, but if you’re going to be pushing the system, keep this in mind.

Final Takeaways from the Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Review

Last year, the Honor MagicBook 14 managed to impress us with its great balance of price, performance, and design. While the fundamentals are still the same, the 2021 version improves on some of the weaknesses of the previous model. It has a better processor, a better screen, a faster SSD, and noticeably better battery life. Sure, it is an incremental upgrade, but one that makes a difference.

An Amazing Machine For Students!

To those of you who are looking to buy this laptop for school or for work, it’s a worthy consideration if you can afford the price tag. The slim design makes it quite portable for everyday use. This laptop also features fast charging via USB-C, which is another welcome feature.

Overall, this is one of the best student laptops for the money. It’s well rounded, has a great screen, and is just a straight-up joy to use. If the company stays on this track, it may be able to snatch this price segment completely from other vendors. For now, the MagicBook 14 gets our recommendation.

Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Pros And Cons

Versatile Yet Powerful

Pros

Simple yet sophisticated design
Fanatastic screen for content consumption
Great battery life & Fast Charging
Premium keyboard and trackpad

Cons

Only one USB-C port
Awkward webcam positioning
Unconventional left shift key size

Processor: Intel Core i7 1165G7 | RAM: 16GB DDR4 | Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD | Display: 14-inch Full HD IPS Display | GPU: Intel Iris Xe

VERDICT:The MagicBook 14 2021 provides everything a student or an average consumer would need to get by their daily lives tasks with ease while providing impeccable sheer processing power with the new Intel Tiger Lake CPU. However, all of the power comes with some tiny drawbacks such as the awkward webcam positioning and the unusual left shift key size. If these minor imperfections aren't a deal-breaker for you then, definitely the MagicBook 14 2021 is a winner for you.

Check Price

Price at the time of review: N/A (USA) and N/A (UK)

The post Honor MagicBook 14 2021 Review: Powerful Intel Machine For Average Consumer appeared first on Appuals.

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA Review

Ace Luke — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:56:50 +0000

ASUS has been releasing some unique laptops for some time now and this year too, we witnessed magnificent laptops like ASUS ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI.

PRODUCT INFO

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA

Manufacture ASUS

Available at View at Amazon

PRODUCT INFO
ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA
Manufacture	ASUS
Available at	View at Amazon

Right now it seems like the company is pushing the limits of ultra-books and we are seeing unique concepts like dual-screen laptops, laptops with ScreenPads, etc. All of these features can end up being inevitable in the upcoming ultra-books and ASUS would probably be having the biggest contribution in all that advancement.

ASUS ZenBook series is, right now, one of the famous series of ultra-books and we will be reviewing one of the latest additions to the series, ASUS Zenbook Flip S UX371EA, which seems to be a mid-range laptop that focuses on the quality of the screen more than the performance of the laptop. Let’s have a deep look at the laptop and see whether it is worth buying in 2020 or not.

System Specifications

Intel Core i7-1165G7 OR Intel Core i5-1135G7
16 GB DDR4 SDRAM (Has 8GB option too)
13.3″ (16:9) OLED UHD (3840×2160) 60Hz Glare Touchscreen with 100% DCI-P3 with wide 178° viewing angles
Intel® Iris Xe graphics
512 GB PCIe SSD (Has 256 GB and 1 TB options too)
Illuminated chicklet keyboard
IR Webcam
Intel Wi-Fi 6 with Gig+ performance
Bluetooth 5.0

I/O Ports

1 x Type-A USB 3.2 (Gen 1)
2 x Type-C USB 3.2 with Thunderbolt support
1 x HDMI

Miscellaneous

Built-in 1 W Stereo Speakers with Microphone
Harmon Kardon Audio
67 Wh lithium-polymer battery
Plug type: USB Type-C
Output: 19 V DC, A, 65W
Input: 100 -240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal
Dimension: 305 x 211 x 13.9 mm (WxDxH)
Weight: 1.2 kg

Design & Build Quality

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA is one of those ZenBooks that provide a 2-in-1 solution. This means that the laptop can be rotated by 360 degrees, essentially converting it into a large tablet. This is one of the thinnest laptops that you would have seen, with around 13.9mm thickness. The weight of the laptop is also pretty impressive, as it weighs around 1.2 Kg only, which is roughly half the weight of a high-end laptop.

The laptop is available in a single colour, that is Jade Black with Red Copper diamond-cut highlights. The top side of the laptop ASUS written with Red Copper colour and it shines very nicely in mild lighting conditions. The corners of the laptop are although round, the degree is quite sharp and this gives the laptop a professional feel. The inner side of the laptop is also in Jade Black colour and looks quite plain, giving peace of mind.

The lid of the laptop uses two hinges unlike some other laptops by ASUS which use a single large hinge at the centre. The all-aluminium build of the laptop was definitely expected at this price and the company delivered it perfectly. The bezels of the screen are slim for sure but not as much as some previous ZenBooks which might have to do something with the OLED panel. Speaking of the OLED panel, one cannot just ignore the sensational feels after witnessing it for the first time.

There are lots of vents for airflow at the rear side of the laptop while the vents for speakers are located at the front bottom side. The laptop comes with Harmon Kardon certified stereo speakers and the Harmon Kardon logo can also be seen just below the keyboard on the right side of the laptop.

The overall build quality of the laptop seems even better than its predecessors which were known for their fine aluminium build. The unique colour theme along with a 360-degree rotatable design gives the laptop a staggering charm that you would want in a laptop.

The Processor

CPUz Screenshot

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA comes with the same processor that ASUS used in some other ZenBooks this year, that is Intel Core i7-1165G7. This is the latest mobile processor from Intel and there is a big improvement in performance compared to previous generation processors. In fact, this processor is quite comparable to the high-end mobile processors from the previous generation despite having fewer cores.

This processor is based on the 10nm SuperFin process, unlike previous processors that were based on the 14nm process. That is why these processors are a lot more efficient as well and pack more performance with lower power consumption. The Code Name of this processor is Tiger Lake and there are a lot of other processors with this architecture. Intel Core i7-1165G7 is a quad-core processor and due to Hyper-Threading technology, it provides eight threads. The TDP of this processor is 28 watts, although this processor has a configurable TDP.

GPUz Screenshot

The base clock of the processor is 2.8 GHz while the Turbo clock is 4.7 GHz. The cache size of this processor is 12 MB, which is also a big improvement over the 8 MB cache in the previous generation processors. The processor also enables the latest technological features like Thunderbolt 4, which ensures top-notch connectivity.

The processor comes with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, which has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.3 GHz and has 96 execute units. This built-in graphics card is nowhere close to a dedicated graphics card but for most of the daily-usage applications, it feels enough.

The Display

The most anticipating component of the ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA is its display and it is one of its kind for sure. The laptop comes with a 13.3-inch OLED panel having a resolution of 3840 x 2160, making it a super-sharp high-contrast display that can be used for a lot more than just viewing movies and dramas. The small size of the panel allows a high density of pixels and the OLED technology amplifies the quality of the screen.

There are not a lot of laptops with OLED panels and even those that have an OLED panel are a lot more expensive. The difference between an OLED and an IPS panel is that each pixel in an OLED panel is turned on and off individually, which allows much deeper blacks than an IPS panel, leading to a super high contrast ratio.

Another great thing about this display is that it comes with wide-gamut colours, providing 100% DCI-P3, which makes it a great product for those who are interested in art and do colour-critical tasks. The display also has certification of DisplayHDR 500. The bezels of the display are although quite slim at the sides and the top, the bottom one seems a bit big for a small laptop like this.

I/O Ports, Speakers, & Webcam

The I/O setup of the laptop is a lot different than most other ZenBooks you would see in the market. It is minimal at its best but some people might not like this new design. The laptop provides an HDMI port, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, and 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports. You might have noticed that there is no dedicated charging port in the laptop, which means that you will have to charge the laptop using the USB Type-C port.

Thankfully, both the Type-C ports support Thunderbolt 4 technology and that is why connectivity with the latest devices is not an issue at all. The charging times of the laptop are really impressive as well and you can charge the laptop to 60% in just around 50 minutes. The speakers of the laptop are similar to other ZenBooks, having Harmon Kardon certification and provide a stereo setup.

The webcam of the laptop is an IR webcam which can be used to enable Windows Hello feature, allowing you to unlock the device in seconds. The location of the webcam at the top seems like a feasible solution, unlike some other laptops that provide the webcam at the bottom of the screen.

Keyboard and Touch-Pad

The keyboard of the laptop offers a different layout than other ZenBooks and this is one of the features of the laptops that it provides an edge-to-edge keyboard. The bottom row of the keyboard features wider keys and the dedicated arrow keys on such a small laptop are surely a treat. It is a chicklet keyboard and the travel distance of the keys is around 1.4mm. The keyboard is backlit, as expected at this price, so you can easily work in the dark.

The touch-pad of the laptop is similar to some of the previous ZenBooks, offering a Numpad in it as well, which not only looks cool but also enhances the functionality of the laptop without using the dedicated space of a Numpad. The touch-pad uses a plain space for tracking, without any kinds of buttons while the bottom area is, of course, reserved for buttons.

Methodology For In-Depth Analysis

The technical specifications of ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA are not too different from some previous mid-range ZenBooks apart from the display. We performed a lot of tests on the laptop that are going to aid you in deciding whether this laptop is going to suit you or not. We performed the tests under stock conditions, using the high-performance Windows power-plan, and did not use any cooling pad.

We used Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, CPUz, GeekBench 5, PCMark, and 3DMark for the CPU performance; AIDA64 extreme for the stability of the system and thermal throttling; 3DMark and Unigine Superposition for the graphics tests; and CrystalDiskMark for the SSD drive. We checked the parameters of the hardware through the CPUID HWMonitor.

As for the display, we have used Spyder X Elite and performed various kinds of screen tests that can be checked in the display benchmark section below.

For the acoustics, we placed a microphone at 20 cm away at the rear side of the laptop and then checked the reading for both idle and load setup.

CPU Benchmarks

We saw laptops with Intel Core i7-1165G7 previously as well and it seems like this processor holds a lot of potential for ultra-books. The processor has a configurable TDP of 12 watts to 28 watts and the Turbo frequency of this processor is 4.7 GHz for a single core and 4.1 GHz for all four cores. The power consumption of the processor during Turbo frequencies go as high as 48 watts and when thermals start going north of 75 degrees, the clocks start decreasing. Let’s have a look at the performance of this processor for various benchmarks.

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA CineBench CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench R15		CINEBENCH R20
CPU Multi-core Score	794	CPU Multi-core Score	1212
CPU Single-core Score	179	CPU Single-core Score	466

In the Cinebench R15 benchmark, the performance of the processor was although impressive for the single-core test, the multi-core test showed some signs of thermal throttling as well. With a multi-core score of 794 and a single-core score of 179, it can be easily seen that the cores in the multi-core test had much lower clock rates.

The performance in the Cinebench R20 benchmark seemed quite similar as well. In fact, since this test lasts a lot longer than the R15 test, the clock rates got a lot slower during the multi-core test and that is why the MP ratio became even lower. The processor got a single-core score of 466 points and in the multi-core test, it got 1212 points, leading to an MP ratio of 2.6.

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA Single/Multi-Core Performance GeekBench

Single-core Performance		Multi-core Performance
Single-core Score	1516	Multi-core Score	3805
Crypto	3773	Crypto	10733
Integer	1330	Integer	3301
Floating Point	1544	Floating Point	3743

In the Geekbench benchmark, Intel Core i7-1165G7 scored in a similar manner to the Cinebench R20 benchmark. It scored 1563 points in the single-core test and 3805 in the multi-core test, where the MP ratio becomes around 2.5, clearly showing thermal throttling during the multi-core test.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark is not as good as we expected. It got a CPU score of 2374 points in the benchmark with around 7.98 FPS.

PCMark 10 Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the PCMark10 is better than other benchmarks due to the fact that most of these workloads require a single core. The processor achieved a high score of 4029 points, which is quite comparable to some high-end processors in the market right now.

That is all for the benchmarks related to the Intel Core i7-1165G7. Overall, the results seem good when it comes to the single-core performance but the multi-core performance seems heavily affected by the cooling solution, and had there been a bigger cooling solution, the results for the multi-core tests could have been twice better.

GPU Benchmarks

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA does not come with a dedicated graphics card, which is why it uses the integrated graphics card of the Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, that is Intel Iris Xe graphics card. This graphics card has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.3 GHz and it has 96 execute units.

3DMARK Time Spy Benchmark

First, we checked the performance of the graphics card with the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. The graphics card achieved a score of 1074 points, with 6.48 FPS in the first graphics test and 5.55 FPS in the second graphics test. This score is although much lower than any dedicated graphics card of these times, it is still impressive for an integrated graphics card.

Superposition Benchmark

The second test we did for the graphics card is the Unigine Superposition benchmark and the graphics card scored 607 points in this benchmark. This score is roughly six times slower than an RTX 2060 mobile graphics card.

Display Benchmarks

As we said before, the display of this laptop is definitely the most anticipating component of this laptop and we were quite eager to test this display. It is a 4K OLED display with a wide colour-gamut and we have used Spyder X Elite for testing the display of the laptop with SpyderXElite 5.4 software application.

Gamma

As you can see in the above picture, the gamma of the screen was 2.0, where the perfect gamma is considered to be 2.2. This will make your screen a bit darker than usual, which might hide shadow details.

Colour Gamut

The colour gamut of this display is just as the company specified and it covered 100% sRGB colour-space, 98% DCI-P3 colour-space, and 98% AdobeRGB colour-space. This means that you can use this laptop for wide-gamut applications and you won’t have any problems using this laptop for printing purposes.

Brightness and Contrast Ratio

The above picture shows the brightness and contrast ratio of the laptop and since this is an OLED panel, the static contrast ratio like this is inevitable, of course. The brightness of the laptop is quite close to the specified 500 Nits brightness, which makes it quite a bright display. The blacks are deep like nothing else and that is one of the best advantages of using an OLED panel.

Luminance Uniformity

In the above picture, you can check the luminance uniformity of the display at 50% brightness. The maximum deviation from the brightest quadrant is 2%, which is super-fine considering most of the IPS displays have a uniformity deviation of around 10%.

Colour Accuracy

The colour accuracy of the display can be seen in the above picture. The accuracy of the gray shades is somewhat lower than colour shades but overall, the colour accuracy of this display is not problematic for colour-critical applications since the Delta E value is 1.99.

Overall, the display is not only perfect for watching movies and other stuff but is also capable of handling colour critical data you throw on it and this makes this laptop a powerful machine for artists.

SSD Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark Screenshot

The performance of a disk greatly affects the performance of a laptop and that is why the company has used a super-fast 1TB PCI-Express-based SSD in this laptop. ASUS has used Western Digital SN730 SSD in this laptop and we checked the performance of this SSD via CrystalDiskMark benchmark. We did the 5x repetition with 4 GiB test and you can see the performance in the picture below.

CrystalDiskInfo Screenshot

The SSD achieved a super-fast sequential read-rate of 3402 MB/s and the same can be said about the 3085 MB/s of sequential write-rate. The random read performance of the disk is satisfactory for the Q32T16 test but it seems to be slower than competitors when it comes to Random 4K tests with Q1T1.

Battery Benchmark

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA comes with a 67 WHr Lithium Polymer battery that supports fast charging as well, with claims of over 60% charging in around 50 minutes. We could not perform our usual three types of battery tests on the laptop due to some unforeseen consequences, so you will have to suffice on a single test, where we checked the battery timing during Unigine Heaven stress test.

The laptop lasted 177 minutes, which sums up to around 2 hours and 57 minutes. The speculative battery timing for 4K video playback is around five hours while at idle, the laptop should last around 15+ hours.

Thermal Throttling

There is no doubt that this laptop comes with some of the best mobile components as of now but we have seen a lot of laptops getting very low scores due to thermal throttling. Let’s have a look at how the thermal throttling affects this laptop. We tested the laptop using AIDA64 Extreme and checked the parameters of the laptop with CPUID HWMonitor.

AIDA64 Extreme with HWMonitor

First of all, the TDP of the processor Intel Core i7-1165G7 is 28 watts while in Turbo mode, it goes above this specified power consumption, up to as much as 48 watts. During this time period, the temperatures rise quickly and the wattage along with the clocks start to decrease. The cooling solution of this laptop is not good enough to withstand the heat output of this processor, even at stock clocks, which is why the clocks start decreasing and the power consumption of the processor goes even below 28 watts.

The clocks of the processor at the start were 4100 MHz on all cores while in tens of seconds it dropped below 4 GHz, as the thermals went above 75 degrees. After running the AIDA64 Extreme stress test for around 5 minutes, the clocks started to stabilize and the final clock rates of the processor were around 1.3 GHz where it utilized around 12 watts of power.

Overall, it seems like the cooling potential of this laptop is not enough for even an efficient yet high-end processor like Intel Core i7-1165G7, which could have been avoided but at the expense of a somewhat bigger and heavier cooling solution, ultimately increasing the weight and the thickness of the laptop. The performance of the laptop is still more than enough for daily usage applications like web browsing, which is why the company decided to go for a cooling solution of this potential.

Acoustic Performance / System Noise

For testing the acoustic performance of the laptop, we placed a microphone at the rear side of the laptop at a distance of 20 cm from the laptop. We checked the readings of the microphone with the laptop being idle and with a stress test. The ambient noise of the room was around 32dB.

As you can see below, the laptop makes almost no noise when it was idle. Even with the stress test, the acoustic performance of the laptop is surely better than its predecessors, achieving a low noise result of 35dB. Overall, it seems like it is at least 6 – 10 dB quieter than most of the previous generation ZenBook-series laptops.

Conclusion

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA is surely a unique laptop that is targeted towards a particular group who is interested in high-end screen panels. The design of the laptop is similar to what we saw with some other high-end ZenBook-series laptops while the hardware components used in the laptop are one of the latest, providing high performance, although somewhat limited by the thermal performance of the laptop. The laptop also provides the latest features like Thunderbolt 4, which allows the user to have next-generation connectivity.

One of the best features of the laptops is its screen panel, as it comes with a 4K OLED panel, providing a wide-gamut colour reproduction and impressive colour accuracy. This lets artists get a great advantage of this laptop and even if you are not, you are surely going to like this laptop for content viewing. The large battery of the laptop allows the users to have a seamless experience and the charging times of the laptop are much better than before as well.

The cooling solution of the laptop is one of the limiting factors for the performance of the laptop but for most people who are buying this laptop for viewing online content or creating art, you won’t be suffering from any kind of stuttering, etc.

ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA

Best Content-Viewing Laptop

Pros

Wide-gamut OLED 4K display
Solid build
Professional looks
Provides Thunderbolt 4

Cons

Cooling performance is not up to the mark

Processor: Intel Core i7-1165G7 | RAM: 16GB DDR4 | Storage: 1 TB PCIe SSD | Display: 13.3” 4K OLED | GPU: Intel Iris Xe Integrated

VERDICT:ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA is an ultra-book that tends to create a new limit for the content viewers and it provides a top-notch 4K OLED screen for that while providing immense raw power for daily workloads.

Check Price

Price at the time of review: $1545.00 (USA) and N/A (UK)

The post ASUS ZenBook Flip S UX371EA Review appeared first on Appuals.

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI Review

Ace Luke — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 14:50:25 +0000

ASUS seems to be at the height of success when it comes to laptops in the past few years and the company has released tons of products that have gone widely successful.

PRODUCT INFO

ASUS Zenbook Pro 15 UX535LI

Manufacture ASUS

Available at View at ASUS

PRODUCT INFO
ASUS Zenbook Pro 15 UX535LI
Manufacture	ASUS
Available at	View at ASUS

The market for mid-range laptops is highly popular these days and among various series of laptops, ASUS ZenBook laptops are the ones that are priced moderately while providing mid to high-end performance. ASUS has added a lot of ZenBook laptops in the past two years and we saw a lot of innovative features in those laptops as well.

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI is the latest addition to the ZenBook series and it is quite similar to UX534 in features, although the performance of the laptop has been greatly improved due to newer-generation components.

The pricing and availability of the laptop have not been disclosed by the company, although we expect it to be around $1500 mark with the default specifications. We will be reviewing this laptop in great detail today and see if it can give a strong competition against DELL, HP, and Acer.

Disclaimer: The pricing of the ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535 can be different from our expected price as the product is not yet released.

The first glance of the ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

System Specifications

Intel Core i7-10750H
16 GB DDR4 SDRAM
15.6” (16:9) LED-backlit FHD (1920 x 1080) 60 Hz touchscreen with 72% NTSC gamut and wide 178^° viewing angles OR
15.6” (16:9) LED-backlit 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) 60 Hz anti-glare panel with 72% NTSC gamut and wide 178^° viewing angles OR
15.6” (16:9) OLED 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) 60 Hz touchscreen with 100% DCI-P3 gamut and wide 178^° viewing angles
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q design
1 TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 M.2 SSD
Full-size backlit with 1.35 mm key travel
Glass-covered; intelligent palm-rejection
Precision Touchpad (PTP) technology supports up to four-finger smart gestures
IR webcam with Windows Hello support
Intel Wi-Fi 6 with Gig+ performance
Bluetooth 5.0

I/O Ports

1 x Thunderbolt 3 USB-C
1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
1 x Standard HDMI
1 x Standard SD card reader
1 x Audio combo jack
1 x DC-in

Miscellaneous

ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system with surround-sound; smart amplifier for maximum audio performance
Array microphone with Cortana voice-recognition support
96 WHr 6-cell Li-ion battery OR
64 WHr 4-cell Li-polymer battery
150 W power adaptor
Plug Type: ø4.5 (mm)
(Output: 20 V DC, 150 W)
(Input: 100-240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal)
Dimension: 354.0 x 233.0 x 17.8 (W x D x H)
Weight: 1.8 kg

Box Contents

ZenBook Pro 15 (UX535LI)
Power adapter with power cord (150 W)
Protective sleeve (optional)
USB Type-A to LAN dongle (optional)

Design & Build Quality

ASUS ZenBook-series laptops are well-known for their sleek looks and such is the case with the ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI. The laptop is definitely not the slimmest and judging by just the specifications of the laptop, one can assume that it is going to be a pretty hefty laptop, however, it is a lot slimmer than what you would imagine. The laptop is available only in a single colour; Pine Grey, which would surely suit a professional environment.

All-aluminium build surely looks professional and classy.

The laptop provides an all-aluminium build, that could be expected at this price point. The body of the laptop is nicely balanced out by the wedgy design, which makes it feel a lot slimmer than it is. This design was also present in the previous ZenBook-series laptops. Moreover, like the previous ZenBook-series laptop, the lid of the laptop raises the bottom by a big margin that lets the laptop breath in a proper manner. There are also vents present at the back and the sides of the laptop that are used for the exhaustion of hot air.

The bottom side of the ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

The top side of the laptop has a circular brushed pattern with grey colour, which is among the signature looks of a ZenBook-series laptop. There is written nothing except ASUS at the top and once you open the lid of the laptop, you are welcomed by an all-new bezel-less screen panel that feels really awesome and it greatly enhances the immersion of the content. The bezels are slightly bigger at the top and the bottom of the laptop while they are very slim at the sides.

There are two hinges that connect the lid to the rest of the body of the laptop but once you open the laptop, the hinges get hidden behind the body, which gives a minimalistic feel to the laptop. The advantage of the wedgy design here is also that the vents for the speaker are placed at the bottom of the laptop but the path is not obstructed by the surface.

The wedgy design is almost impeccable

As for the inside, there is a single division between the keyboard area and the Screen-Pad area, which gives the laptop a simplistic yet elegant feel. Above the keyboard, there is ASUS ZenBook written in white colour.

Overall, the build quality of the laptop seems pretty solid at this price point and apart from being sturdy, the design of the laptop makes it great for the cooling as well.

The Processor

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI comes Intel Core i7-10750H. This is the latest processors by Intel for the high-end mobile machines and replaces the former Intel Core i5 9300H and the Core i7-9750H.

CPU-Z Screenshot

The Intel Core i7-10750H is a hexa-core processor that provides six cores and twelve threads. The Code Name of this processors is Comet Lake, which is the successor of the Coffee Lake.

The base clock of this processor is 2.6 GHz while the Turbo clock of the processor is 5.0 GHz, which is quite an impressive clock rate for a mobile processor. The processor also has a large cache size of 12 MB, where previously, these kinds of processors had a cache size of 8 MB.

The processor has a configurable TDP of 45 watts, where its TDP-Down is 35 watts. The processor utilized as much as 71 watts during full load, which is due to the Turbo clock rates. The processor also has Intel UHD graphics, having a base frequency of 350 MHz and a maximum dynamic frequency of 1150 MHz. We are not going to discuss the integrated graphics card here because this laptop came with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti, which is a mid-range graphics card and a lot better than the integrated graphics card.

The Graphics Card

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI comes with a dedicated graphics card, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti with Max-Q Design that has a 4 GB GDDR6 VRAM and the performance of this graphics card is lower than that of the GTX 1650 Super.

GPU-Z Screenshot

The graphics card has 1024 shader processing units, which are higher than that of the desktop GTX 1650 and lower than that of the desktop GTX 1650 Super. The base clock of the graphics card is 1035 MHz and the boost clock of the graphics card is 1200 MHz. Both of the clocks are significantly lower than that of the desktop variants or even the standard 1650 Ti mobile graphics card, which is why the performance gets hurt badly, although the temperatures of the laptop stay under control as well.

The graphics card has a similar number of Render Output Units and Texture Mapping Units as that of the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile graphics card, at 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs. The real-time performance of the graphics card is even lower than that of the desktop GTX 1650 due to the huge difference in the clock rates, which changes the resultant performance greatly.

The graphics card has 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, which is although the same as that of the GTX 1650 Ti Mobile, there is a bit of difference in the memory performance due to lower memory clock, as the Max-Q variant has a memory clock of 1250 MHz where the GTX 1650 Ti has a memory clock of 1500 MHz, leading to 20 percent reduction in the memory performance.

Overall, this graphics card is not so aggressive on the power consumption and that is why the thermals of the graphics card are usually under 70 degrees. The wattage of this graphics card is even lower than 50 watts and that makes it great for laptops whose cooling solution is not so powerful.

The Display

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI comes with three kinds of screens; a 1080P 60Hz IPS touchscreen panel having 72% NTSC colour gamut, a 4K 60Hz IPS panel having 72% NTSC colour gamut, and a 4K 60Hz OLED touchscreen panel, having a colour gamut of 100% DCI-P3. The display of this laptop has 4mm thin bezels and have a screen-to-body ratio of 88%. To be honest, this is one of the first laptops that we have seen with a bezel-less design and it surely enhances the charm of the laptop. The size of the panel is 15.6-inch, which is why the name of the laptop is ZenBook Pro 15.

The display in all its glory

The 1080P display suits most people because, for a 15.6-inch screen, 1080P resolution is more than enough, although, for those people who want large workspace for editing purposes, 4K screen is going to be better, especially the OLED panel one because it is designed for artists who can take advantage of its high contrast and wide colour gamut.

Even though the laptop comes with pretty expensive panels, these panels are in no way comparable to the gaming panels, as both of them have different advantages. You don’t get super-fast response rates in these panels or the high refresh rates just like you don’t get wide colour gamut support in most gaming monitors.

I/O Ports, Speakers, & Webcam

Right side of the ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

The I/O setups of laptops are getting more and more minimal and so is the case with this laptop. The laptop provides a MicroSD card reader slot, a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, and an HDMI port at the right side while at the left, the laptop offers a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C port, DC-in port, and a combo audio jack.

Left side of the ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

As for the speakers, the vents of the speakers are located at the front bottom of the laptop and there are two stereo speakers that support the ASUS SonicMaster audio system with surround sound as well that seem to be quite similar to the speakers ASUS is using in other ZenBook-series laptops.

Webcam placement

The webcam is present at the top of the screen lid, which is considered the best position for a laptop, as it gives the user a lot of control in adjusting the position of the laptop. The laptop also has IR webcam feature and it has Windows Hello support as well.

Keyboard and Screen-Pad

The laptop comes with a chicklet keyboard and it is similar to the keyboards used previously in the ZenBook-series laptops. The keys have a travel distance of 1.35 mm, which seems just suitable for a laptop and provides a comfortable typing experience. The keyboard is also backlit, enabling the users to work in the dark and this is pretty much a standard in every mid-end to a high-end laptop.

The keyboard of the ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

The layout of the keyboard is quite unique and not many laptops have this kind of layout. The alpha-numeric keys are present at their respective locations but instead of delete, page-up, etc., you get a Numpad, where the power button is located at the top right side of the Numpad.

The hybrid touch/screen pad is indeed flawless.

One of the most unique features of the ZenBook-series laptops is the presence of Screen-Pad, which is just like a screen that is present at the location of the touch-pad and it greatly enhances the functionality of the laptop. You can use the Screen-Pad for various kinds of functions like App-switcher, Mode-switch, Task Group, Handwriting, etc. and it is very handy at times.

Phone Call Function and Phone Screen Mirroring Function

This Screen-Pad with Screen-Xpert 2.0 includes a link to MyASUS function shortcut key on the far left of the navigation bar. This allows the user to call other people from the laptop using the Phone Call function and also allows the users to mirror the mobile on the laptop, where you can view the mobile screen clearly, although you cannot use the phone directly through the mirrored screen.

Phone Call Feature

Screen Mirroring Feature

Methodology For In-Depth Analysis

The technical specifications of ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 are quite high and that is why we were very interested to see the performance of this laptop in various kinds of workloads. So, we have done a lot of tests on the laptop to help you in order to judge the performance of the laptop. We have performed the tests under the stock conditions and temperatures and have not used any cooling pad which would affect the judgement of a daily user.

We used Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, CPUz, GeekBench 5, PCMark and 3DMark for the CPU performance; AIDA64 extreme for the stability of the system and thermal throttling; 3DMark and Unigine Superposition for the graphics tests; and CrystalDiskMark for the SSD drive. We checked the parameters of the hardware through the CPUID HWMonitor.

For checking the performance of the display, we have used Spyder X Elite and performed the full calibration test, screen uniformity test, colour accuracy test, brightness and contrast test, and the gamut test.

For checking the noise levels of the laptop, we placed a microphone at 20 cm away at the rear side of the laptop and then checked the reading for both idle and load setup.

CPU Benchmarks

This is the first of laptops that have come with Intel Core i7-9750H and this hexa-core processor is much better at handling high-end workloads. The cooling solution of this laptop is much better than what you would find in ultrabooks and that is why the processor keeps high frequency while keeping the temperatures under 80 degrees.

The laptop has a TDP of 45 watts but during full load, the power consumption of the processor went as high as 71 watts, where all the cores of the processor were running at 4200 MHz. The clock rates do reduce once the temperatures go above 75 degrees and we have thoroughly written about the thermal throttling of the processor in the section after the benchmarks.

[table “111” not found /]

In the Cinebench R15 benchmark, the performance of the processor is not very different from the Coffee Lake series processors because these processors are also based on the 14nm process. The single-core score of 191 points is quite good for single-threaded applications while the multi-core score of 965 points is more than a stock desktop Intel Core i7-7700K, which is not too shabby for a mobile processor. The benchmark resulted in an MP ratio of 5.04 which means that the single-core performance of the processor is higher than the performance of a single core during the multi-core test.

The behaviour of the processor for the Cinebench R20 benchmark was slightly different. The processor got an impressive single-core score of 460 points, while in the multi-core test, it got 2139 points, leading to an MP ratio of 4.65, which is a bit low for a hexa-core processor.

ASUS ZenBook UX535LI Single/Multi-Core Performance GeekBench

Single-core Performance		Multi-core Performance
Single-core Score	1218	Multi-core Score	4931
Crypto	1619	Crypto	3553
Integer	1141	Integer	4957
Floating Point	1318	Floating Point	5105

In the Geekbench benchmark, the multi-core performance of the Intel Core i7-10750H dropped even lower. With a single-core score of 1218 and a multi-core score of 4931, the MP ratio of 4.04 is unexpectedly low for a hexa-core processor with Hyper-Threading and that is probably due to much lower multi-core clock rate than the single-core clock rate.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark is relatively better than the score in the Cinebench and GeekBench benchmarks and the CPU achieved a score of 4982 and FPS of 16.74. For reference, Intel’s octa-core flagship mobile CPU from the 9th generation, the Core i9-9880H scored 7221 points in the Time Spy test.

PCMark10 Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the PCMark10 is given above. The performance of the processor is not as high as the latest mainstream mobile processors by Intel whose single-core performance is faster.

The benchmarks of the CPU end here. Overall, there is a little to no improvement in performance against the last-generation Intel processors and faster multi-core clocks, possibly with a better cooling solution, might have improved the results.

GPU Benchmarks

ASUS ZenBook UX535LI uses NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q graphics card and we checked the performance of this graphics card with two benchmarks; 3DMark Time Spy benchmark and Unigine Superposition benchmark.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

We checked the performance of the graphics card with 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. The graphics card achieved a score of 3285 points, with 20.01 FPS in the first graphics test and 17.92 FPS in the second graphics test. This score is almost half as that of a GeForce RTX 2060 mobile graphics card, which makes it an entry-level graphics card for gaming or other graphical applications.

Unigine Superposition 1080P Extreme Benchmark

For the graphics card, the second test we did is the Unigine Superposition benchmark and the graphics card scored 1605 points on this benchmark. This score is more than two times slower than an RTX 2060 mobile graphics card.

Display Benchmarks

ASUS ZenBook UX535LI came with 4K IPS display without the touch capabilities and we tested the laptop with Spyder X Elite while the software application version used was SpyderXElite 5.4.

Parameters of the Display After Full Calibration

As you can see in the above picture, the gamma of the screen was somewhat above the mark before calibration, at 2.30 but after the full calibration, it reached 2.23, which is much closer to the perfect 2.20 value. The blacks at 0.33 seem impressive and the whites at 422 are excellent for 100% brightness levels. This roughly equates to around 1278:1 static contrast ratio, which is more than the common 1000:1 that you would find in most laptops.

Colour Gamut

This screen is similar to some of the mid-range desktop screens, as it provides a 100% sRGB colour gamut, 75% of AdobeRGB, and 80% of DCI-P3 colour gamut.

Colour Accuracy Before Calibration

Colour Accuracy After Calibration

The colour accuracy of the laptop before calibration was better than even many entry-level professional screens, at 1.44 and with calibration, it got improved to 1.12, which is a really good result for a laptop screen.

Brightness and Contrast Before Calibration

Brightness and Contrast After Calibration

The above pictures show the brightness and contrast of the display for various brightness levels. The static contrast ratio decreased from 1370:1 to 1300:1 with calibration. This contrast ratio is better than many of the desktop screens priced around 200 to 300 bucks.

50% brightness
66% brightness
83% brightness
100% brightness

The above test shows the screen uniformity of the panel and as you can see, the performance of this display is not so good in this test. We saw a maximum deviation of over 13.6% in the bottom left corner, which is not the best scenario but definitely better than the entry-level laptop screens.

Overall, this 4K display provides crispy graphics for both watching videos and for doing productive works, although if you want to do colour-critical work, it will be better to buy the laptop with OLED 4K screen as that one has a much better contrast ratio and colour gamut.

SSD Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark

ASUS has used Western Digital PC SN730 SSD in this laptop having a capacity of 1024 GB. We used CrystalDiskMark benchmark for testing the performance of this SSD and the statistics can be seen in the picture. We did the 5 times repetition with 4GiB test.

The scores of the SSD seem shockingly great, especially the write speed seems unexpectedly high. Even the SEQ1M Q1T1 result seemed superb and the read speed in the RND4KK Q32T16 is noticeably higher than Kingston OEM SSDs.

Battery Benchmark

The battery timing of ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI is terrific and we were amazed by the battery of this laptop. The laptop came with a 96 WHr 3-cell lithium-polymer battery and we did three tests with the laptop; first, we checked the battery timing of the laptop in the idle state till the battery got depleted, then we checked the battery timing with 4K video playback till the battery was drained and then at the last, we checked the battery timing of the laptop with Unigine Superposition game mode test and ran it till the laptop got shutdown.

The laptop lasted more than 24 hours in the idle state, which is a tremendous battery timing even for the idle state. As for the 4K video playback, it lasted around 10 hours. The battery timing of the laptop in rendering was a lot less than other tests, as the laptop uses a dedicated graphics card and it lasted around two hours.

Thermal Throttling

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI comes with a high-end cooling solution since it has a high-end processor and an entry-level dedicated graphics card as well and we tested the thermal throttling of the laptop with AIDA64 Extreme stability test and Furmark while keeping a check on the temperatures and other parameters via CPUID HWMonitor. The test was performed at an ambient temperature of around 30 degrees.

AIDA64 Extreme Test With HWMonitor

First, we stressed the CPU with AIDA64 Extreme and as the test started, all the cores had a clock rate of 4200 MHz but once the temperatures started going above 75 degrees, the clocks started to decrease and they went as low as 3000 MHz and at this point, the power consumption of the CPU was around 45 watts. These are the stable clock rates of the processor and the power consumption of the CPU is the same as its TDP, i.e. 45 watts.

Now, after the first testing, we stressed the graphics card alone with Furmark. The graphics card did not suffer from any thermal throttling at all and stayed under 70 degrees. The clock rates of the CPU started decreasing after the temperature went above 80 degrees and the thermals went as high as 90 degrees. The CPU clocks got stable at around 3700 MHz.

At last, we stressed the CPU and GPU both with AIDA64 Extreme and Furmark. This too, did not create any thermal throttle in the graphics card, although the processor started to suffer badly and the temperatures went above 90 degrees, so it had to compensate for the increase in temperature by decreasing the clocks. Finally, the clock rates of the CPU got stable at around 2000 MHz, where the power consumption of the CPU got to around 24 watts from the previous 45-watt mark.

Acoustic Performance / System Noise

For testing the noise of the laptop, we placed the microphone 20 cm away from the laptop at the rear side and checked the readings for both the idle state and the load state. The ambient noise level of the room was around 32.5 dB. For the idle state, we got a low reading of 34 dB while at full load, we checked the reading of the laptop after the AIDA64 Extreme stress test ran for around 5 minutes and the reading was 37 dB, which is much quieter than other laptops.

Conclusion

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 is surely a great mid-range laptop that is aimed towards business-class people and those who are interested in a classy product. The technical specifications of the laptop are great for handling both graphical and non-graphical workloads, thanks to the hexa-core processor and dedicated graphics card. The physical design of the laptop is quite robust and it provides the laptop with marvellous looks while optimizing the cooling performance as well.

The unique hardware features of the laptop like the Screen-Pad tend to create a new standard in the industry while the software enhancements like Phone Call feature extend the functionalities of the laptop. The choice in the display panel gives the user a wide choice whether he wants to do colour-critical work or focus on the daily chores, so as not to burden everyone with the increased costs of the professional display panel.

Overall, if you are in need of an innovative product that can revolutionize your way of working and provide high performance while keeping the price under control, ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI is the best thing you can get and there is no denying this fact.

ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI

Best Mid-range Professional Laptop

Pros

Available with great-quality screens
Presence of a dedicated graphics card
Screen-Pad definitely feels handy
Phone Mirroring functionality seems awesome

Cons

The processor's performance is limited by the cooling solution

Processor: Intel Core i7-10750H | RAM: 16GB DDR4 | Storage: 1TB PCIe SSD | Display: 15.6-inch 4K IPS panel | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q

VERDICT:ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 is a great mid-range professional-class laptop that tends to become a daily driver due to unique functionalities that people are unable to find in other laptops.

Check Price

Price at the time of review: N.A. (USA) and N.A. (UK)

The post ASUS ZenBook Pro 15 UX535LI Review appeared first on Appuals.

ASUS VIVOBOOK S14 S433E Review

Ace Luke — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 23:21:31 +0000

ASUS is the first name that comes to mind when we think of ultrabooks and that is because of its spectacular history with the ultrabooks.

PRODUCT INFO

ASUS VivoBook S14

Manufacture ASUS

Available at View at Amazon

PRODUCT INFO
ASUS VivoBook S14
Manufacture	ASUS
Available at	View at Amazon

As of now, there is a wide range of ultrabooks that the company has released, where the Zenbook series is the most renowned while Chromebook, StudioBook, ExpertBook, and VivoBook are making their name by providing some of the most unique characteristics that you can find in the laptop industry. The VivoBook series is a mid-range series by the company and that is why it attracts a lot of people.

The first glance of the Vivobook 14

We will be reviewing the ASUS VivoBook S14 S433EA today, which is the latest addition by the company to the series. This laptop is based on the Intel platform and harbours the latest-generation Intel processor along with mediocre specifications so that it performs suitably for daily use.

System Specifications

Intel Core i7-1165G7
16 GB DDR4 3200MHz SDRAM, (Has an 8 GB option too)
14″ LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9
Intel® Iris Xe graphics
512 GB PCIe SSD (Has 256 GB and 1 TB options too)
Full-size backlit with 1.4mm key travel
HD 720p Webcam
Intel Wi-Fi 6 with Gig+ performance
Bluetooth 5.0

I/O Ports

1 x COMBO audio jack
1 x Type-A USB 3.2 (Gen 1)
1 x Type-C USB 3.2 with Thunderbolt 4 support
2 x Type-A USB 2.0
1 x HDMI
1 x DC-in

Miscellaneous

ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system with surround-sound
50 Wh 3-cell lithium-polymer battery
Plug type: ø4.0 (mm)
Output: 19 V DC, 3.42A, 65W
Input: 100 -240 V AC, 50/60 Hz universal
Dimension: 324.9 x 213.5 x 15.9 (W x D x H)
Weight: 1.4 kg

Box Contents

Asus VivoBook S14 laptop
Manual
Power cable and brick

Design & Build Quality

ASUS VivoBook S14 comes with a very sleek impression and surely it is one of the slimmest laptops that we have seen. The VivoBook S14 S433EA is available in four colours; Indie Black, Gaia Green, Resolute Red, and Dreamy White. We received the laptop in Indie Black colour and it looks more professional than the other three colours.

First of all, the laptop has an all-aluminium build and at this price, this seems such a marvellous decision by the company. The top side of the laptop is very simple; there is written ASUS VivoBook at the top and there is an engraved line at the side of the hinges. The edges of the laptop are almost boxy and have a slight roundness, which makes it look novel.

A fairly thin laptop.

Once you open the lid of the laptop, the Nano-Edge display welcomes you nicely, having a screen-to-body ratio of 85%. Opening the lid also raises the bottom of the laptop so that it can breathe easily and this greatly helps in the cooling process as well. The laptop has a single large hinge at the centre, which is aesthetically more pleasing than two hinges at the sides. Also, it seems like this design makes it more durable as well. By the way, there is no texture on the inner side of the laptop just like the top, i.e. it is plain and has a uniform colour.

The bottom side of the Vivobook 14

The bottom of the laptop is surprisingly plain as well. There are four circular rubber feet at the corners and a vent at the centre of the laptop. The vents for speaker are also present at the bottom though and since the bottom of the laptop is raised when the lid is open, the vents are not blocked by the surface.

Overall, the build quality of the laptop matches some of the high-end laptops in the market while the price-tag of this laptop is insanely lower than such laptops.

The Processor

Competition leads to great improvements and such is a case with Intel mobile processors. Intel has released a lot of processors in the last couple of years and the main reason for this was the competition from AMD. Anyhow, the 11th-generation processors have just been released and the performance of these processors is quite impressive, especial thanks to the 10nm SuperFin process.

The Code Name of the processors is Tiger Lake and there are more than twenty models with this architecture. The processor that is used in our VivoBook S14 laptop is the Intel Core i7-1165G7, although this laptop also comes with Intel Core i5-1135G7. The Intel Core i7-1165G7 is a quad-core mobile processor, i.e. it offers four cores and eight threads due to Intel Hyper-Threading technology while having a configurable TDP of 28 watts that can be reduced to 12 watts.

This processor is a direct successor of Intel Core i7-1065G7 and theoretically, it seems like it would have around 20% improvement due to better single-core performance. The processor has a base clock of 2.8 GHz and a Turbo clock of 4.7 GHz. On the other hand, the cache of the processor gets a 50% improvement and is now 12MB instead of 8MB. Moreover, it now supports Intel Thunderbolt 4 as well, which is the industry-leading technology when it comes to connectivity.

The processor comes with Intel Iris Xe Graphics, which has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.3 GHz and has 96 execute units. This makes it more than capable of handling high-quality graphics media, although it is nowhere close to a discrete graphics card when it comes to gaming or other similar uses.

The Display

ASUS VivoBook S14 is not a high-end laptop, which is why it does not come with a high-quality display, although it is more than enough for users that this laptop is targeted towards. The display has a 14-inch IPS panel, which has a resolution of 1920 x 1080, which is the common standard of laptops in these times. The size of this display makes it look better than other laptops because more pixels are packed in a given area, which increases the density of the pixels.

The display is advertised as Nano-Edge display and it has an 85% screen-to-body ratio, which was expected from a VivoBook. The overall quality of the display is although not comparable with professional displays but for a daily-use laptop, it seems pretty good.

The display in all its glory

Since it is not a gaming laptop, you don’t get the super-fast response time or the high refresh rate. Also, there is no adaptive synchronization technology in the display that you get in a gaming laptop, i.e. NVIDIA GSYNC and AMD FreeSync technology. The colour gamut of the display is not advertised by the manufacturer, although it is greatly discussed in the testing section.

I/O Ports, Speakers, & Webcam

The I/O setup of the laptop is quite minimal and it has fewer ports than most mainstream laptops due to the sleek design. At the right side of the laptop, you get 2 x USB 2.0 and a MicroSD card reader while at the left, the laptop offers a DC-in port, an HDMI port, a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port, and a combo audio jack.

The left side of the Vivobook 14

This is one of the first laptops that we have seen with Thunderbolt 4 technology and we think it can do wonders with external graphics cards or high-resolution monitors, in case the user wants to do work on graphical applications.

As for the speakers, the vents of the speakers are located at the front bottom of the laptop and there are two stereo speakers certified by Harman Kardon and support ASUS SonicMaster audio system with surround sound, providing crispy audio with no distortion that you used to notice in laptops a couple of years ago.

The right side of the Vivobook 14

The webcam is still present at the top of the screen which is arguably better than the alternate location in some new laptops where the webcam is present at the bottom of the screen. In the present position, it is a lot easier to adjust the position of the webcam. As for the quality of the webcam, it is nothing special but it can get the job done when you need a camera for calling or other purposes.

Keyboard and Touch-Pad

The laptop comes with a chicklet keyboard and it seems like a pretty standard one, having a travel distance of 1.4mm. The keyboard is backlit, which is a nice addition and great for those who want to work in the dark. A unique thing about the keyboard is the presence of greenish/yellowish band around the enter key, which although feels nice at the touch, it might not feel like a good thing for many due to odd looks.

The aerial view of the keyboard and touchpad

The layout of the keyboard is what you would find in most competitors with a few differences. The keyboard has small arrow keys, a number-key row with larger buttons, and the function-key row with smaller buttons than the rest. There is no Numpad in the keyboard and the reason for this is that the size of the laptop is pretty small and such a keyboard would not fit on it but you don’t have to worry about that because a Numpad is included in the Touch-pad of the laptop, which feels very innovative.

A close-up of the amazing touchpad.

The touch-pad of the keyboard looks absolutely stunning and this is because of the absence of any partition in it. There is a small fingerprint sensor at the top right side of the laptop that can be used to sign-in into various applications. As for the integrated Numpad, it can be enabled by simply tapping the touch-pad once.

Methodology For In-Depth Analysis

The technical specifications of ASUS VivoBook S14 are quite interesting and we have done a lot of tests on the laptop which is going to help you a lot in discerning the performance and the quality of this laptop. We have performed the tests under the stock conditions and temperatures and have not used any cooling pad which would affect the judgement of a daily user.

As for the display, we have used Spyder X Elite and performed the full calibration test, screen uniformity test, colour accuracy test, brightness and contrast test, and the gamut test.

For the acoustics, we placed a microphone at 20 cm away at the rear side of the laptop and then checked the reading for both idle and load setup.

CPU Benchmarks

CPUz Screenshot

This is one of the first laptops we have seen that have come with Intel Core i7-1165G7 and it seems like it offers a significant improvement over the previous generation processor. The processor has a configurable TDP of 12 – 28 watts, although it used up to 40 watts during full load. The processor has a single-core Turbo frequency of 4.7 GHz but with all the four cores, the processor reached a maximum clock rate of 4.0 GHz. As the temperature goes above, the processor leaves the Turbo clock rates and the power consumption goes down.

ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology

ASUS has used AIPT (ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology) in this laptop, which is advertised to make the processor much faster than the reference model by Intel. Since these processors have a configurable TDP, the manufacturer can set the TDP of the laptop with respect to the cooling solution and AIPT governs the parameters of the processor, which leads to up to 40% improvement in multi-core score, when compared against the 15W reference processor.

ASUS VivoBook S14 Cinebench CPU Benchmarks

Cinebench R15		CINEBENCH R20
CPU Multi-core Score	908	CPU Multi-core Score	2032
CPU Single-core Score	205	CPU Single-core Score	549

In the Cinebench R15 benchmark, the processor got really impressive scores and the single-core score is comparable to some of the flagship processors like Core i7-8700K and Core i7-9700K. With a multi-core score of 908 and a single-core score of 205, it is pretty evident that the cores performed at a lower clock in the multi-core setup, thus reaching this score. This performance is close to a stock Intel Core i7-7700K, which is impressive for a mobile processor.

The performance of the processor in the Cinebench R20 is a bit different from expectations. Since this test is longer than the Cinebench R15, the difference in the multi-core score and single-core score is not as massive as in the Cinebench R15. The processor got an impressive single-core score of 549 points, however, in the multi-core test, it got 2032 points, leading an MP ratio of 3.7, which is too low for a quad-core processor with HyperThreading enabled. The overall score is slightly lower than a stock Core i7-7700K, as expected.

ASUS VivoBook S14 Single/Multi-Core Performance GeekBench

Single-core Performance		Multi-core Performance
Single-core Score	1563	Multi-core Score	5033
Crypto	3983	Crypto	5949
Integer	1361	Integer	4790
Floating Point	1597	Floating Point	5406

In the Geekbench benchmark, Intel Core i7-1165G7 scored in a similar manner to the Cinebench R20 benchmark. With a single-core score of 1563 and a multi-core score of 5033, the MP ratio of 3.22 is quite less as you can see and that is mainly due to the faster single-core performance against all the cores.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark is quite phenomenal for a quad-core processor and the CPU achieved a score of 3873 and FPS of 13.01. For reference, Intel’s octa-core flagship mobile CPU from the 9th generation, the Core i9-9880H scored 7221 points in the Time Spy test.

PCMark10 Benchmark

The performance of the processor in the PCMark10 is just superb. This benchmark does not cater much of the multi-core setup and that is why the performance of this processor in this benchmark is quite similar to that of the high-end AMD Ryzen octa-core processors like Ryzen 4800H.

That is all for the benchmarks related to the processor. Overall, the result of the processor is impressive for a quad-core processor; the single-core performance is jaw-dropping, although the multi-core performance could have been better if the clocks would be a little bit higher if the company used a larger cooling solution.

GPU Benchmarks

ASUS VivoBook S14 does not use a dedicated graphics card and the processor comes with the Intel Iris Xe graphics card, which is the latest graphics card from Intel. The graphics card has a maximum dynamic frequency of 1.3 GHz and it has 96 execute units.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

We checked the performance of the graphics card with 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. The graphics card achieved a score of 1183 points, with 7.43 FPS in the first graphics test and 7.03 in the second graphics test. This score is although six times lower than a GeForce RTX 2060 but it is quite high for an integrated graphics card.

Unigine Superposition 1080P Extreme Benchmark

For the graphics card, the second test that we have included is the Unigine Superposition benchmark and the graphics card scored 739 points on this benchmark. This score is roughly five times slower than an RTX 2060 mobile graphics card.

Display Benchmarks

The display of this laptop is not too special but it is indeed a fine display for daily usage. It has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and it uses an IPS panel. We have used Spyder X Elite for testing the display of the laptop and we used SpyderXElite 5.4 software application.

Brightness and Gamma Results After Full Calibration

As you can see in the above picture, the gamma of the screen was slightly off before calibration, at 2.07 but after the full calibration, it reached 2.26, which is much closer to the perfect 2.20 value. The blacks at 0.26 seem pretty good and the whites at 253 are quite impressive for 50% brightness levels. This roughly equates to around 973:1 static contrast ratio, which is what most of the mainstream screens offer.

Colour Accuracy Before Calibration

Colour Accuracy After Calibration

The colour accuracy of the laptop before calibration was better than most screens, at 2.28 but it did not improve much after calibration and the value did not go below 2.0 and reached 2.01.

Brightness and Contrast Before Calibration

Brightness and Contrast After Calibration

The above pictures show the brightness and contrast of the display for various brightness levels. The static contrast ratio decreased from 1100:1 to 1030:1 with calibration.

50% brightness
66% brightness
83% brightness
100% brightness

The above test shows the screen uniformity of the panel and as you can see, the performance of this display is not so good in this test. We saw a maximum deviation of over 15% in the bottom left corner, which is quite high and that is why this laptop won’t be so good for graphical workloads, as mentioned earlier.

Overall, the display is technically more than enough for watching videos, browsing the internet but do not expect a laptop like this to cater to your professional needs like photo editing, etc.

SSD Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark

ASUS has used an OEM Kingston SSD in this laptop having a capacity of 512 GB. We used CrystalDiskMark benchmark for testing the performance of this SSD and the statistics can be seen in the picture. We did the 5 times repetition with 4GiB test.

It performed pretty well in the SEQ1M Q8T1, providing read speed of 1990 MB/s and write speed of 977 MB/s. The RND4K performance of this SSD is far lower than Samsung flagship SSDs but most people would not notice the difference in daily usage.

Battery Benchmark

The battery timing of an ultrabook is a crucial thing and we hoped that this laptop will provide us with great battery timing because of its efficiency. The laptop came with a 50 WHr 3-cell lithium-polymer battery and a great thing about the laptop is that it supports fast charging, which enabled it to be charged to 60% in 49 minutes.

We performed three tests with the laptop as far as battery timing is concerned. First, we left the laptop in the idle state and let it go down from 100% to 0%. Next, we checked the battery timing of the laptop with a 4K video playback. Last of all, we checked the battery timing with Unigine Superposition game mode test and ran until the laptop got shut down. The performance of the laptop can be seen in the chart below.

As you can see, the laptop lasted around eleven hours in the idle state, which is more than good for a slim laptop like this. As for the 4K video playback, it lasted around four hours, which means that you won’t be disturbed at all during a movie even if it is a high-end 4K playback. Last of all, the battery timing of the laptop in rendering is pretty astonishing and one of the reasons for this is that the laptop does not have a dedicated graphics card and that is why it lasted around two and a half hours.

Thermal Throttling

Since ASUS VivoBook S14 is quite a slim laptop, it was evident that the laptop will suffer from thermal throttling due to the Turbo clocks and that is why we extensively tested the thermal throttling of the processor in this laptop. We used AIDA64 Extreme stability test for stressing the processor and checked the parameters of the processor via CPUID HWMonitor. The test was performed at an ambient temperature of around 30 degrees.

AIDA64 Extreme Stability Test

As soon as the test started, all the cores ran at 4000 MHz, utilizing over 37 watts of power. Within tens of seconds, the clocks of the system started decreasing due to the temperature exceeding 90 degrees and after around 5 minutes, the clocks got stable at 2700 MHz. At this point, the power usage of the processor got to around 22 watts and the applications showed a maximum thermal throttling of 33%. This thermal throttling cannot be avoided for the most part because the Turbo clocks of the processor are meant to do this, although it can be avoided with a better cooling solution.

Acoustic Performance / System Noise

As you can see below, the laptop had a low noise of 34 dB when it was in the idle, which is just 2 dB higher than the ambient noise. After that, we ran the AIDA64 Extreme stress test and noted the reading after around five minutes. The noise levels of the laptop increased to 41 degrees, which is still decent for a laptop on full load.

Conclusion

ASUS VivoBook S14 is a laptop that is at the pinnacle of technology right now and that is why it offers a lot of things that could not be provided together before. First of all, this is one of the slimmest laptops you can get right now, making it a lot more portable than most laptops released earlier. Another reason for this laptop to shine in the dark is that it is equipped with very efficient hardware which not only performs well but also allows people to use the laptop for long sessions.

The all-metal design of the laptop feels premium at the touch as well and it is available in various colours, so as to fit the needs of a wide range of people. Moreover, it is equipped with the latest technologies like Thunderbolt 4, which allows the users to dive in new dimensions by connecting the laptop with tons of hardware components. The display of the laptop is although incomparable to professional displays, you won’t notice any fault in it as long as you are using this laptop for the tasks that it is designed for. Surely, a better cooling solution would have enhanced the performance of the laptop but at the cost of form-factor and the current performance level of the laptop is pretty impressive for such a slim laptop. Last of all, the price of the laptop is unimaginable for such a laptop and this point makes it a mighty laptop for common people.

ASUS VivoBook S14

Best Daily-use Laptop

Pros

Priced decently
Great single-core performance
Sophisticated looks
Provides Thunderbolt 4

Cons

A low-end dedicated GPU could have been great
The cooling performance is subpar

Processor: Intel Core i7-1165G7 | RAM: 16GB DDR4 | Storage: 512GB PCIe SSD | Display: 14” Full HD IPS | GPU: Intel Iris Xe Integrated

VERDICT:ASUS VivoBook is a budget laptop that can be a great competitior to other ultra-books due to strong compute performance and latest innovative technologies.

Check Price

Price at the time of review: $699.99 (USA) and £689.99 (UK)

The post ASUS VIVOBOOK S14 S433E Review appeared first on Appuals.

Honor MagicBook Pro Review – Expensive But Incredible Performance

Hassam Nasir — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 20:59:18 +0000

Amidst the saturated laptop market, Honor is one of the few brands that has consistently lived up to not just their reputation but also to their promise to the fans.

PRODUCT INFO

-

Manufacture Honor

Available at View at Honor Store

PRODUCT INFO
-
Manufacture	Honor
Available at	View at Honor Store

Be it the Honor smartphones with a great price per performance ratio or their laptops, with the need to keep up with the advances in the CPU chipsets and thus, bring the people laptops truly worth remembering. Their MagicBook lineup is a testament to that. With the first iteration of the MagicBook Pro coming out with Intel CPUs, Honor promised to release one with Ryzen CPUs as well with their better over-all performance and value for money.

Honor MagicBook Pro Review

Announced in Honor’s Smart Life event, the Honor MagicBook Pro came with similar yet improved specs and feature set over the previous laptops in the MagicBook lineup. The initial lineup announced was equipped with Intel’s 14nm Comet Lake processors however, Honor confirmed later on that they would be releasing Ryzen variants as well. And now, lo and behold, the Ryzen lineup is here. On our hands today, we’ve got the Honor MagicBook Pro with Ryzen 5 4600H CPU and 16 Gigs of RAM. This comes next to the normal Honor MagicBook 14, and before Honor MagicBook 2021.

Honor MagicBook Pro Showcase

We’ll be taking an in-depth look at what the new MacBook Pro by Honor has to offer and if it is as good as we had hoped it would be. Let’s get right into it.

Unboxing

Coming to you in normal cardboard packaging, the Honor MagicBook Pro is neatly packed in the box with all the essentials you need. You can find the usual sticker on the side with a brief list of the specs that this laptop has. As usual, the laptop is packed inside a sleeve as well as has packing foam to protect it from damage during transportations.

The box contents are as follows:

The box

Honor MagicBook Pro laptop
USB-C charger along with adapter
Documentations

System Specifications

CPU: Ryzen 5 4600H
GPU: AMD Radeon
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
Storage: 512 GB NVMe PCIe SSD
Charger: 65W Fast Charger
Keyboard: Backlit keyboard
Display: 16.1-inch FullView IPS Display
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Battery: 56Wh

Dimensions

Length: 369 mm
Width: 234 mm
Height:16.9 mm
Weight: 1.7 kg

I/O Ports and Buttons

3x USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type A)
1x USB Type-C
1x 3.5mm audio jack
1x HDMI 2.0
Fingerprint power button

Design and Build

Most of the MagicBook laptops by Honor have followed almost the same designs. As these are mostly intended for office work and for students, the simplistic design works quite well in their favor. With the metal chassis and the similar color scheme as we’ve seen before in MagicBook laptops, the MagicBook Pro comes out as not only lightweight Ultrabook but also quite sturdy and robust, definitely helping Honor earn points in that department.

Quite often, MagicBook’s design has been compared to Apple’s Macbooks, and for good reason. Along with rocking a minimalistic and simple design with almost the same grey dominant color scheme, MagicBooks also gives the same feeling when you open the laptop up. That is not to say that there’s anything bad about it as we’re rather fond of how it all comes together with the MagicBook. The metal chassis provides a solid foundation for the structure and has very little flex, proving its robustness and sturdiness.

Top view

Similar to the previous iterations of the MagicBook, the MagicBook Pro is available in the same grey shade colors, named Space Grey. On the top, you can see the polished edges and a very smooth finish which helps preserve the elegance of the MagicBook Pro. This laptop is quite thin which makes for easy probabilities and carrying capabilities in Laptop Backpack. The density of this laptop is sufficient enough to let you feel that it is not as susceptible to damage as you might think.

Slim design of the MagicBook Pro

Looking at the bottom of this laptop, you can see the vents for airflow and ventilation and a slight bump which helps lift up the laptop. The lift of the MagicBook Pro is not that good because that little crest is not quite enough to give this laptop a good lift. We’ve seen Asus’s ErgoLift – Zenbook 14 UX425JA, in which the laptop is designed in such a way that when you lift the lid, it automatically lifts the laptop up a little and gives it room to breathe. For lightweight tasks, which the MagicBook Pro is mostly intended for, you shouldn’t face a lot of problems. However, the temperature may end up getting a bit high when you start to put it under a lot of stress. We’ll be talking about the temperature throttling in-depth in a later section.

Vents at the bottom

Unlike the previous MagicBooks, the MagicBook Pro has speakers on the top right beside the keyboard. The power button and the fingerprint reader are on the top right top side of the speakers too with a little cutout for it. This helps the audio capabilities of the MagicBook Pro in a number of ways. The airflow and positioning of the laptop will not block the speakers and reduce the volume. The screen to body ratio is also pretty high which results in very thin bezels. This low screen to body ratio really helps the 16.1-inch screen for more immersion. This is further complemented by the fact that the webcam is placed in one of the Fn key rows instead of on the top bezel.

I/O Ports, Speakers, and Webcam

I/O ports left

As usual, the I/O ports are located on both sides. The MagicBook Pro uses a USB Type-C charger which was something we immediately liked. Starting with the right side, you can see that the MagicBook Pro has 2 USB ports and also a 3.5mm audio jack.

I/O ports rightUS

Similarly, on the right Honor offers you another USB port along with an HDMI cable and a USB Type-C port which is also what you use for charging the MagicBook Pro, which can be a bummer for some people as you lose access to your type-c device when plugged in. The I/O port selection is pretty standard with this laptop. You might find yourself running out of native ports soon, especially if you attach an external mouse and keyboard. However, these ports make sense when you look at the design of the MagicBook Pro. The fewer amount of ports contribute to its thinness and thus, portability.

As stated earlier, the speakers of the laptop are situated on the top rather than on the bottom or sides. This helps in preventing the sound from being muffled. Since laptops are portable computers, you’re not always going to be putting them on a flat surface where you can ensure that the speakers are not blocked. Having them placed there saves you the trouble of finding that sweet spot to put your speakers in. As for how the speakers perform, they’re quite decent.

Speakers located on the side of the keyboard

There’s nothing too special about the speakers of the MagicBook Pro. While they do have a better position than most laptops, the quality is still nothing too astonishing. The volume is not as loud as we had hoped, but it’s enough to get you through the day. For the intended purposes, the MagicBook Pro speakers should suffice as it really isn’t a flagship laptop intended for the best of the best users.

Webcam in one of the Fn keys

We’ve seen MagicBooks adapt a different webcam design and the MagicBook Pro carries that forward. Instead of having the webcam placed on the top bezel, it is hidden inside one of the Fn keys (between F6 and F7). Pressing that opens up the webcam and it pops out. If you’re very cautious of your privacy, you won’t have to put up a black tape on top of your webcam and end up ruining the overall aesthetics of the laptop. This provides more privacy. However, it comes at the cost of somewhat awkward positioning during photos or calls. Your Zoom call attendees may end up seeing you from a less than ideal angle. For the price that the MagicBook Pro has, the quality of the webcam turned out to be quite mediocre at best. Coupled with the awkward angle, your video call experience might not turn out to be very good.

Honor MagicLink 2.0

By now, it really would be surprising if someone wasn’t familiar with Honor smartphones. Before laptops, Honor really put themselves out there and released a number of notable smartphones both budgeted and flagship. And now, it seems evident that they are set out to make a mark in the laptop market as well. Similar to smartphones, a great laptop does not only comprise high-end specs but great performance and other features as well. And that’s where Honor MagicLink 2.0 comes in for the Honor MagicBook Pro laptop.

Honor MagicLink 2.0 is an NFC protocol that lets you pair your supported Honor smartphone to your laptop. This creates a very seamless and convenient ecosystem for you to work so that everything of use is right in front of you. After connecting your Honor smartphone to your MagicBook Pro, you can manage multiple devices at the same time using multi-screen. You should know that MagicLink 2.0 works only on Honor smartphones with NFC and EMUI 10 or above or MagicUI 3.0 or above.

Once connected, you can answer calls on your MagicBook Pro, use the camera for video calls, use the mouse to interact and operate the apps on your phone, and even edit the files. All of this makes for an incredibly easy and efficient working environment as you have yourselves and an ecosystem that perfectly connects your devices and makes working fun and easy.

The Processor

CPU Specs

The Honor MagicBook Pro, as we talked about earlier, comes in two different variants. Originally, the MagicBook Pro came equipped with Intel’s 10th Gen processors. A little later Honor released their Ryzen lineups for the MagicBook Pro, and that’s what we have in our hands. The one in our hands today for this review has Ryzen 5 4600H in it.

The Ryzen 5 4600H CPU has 6 cores and 12 threads and has the latest 7nm chipset design. It also supports hyperthreading. It has an 8mb cache and TDP wattage of 45W, however that is usually subject to a little bit of change as per the requirements of the vendors. Based on the 7nm designs, the Ryzen 5 4600H promises better performance per Watt. The CPU has a Turbo Boost speed of 4.0GHz.

GPU specs

The GPU

Honor MagicBook Pro with the Ryzen CPU comes with AMD Radeon Graphics. There are no dedicated graphics with this laptop, and that does hold it back a little. However, a dedicated GPU would have resulted in a thicker laptop and that is just not what the MagicBook Pro is about. It is designed and intended for students and office work, with light laptop gaming and editing on the side. With that in mind, it makes sense that there is no dedicated GPU in the MagicBook Pro and instead, it makes use of the integrated GPU with the Ryzen 5 4600H. Light games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike Global Offensive, Dota, and even Valorant will work fine on this laptop.

The Display

The Honor MagicBook Pro laptop features a 16.1-inch FullView display with a 90% screen to body ratio. This results in extra-thin bezels of just 4.9mm on the three sides. Normally, the top bezel is also a little larger because the camera is there however, with Honor’s addition of putting the camera in one of the Fn keys, the top bezel is also quite thin.

16.1-inch IPS FullView display

The 1920x1080p resolution on an IPS display with 100% sRGB color gamut works to great wonders on the MagicBook Pro. IPS panels offer greater color accuracy and range. It has 300 nits of brightness and a contrast ratio of 1000:1, pretty standard numbers that we have seen in laptops before. The MagicBook Pro screen also has been certified by TÜV Rheinland and produces fewer blue light emissions, which are harmful for your eyes. IPS panels don’t really have quite good viewing angles so you should not have qualms there.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Laptop keyboards are often subject to a few design flaws, which are sometimes nothing more than personal preferences. Likewise, in the case of MagicBook Pro, the keys were a little less than ideal for me. The keys have a keystroke of 1.3m however, they are rather small. There is very little lift off the keys and in typing, I found my fingers actually digging a little deep.

MagicBook Pro trackpad

Over long typing, I found my fingers getting a little tired and having trouble keeping up with my usual typing speed because the keys were not very comfortable to use. The travel time between the keys is short, which is normally good however, in this case, I found myself longing for more distance between the keys because of how packed it all was. I doubt many will even notice this, let alone find it to be a problem because some people are quite used to keyboards like this. However, I found the switch to be quite problematic at first.

MagicBook Pro trackpad and keyboard with a simple and efficient design

The trackpad is pretty standard and does not have dedicated buttons. Instead, the buttons are built-in on the trackpad, like we’ve in many laptops. This of course saves space and gives you more room to work with. The standard gestures are featured and you can do the same pinch to zoom in or zoom out and other trackpad gestures for your tasks.

Cooling Solution and Thermal Design

The Honor MagicBook Pro has quite an efficient cooling design that works wonders for it. As is the case with most laptops, the Honor MagicBook Pro’s air vents are located at the bottom. I talked about the fact that the crest alone is not sufficient enough to give the MagicBook Pro a decent lift up from the surface. However, that did not really cause much of an issue in most of the cases.

Dual fan design with thicker pipes in the MagicBook Pro helps keep the temperature at optimum levels. In most cases, you will not even notice the temperature goes up, let alone the fan gets noisy. The dual heat pipes and fans help in about 15% better heat dissipation. On top of that, the fans remained quiet for the most part. The noise of the fan did become noticeable when we put the MagicBook Pro to test when doing the benchmarks. However, that just goes to show that it was working overtime to keep the temperatures at bay and prevent thermal throttling.

Testing Methodology

For the benchmarks and in-depth testing, we used the likes of Geekbench 5, Cinebench, PCMark 10, and 3DMark TimeSpy for the CPU tests. For the SSD, we used CrystalDiskMark for the Read and Write speeds. We also tested out rendering times in Adobe Premiere.

For all of the tests, the laptop was plugged in and full performance mode was toggled on. No extra cooling solutions were used and the laptop’s own ventilation and cooling system were solely responsible for these results.

CPU Benchmarks

The Honor MagicBook Pro has the Ryzen 5 4600H CPU installed in it and we used the appropriate benchmarking tools to test the prowess of this CPU.

Starting out, the first test was carried out using 3DMark TimeSpy and the scores were recorded.

3DMark Results

From the above screenshot of the test, you can see that the score comes out as 4918, which is pretty fantastic. Despite being intended and designed for somewhat average use, the Ryzen 5 4600H proves to be a fantastic piece of hardware and does not disappoint.

Next, we used Geekbench to test out the single-core and multi-core performance of the Honor MagicBook Pro.

Honor MagicBook Pro GeekBench Single/Multi Core Performance

Single Core Performance		Multi Core Performance
Single Core	1097	Multi Core	5884
Crypto	2107	Crypto	4476
Integer	968	Integer	5680
Floating Point	1209	Floating Point	6561

For those who are not familiar with how Geekbench measures scores, it basically just assigns a series of tasks to the CPU to run. The score displayed shows how quickly the processor was able to process and complete those tasks. Higher numbers mean it took less time for it to complete them. You can see that the single-core and multi-core scores come out as 1097 and 5884 respectively, making the ratio come out as 5.3.

Following that, we used Cinebench R15 and Cinebench R20 to test out the CPU prowess.

Cinebench R15 Results

From the Cinebench R15 results, the score of single-core comes out as 170 with an MP ratio of 7.79. The single-core score of 170 is quite impressive and further solidifies the Ryzen 5 4600H is a great CPU for you to get your hands on.

Cinebench R20

In the Cinebench R20 scores, the single-core performance is 438 with an MP ratio of 6.97. Cinebench uses 3D/4D rendering and uses its own scoring metrics to display the stats. AMD’s Zen architecture has been living up to their promises and the Ryzen 5 4600H can attest to that with these scores.

Lastly, PCMark 10 was used which tests the CPU’s rendering and content creation performance. For performance free of any potential hurdles, a score close to 3400 is recommended. Higher than that is of course appreciated.

PCMark10 Results

The above results can really put the final nail to the coffin and prove that this laptop is quite fantastic in its works. With a score of 4843, the MagicBook Pro comes out as a great laptop to have. For the intended audience, these scores will be fantastic and effortless usage and even video rendering should not prove to be that big a hassle for you.

GPU Benchmarks

MagicBook Pro has an integrated Vega GPU and in this section, we will be showing you the results of GPU benchmarks. For this, Unigine Superposition and GeekBench 5 OpenCL were used.

For the first GPU benchmark, we used Unigine Superposition, which is one of the most demanding benchmarks for your GPU. It uses highly detailed and interactive environments to test out the GPU prowess.

Superposition Results

For an integrated GPU with only 512Mb of VRAM, the score of 536 on the Unigine Superposition is pretty fantastic to see. Rest assured, you can easily play League of Legends and game of somewhat same requirements on this with ease.

Next up, we have the scores of Geekbench 5 OpenCL.

Geekbench 5 OpenCL Score

In this, we can see that the score comes out as 11169. This is actually higher than some Nvidia laptop GPUs as well so it was quite pleasant to see the MagicBook Pro perform well in these tests.

Display Benchmarks

The Honor MagicBook Pro has a 16.1-inch FullView Display with an IPS panel. It has a resolution of 1920 x 1080p. In our usage, we were able to really enjoy the experience that the MagicBook Pro was able to deliver to us. Of course, it’s nothing too special but it still is a promising display and we’re going to be testing it out to its max potential in this section.

For our benchmarks, we used Spyder X Elite and calibrated the display too. We’ll be showing you before and after calibration results and will also discuss the different parameters that are brought into question.

Right out the box, the pre-calibrated color accuracy, reproduction, and range were a little off. You can see that from the before and after calibration pictures and compare the results.

Brightness, Contrast and White Point post-calibration

As we stated earlier, the MagicBook Pro’s display has 300 nits of brightness. For our brightness and contrast test, we the brightness from 0 to 100% with 25% increments. The results are shown above. Even with brightness at a mere 4.1, the contrast ratio was still 300:1 which is quite high. We were able to get 349.8 nits of brightness which is more than enough.

Color Gamut of display

As advertised, the MagicBook Pro display was able to give us 100% of sRGB coverage which is quite fantastic. Other than that, the above screenshot shows 76% of AdobeRGB, 76% of P3, and 71% of NTSC coverage. These results are quite good and rather impressive. Even with content creation, video editing, or digital arts on the side, the MagicBook Pro should yield great results for you.

Color accuracy pre-calibration

We can see here that pre-calibration, the delta E values were way off. Darker colors and shades did have Delta E of less than 2 but the maximum was at 5.37 resulting in an average score of 2.76.

Color accuracy post-calibration

After calibration, the Delta E values came down quite a lot. All of the values except one were less than 1, resulting in fantastic post-calibration color accuracy. The average Delta E values after calibration came all the way down to a mere 0.99.

Next, we checked color uniformity for 4 different brightness levels: 50%, 67%, 83%, and full 100%. The results of these can be shown in the above set of pictures.

In the above set of screenshots, we’re showing you the luminance uniformity tests that we did for the same 4 brightness levels as the color uniformity test.

Before and After calibration

We used Spyder X Elite for our display benchmarks and measured the parameters before and after calibration. You can see the difference in the above two screenshots which show you the before and after calibrated views of a picture. The difference is quite noticeable and pleasant as well.

SSD Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark Results

The Honor MagicBook Pro on our hands came with a 512 PCIe NVMe SSD. For our test of the SSD, we used CrystalDiskMark to test out the read and write speeds along with 4K speeds.

In CrystalDiskMark, the read and write speeds come out to be 3436.43 Mb/s and 2722.83 Mb/s. These numbers should assure you that you will not encounter any in your work as they are quite impressive. You really should see these numbers fly when you use the USB-C port for transferring data. What’s even more impressive are the 4K speeds of 47.83 Mb/s and 152.21 Mb/s for reading and write respectively.

Battery Benchmarks

The Honor MagicBook Pro comes with a 56Wh battery and is charged using the USB-C port on the side. Upon fully charging it, up to 11 hours of continuous usage can be dished out using this laptop. Keep in mind that these numbers are not always going to stay the same. For example when gaming or really pushing the MagicBook Pro to its limits, you will most likely notice the total battery time go down. Still, long battery life is what you should expect with this laptop.

Another great feature that this laptop has is fast charging. In the box, you’ll get a 65W Fast Charger which you can plug into your wall socket and let your MagicBook be charged in no time. We noticed that the MagicBook Pro was able to charge from 0 to a full 100% in just under 2.5 hours, an impressively short amount of time considering how long the battery lasts. In order to test out the battery of the MagicBook Pro, we did three tests. In the first, laptop was left on idle with 50% brightness and we noted the time it took for it to completely die. In the second, the brightness was again at 50% however, we used it regularly by browsing, watching Netflix and Youtube and etc. And lastly in the third, the brightness was raised to a full 100% and heavy stress was put on the laptop and the time it took for the battery to drain was noted.

The numbers are quite impressive, albeit not the best we’ve seen so far. Still, a regular usage time of about 9 hours should be quite sufficient for many people. And if you run out, the 65W Fast Charger will let you get back in in no time.

Performance in Content Creation Software

Evident from the CPU and GPU benchmarks, the amazing prowess of the Ryzen 5 4600H should be visible by now. We took things up a notch and decided to test it out in content creation software as well. To test out how well it can handle video rendering. For our test, we used Adobe Premiere Pro and used a 4K video with a duration of 1 minute and 32 seconds and 60fps.

For Adobe Premiere Pro, presets of 4K, 1080p, and 720p were used. The results can be seen above and they are quite decent. It took 6:45 mins for 4K video, 5:25 for 1080p and 5:18 for 720p.

Thermal Throttling

The temperature and thermal throttling handling capabilities of the MagicBook Pro were very pleasing to witness. Even when putting the MagicBook Pro to the test, there was barely any performance degradation. The dual fan and dual heat pipe design come out to be quite sufficient for the tasks that the MagicBook Pro sets out to do. For that reason, it surely deserves credit.

In normal benchmarks, we rarely witnessed any thermal throttling with the MagicBook Pro. PCMark 10, Adobe Premiere Rendering and Superposition went smoothly and with ease, without causing any notable temperature spikes. It wasn’t until the stress test of CPU, FPU, Cache, and system memory through AIDA64 when we noticed the temperature hike.

Temperatures after stress test

During that, the CPU Diode temperature reached 105C and the GPU temperature was at 71C in 2-3 minutes with the CPU clock was varying between 3.6GHz to 3.9GHz. As a precautionary measure, we ran this test for only 5 minutes and stopped it after that. Despite reaching a temperature of more than 100C, we did not notice any thermal throttling. The only notable one was achieved when we really put the MagicBook Pro to test with a very demanding and stressful test using Aida64.

You really should be fine with just about anything that the MagicBook Pro is going to be used for. The dual fan and dual heat pipes ensure that no thermal throttling is achieved when using the MagicBook Pro. In our CPU, GPU, and even content creation software, that is the Adobe Premiere Pro, the temperature remained in optimum levels and we had nothing to worry about.

Acoustic Performance/System Noise

In using the MagicBook Pro, the fans remained at very quiet levels. In just about all the tasks, except benchmarking, that we used the MagicBook Pro for, the fan level was very close to the 25dB level. If you’re not familiar with what the noise levels are and the unit of their measurement, you can take the following for reference. A quiet room will have a sound level of around 26-28 dB. As long as the noise is below the 30dB threshold, it is barely audible to the human ear. That is if you’re not really paying attention to it and are trying to listen to the sounds. The noise and thermal performance of this laptop can be further made better if you choose to use an external cooling pad.

Be that as it may, you can rest easy knowing that the fans of the MagicBook Pro will not cause you any troubles. You can pay full attention to the work you’re doing and not be bothered by the noise of the fans that we’ve sometimes seen in laptops.

Conclusion

Honor’s MagicBook lineup of laptops has continuously impressed us over and over. In MagicBook 14, we talked about what a great addition to your needs it was and Honor steps things up a notch with the MagicBook Pro. The MagicBook lineup of laptops is clearly helping Honor imprint a dominating footprint in the laptop market.

The simplistic design works great wonders for the Honor MagicBook Pro laptop. With clear cut and smooth edges, and slim design is just about perfect for anyone. MagicBook laptops have clearly been keeping up with the trend and while it does not have a Thunderbolt port, it comes with a USB-C port that is also used for charging. That results in really fast charging so you can save time and have your laptop ready on the go. Great results and scores should further invite you into accepting the amazing prowess of the Honor MagicBook Pro.

In addition to that, the benchmarks of all the parameters came out to be quite fascinating. Further, Honor MagicLink 2.0 lets you connect supported Honor smartphones to your MagicBook Pro laptop and make for a seamless and efficient working environment. In the future, Honor might have plans to work on their webcam and speaker quality, however, nonetheless, the ones provided in the MagicBook Pro should suffice. For the price that it boasts, MagicBook Pro really gives value to its customers and truly harnesses the power of Ryzen 5 CPUs. Be it for every day usage or CPU intensive work, the benchmark results should be satisfying enough to prove to you that the MagicBook Pro packs quite a punch.

Honor MagicBook Pro

A fantastic laptop for all your needs

Pros

Great build quality and a sleek and professional-looking design
Very little thermal throttling
Dual pipe
and dual fan design keeps the temperature at bay for most tasks
Very fast fingerprint power button

Cons

Webcam quality is quite subpar
When plugged-in you lose access to the USB-C Port

Processor: Ryzen 5 4600H | RAM: 16GB dual-channel DDR4 | Storage: 512GBPCIe NVMe SSD | Display: 16.1-inch FullView IPS | GPU: AMD Radeon Renoir

VERDICT: Honor's MagicBook Pro may come off as a little bit expensive for some people, however, it is a great laptop to have. With fantastic results in CPU and GPU testings and elegant design, the MagicBook Pro offers a very sweet spot between great performance and aesthetics.

Check Price

The post Honor MagicBook Pro Review – Expensive But Incredible Performance appeared first on Appuals.

Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA Review

Hassam Nasir — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 16:54:41 +0000

ASUS is one of the most popular brands in the computer and laptop industry in the world. While ASUS’s fame mostly stems from their gaming products, their non-gaming products are no less than that.

PRODUCT INFO

Zenbook 14 UX425JA

Manufacture ASUS

Available at View at Amazon

PRODUCT INFO
Zenbook 14 UX425JA
Manufacture	ASUS
Available at	View at Amazon

ASUS makes products ranging from monitors, peripherals, motherboards, and laptops as a whole. In both gaming and non-gaming laptops, ASUS has a very good reputation. With products like the previous ZenBooks, this reputation is richly deserved. Today we are looking at the new addition to the series of ZenBooks. The ASUS ZenBook 14 UX425JA is one of the ZenBook’s for the year 2020. ASUS released their new ZenBook laptops rather quietly and under the radar early on in the year and it has taken a little time for people to notice them.

Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA at first glance.

Now that they have come into people’s sight, however, they are giving tough competition to many highly acclaimed laptops. The ASUS ZenBook is a light to medium level work laptop for those who can afford it. It is intended for people who have a lot of traveling to do in their daily routine.

System Specifications

Intel^® Core i5-1035G1 processor
8GB LPDDR4X 3200MHz
14” Full HD (1920 x 1080), 16:9 aspect, anti-glare screen, 300nits brightness display
32GB + 512GB Intel^® Optane Memory H10 with SSD
Intel^® UHD Graphics
3D IR HD camera with Windows Hello support
Intel WiFi 6 with Gig+ performance (802.11ax)
Bluetooth 5.0
ASUS SonicMaster stereo audio system with surround-sound; smart amplifier for maximum audio performance
Array microphone with Cortana and Alexa voice-recognition support

Miscellaneous Specs

Edge-to-edge design, full-size backlit, with 1.4mm key travel
Glass-covered; intelligent palm-rejection
Precision Touchpad (PTP) technology supports up to four-finger smart gestures
67Wh 4-cell lithium-polymer battery
65W power adaptor
Plug Type: Type C
Dimensions: 1.39cm x 31.9cm x 20.8cm (H x W x D)
Weight: 1.17kg

I/O Ports

2 x Thunderbolt 3 USB-C^® (up to 40Gbps)
1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A (up to 5Gbps)
1 x Standard HDMI
1 x MicroSD card reader

Box Contents

Zenbook 14
Power cable and brick

Design and Build

The ASUS Zenbook 14 UX425JA is one of the most lightweight laptops of this time. It is also extremely thin. The Zenbook 14 is mostly made of metal. This makes the Zenbook 14 solid and sturdy. Interestingly enough, even though it is made of metal, the weight of the Zenbook 14 is still only 1.1 kg. On the outside, there is the ASUS name written a little bit to the side rather than in the center of the laptop. The Zenbook 14 is available in two different colors, the pine grey, and the lilac mist.

Aerial view of the Zenbook

Although the ZenBook 14 UX425JA is one of the most lightweight laptops, it is also very sturdy and durable. ASUS has put the ZenBook 14 through several rigorous durability tests that have proven the durability of this laptop. They have even gone so far as to put it at military-grade toughness. Through all this, ASUS has also managed to maintain the highly stylish and sleek design of the ZenBook 14. This laptop is one of the best-looking laptops to ever come into the market. Whether you choose the pine grey or the lilac mist color, there is no doubt that this will satisfy the aesthetic demands of every customer.

Once you open the laptop, you will notice that the keys are placed differently than the previous Zenbook models. Starting from the top left and moving towards the right side, we see that there are many function keys ranging from multimedia keys to brightness increase and decrease keys. On the right side, there is a line of keys for basic purposes like the power button or the home button, etc. In between the keys, there is a space of about 1.5 mm. This space between the keys allows for easy pressing of the keys without pressing multiple keys at the same time. It also makes for smoother and more rhythmic typing. The only real problem with the placement or size of the keys is with the arrow keys. They are way too small to be used easily. Most of the time you will end up pressing more than one key.

The almost perfect keyboard

In an open position, you will notice that the keyboard part is tilted upwards. Due to this upward tilt, typing is much easier and ergonomically proficient. With a tilt less, the flat keyboard you have to tilt yourself forward a bit to better access the keyboard. This can cause neck and back issues after some time. However, thanks to this upward tilt you are free of any such issue. The upward tilt also provides the laptop with a cooling property. Since it is uplifted from the surface, the air is free to pass from underneath the Zenbook, hence cooling it in the process.

The audio quality is also improved thanks to this upward posture of the laptop. The sound is free to pass from underneath the laptop rather than get muffled on the surface. Not to mention the speakers are Harman Kardon approved. With such trustworthy names of the sound industry working to make sure you get the best audio possible, there can be no doubt as to the quality of sound that the ZenBook will deliver.

The Zenbook 14 is definitely one of the thinnest laptops we’ve ever seen.

The ZenBook 14 UX425JA is a highly portable device. This is one of its biggest positives. It is extremely lightweight and even sleek in design. This device is a very good option for anyone who has a lot of traveling to do. It is easy to carry around and has a long battery life to boot. ASUS has boasted of 22-hour long battery life for the ZenBook 14. Not to mention the quick charging feature allows you to charge for up to 60% worth of battery life in 50 minutes. Normal full charging of the battery takes about 2 hours. So, if you have a lot of traveling to do this laptop has to be one of the best options.

The bottom side of the laptop.

There is also an IR camera at the top of the laptop, above the screen. Thanks to this camera you are able to turn on your laptop without the need to put in any password. The IR camera is able to recognize and identify your face in a very short time and turn on the laptop. The IR camera also gives a very clear image during video calls or if you are in the mood to take pictures. However, there is no finger sensor or touch screen feature available in the ZenBook 14.

I/O Ports, Speakers, & Webcam

On the left side of the ZenBook 14, there are 2 Thunderbolt 3 type C USB ports along with one HDMI port. On the right side of the laptop, there is one micro SD card reader and one USB 3.2 type A port. As USB ports start going obsolete, Thunderbolts start paving the way for the future. ASUS is well aware of this fact and has given two thunderbolt ports in its latest product. Thunderbolt ports are the fastest USB ports in the world at this time. They can also be used for multiple purposes. You can transfer files or use the Thunderbolt port to play videos from some other device to your laptop. Giving two such ports in the same laptop is a sure-fire way to future proof a product. USB type 3.2 ports are a more standard type of USB port. Though still faster than the average USB port.

The left side of the Zenbook

While HDMI is also going down in popularity due to the Thunderbolt ports existence, HDMI ports are still widely used and ASUS has indeed included it in the ZenBook 14. What they have cut down on to be able to add all of these top-notch ports in such a small space is the 3.5 mm audio jack or aux cable input. A lot of people have been moving from wired headphones that require audio jack input to wireless headphones. However, the audio jack is still widely popular and it is a bit odd that ASUS has decided to not add it to the new ZenBook.

The left side of the Zenbook

On the top bezel, the Zenbook 14 UX425JA has its webcam. Asus takes on a bit different approach to the webcam of this laptop. The Zenbook 14 UX425JA has a 4-element webcam with an IR sensor. With a 4 element webcam, the lens uses more elements to deliver sharper quality images and videos. Along with that, this Zenbook’s webcam also has support for Windows Hello. In our use, we found that the Zenbook 14 UX425JA had little trouble unlocking the camera via Windows Hello. Even in the absence of light, the IR sensors did their job fairly well and unlocked the laptop quickly. That being said, the camera quality was found to be very mediocre at best. With the absence of a fingerprint reader, you’ll probably be using the face unlock a lot. However, the quality of the camera is nothing special and you’ll easily note that the camera quality does take a bit of a dive.

IR Webcam

The Zenbook 14 UX425JA uses Harman Kardon certified speakers. The speakers are placed on the bottom and the sound comes out through the grills. The speakers, although do a decent job in putting out clear sound, are very low in volume. There is just not enough punch in their sound. The design of the Zenbook 14 lifts up the laptop so it doesn’t lie completely flat. That does open up a bit of room for the sound to come out but it still ends up being a little muffled. The volume is quite low and the Zenbook 14 UX425JA takes up more hits in the audio department not only for that but also due to the fact that it comes without an audio jack.

CPU-Z

Processor

The processors used in the ZenBook are of three different types. You can choose either the Intel Core i3 1005G1 processor, the Intel Core i5 1035G1 processor or the Intel Core i7 1065G7 processor. The one we have is the Intel Core i5 1065G7 processor.

This processor model has a total of 4 cores and 8 threads. It has a total cache of 6 MB Intel Smart Cache. The i5 Core 1035G1 processor comes with a maximum of 64 GB DDR4 memory and integrated UHD graphics. To sum it up, the Intel Core i5 1035G1 processor is a 1GHz quad-core processor with turbo boost feature and a 6 MB cache.

GPU-Z

GPU

The ASUS ZenBook 14 has integrated graphics of two types. The Intel Iris Plus Graphics or the Intel UHD Graphics. The Intel Iris Plus Graphics is more advanced than the Intel UHD Graphics. It also requires you to pay a bit more than the UHD Graphics. The ZenBook 14 has no dedicated GPU. This is one of the points where ASUS is at a loss. Due to their wish to make the ZenBook 14 as sleek and weight-less as it is, they have sacrificed on some of the features that would allow them a much better performance. Due to the lack of a dedicated GPU, users who want to run high demand processes will not get the quality that they desire. Especially when buying a product of this high a price. Then again, the ZenBook 14 is not really focused on people who do run high load processes. This is a much more office-oriented or traveling oriented laptop. For office work, this laptop will not give you any cause for concern. The variant on our hands has the i5 1035G1 and comes with the Intel UHD Integrated Graphics.

Display

The ASUS ZenBook 14 UX425JA has a 14-inch IPS LED display. The screen also has anti-glare properties and 300nits brightness display. With a 90% screen to body ratio, the borders of the screen are very thin. Having an IPS display is a big bonus. IPS display allows you the best viewing angle of all screen types. Even if you are looking at the screen from an acute angle, you will not face any viewing issue that a non IPS screen is sure to give. The quality of the display is amazing.

The Full HD 99% sRGB IPS Display

For viewing images or videos, this laptop is not going to disappoint you with its display quality. You might have to tinker around to set the correct amount of colors and brightness levels of display. Once you have done that, you will see very little to no light bleeding and almost no uniformity issues in display. Of course, if you have a dedicated GPU you will get a better display, but that is mainly for gaming purposes. This laptop is not aimed at the gaming community. For non-gaming users, this laptop’s display will not give you any qualms.

Cooling Solution/Thermal Design

The impressive design of the Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA includes the fact that it is so incredibly thin and easy to carry around. This ultra-thin design has its own share of aesthetics but has certain drawbacks too. You will not find over the top heatsinks and thick heat pipes dissipating the heat in this laptop. The thermal design of this laptop is pretty straightforward, one fan and one heat pipe. The air vents are present at the bottom of the Zenbook 14 UX425JA.

Cooling Vents

This laptop, like most in Asus’s Zenbook lineup, comes with ErgoLift where the lid of the laptop results in lightly lifting up the base. This design is something we’ve really come to enjoy as it does a decent job of making sure that the fans are getting enough ventilation. However, the cooling solution of this laptop is still just not enough. This ultra-thin design has resulted in not a lot of room for the air to properly ventilate through this laptop. We’ve discussed the temperatures in the benchmarks below. With Asus prioritizing more on the aesthetics and ease of portability, the Zenbook 14 UX425JA takes a hit in terms of cooling and temperature control.

TouchPad

Another key feature when it comes to laptops is the pad. In mouse movement and sensitivity, the pad is top-notch. One of the most interesting features of the ZenBook 14 is the ASUSEfficient Number Pad 2.0. By one click on the top right of the pad, the number pad can be turned on and one click on the same spot turns it off. The keys of the number pad are backlit.

The innovative touchpad

On the top left is a button for the brightness of the backlight for the keys. There are only two brightness levels of the backlight. When you have the number pad feature active, you can turn on the calculator just by swiping across from the top left icon to any direction on the pad. For some time now laptops have lacked a number pad such as the one we see in keyboards. ASUS have solved this problem thanks to their Efficient Number Pad 2.0.

Testing Methodology and In-Depth Analysis

Moving on to the actual performance part of our review, we look at how the laptop fairs in most aspects of its performance. We tested the laptop in very ordinary circumstances to best see how it would work for a normal person with standard settings. Plugging it in a standard power outlet in the wall and keeping it without extra cooling solutions at room temperature at about between 25- 30 degrees Celsius. With the laptop plugged in, we can see exactly how strong it is at its full power.

We have used the likes of Geekbench 5, CINEBENCH, PCMark10, 3DMARK TimeSpy (CPU), and other very famous platforms for our tests.

CPU Benchmarks

We used Geekbench 5 to measure and record the results of our tests on the single-core and multi-core performance of the CPU. Basically what Geekbench does is that it assigns the CPU tasks and it measures how long the tasks were taken to be completed. More score means that the Processor took lesser time to complete the tasks assigned by Geekbench. The ASUS Zenbook 14 UX425JA Processor, the i5-1035G1 scored 1117 in its single-core and 3648 points in its multi-core. The ratio between them was therefore 3.26.

Zenbook 14 UX425JA GeekBench Single/Multi Core Performance

Single Core Performance		Multi Core Performance
Single Core	1117	Multi Core	3648
Crypto	3406	Crypto	6741
Integer	944	Integer	3529
Floating Point	1110	Floating Point	3391

The CINEBENCH R15 AND R20 are the tests that come up next. In the R15 version, our processor on the laptop had a score of 150 in single-core performance with a ratio of 3.97. The single-core performance of the Processor is fairly good and we believe that it can be used for gaming provided you have a GPU, which you don’t.

Cinebench R15

The CINEBENCH R20 obviously gave us very different readings but that is mainly due to it being a more intensive and harder test than the R15. We got a single-core score of 355 pts and a ratio of MP at about 3.05. So, even though our test was much harder, in fact almost over 8 times harder, our results were still very good.

Cinebench R20

Next up is the results we carried out in PCMark 10. This is the software that will help us determine how good this processor will be in professional work such as content editing and rendering. PCMark gave us a result of 3513 pts.

3D Mark Time Spy CPU benchmark

This is a fantastic result as in most cases the recommended score is over 3400 for consistent and solid renders. Lastly, in our 3DMark TimeSpy Custom CPU 1080P Test, the Zenbook scored 1962, which is acceptable at this point.

PCMark 10 Benchmark

GPU Benchmarks

Geekbench Open CL GPU Benchmark

At the end of the Geekbench 5 OpenCL benchmark test we got ourselves a score of 5309. This is not too huge a score but it does put it near the GTX 550 Ti for instance, which has an OpenCL score of about 5300.

Display Benchmarks

Display benchmarks are there to help you understand how well the panel of this laptop is going to perform. For normal use, the mere fact that the viewing angles and above than average color reproduction is present is quite sufficient. However, content creators and picture editing require good results on the display benchmarks. So, we’ll be taking a look at them in this section.

Note: All of the display benchmarks were taken after the display calibration in order to yield the maximum potential of the display.

We first checked the color space support for the screen of the Zenbook 14 UX425JA. This screen covers 99% of sRGB, 69% NTSC, 75% of Adobe RGB, and 75% of DCI-P3 color gamut.

Afterward, we performed the brightness and luminance uniformity test. The test was conducted at four levels: 100%, 83%, 67%, and 50%. You can see from the results that there were variations of 9-12% in the cornered quadrants in all 4 brightness levels.

After this, we look at the color accuracy of the screen of this laptop. The results can be shown below and you can see that the average Delta-E is at 0.92 which is pretty impressive. You want Delta-E to be as low as possible as higher the value means lower the color accuracy.

The color uniformities were again measured at the same four brightness levels as in the luminance uniformity test. The results can be shown below for all four different brightness levels.

Overall, the display is better than we expected and will definitely satisfy everyone, be it an enthusiast or an average user.

SSD Benchmarks

The ASUS Zenbook 14 UX425JA variant we had used the 512 GB SSD. There are other options as well as the ability to add or have an SSD of your choice. But we have the 512 GB version. In the tests we carried out on CrystalDiskMark 7.0 we have sequential read and write speeds of 2052.10 Mb/s and 580.70 Mb/s.

The 4k speeds were impressive at 104.11 Mb/s for reading and 91.12 Mb/s for writing. This SSD, based on these results, can handle most of what you can throw at it. You can even use it for some heavy-duty work as well. The scores are very solid in most areas.

Battery Benchmark

It is important for laptops to have longlasting batteries so that they can be used without having to worry too much about the battery running out too often. The battery results are nothing too out of the ordinary, but they’re not something that you really should be worried about either. That is if heavy-duty tasks are not what you’re going to be doing.

For our tests, we charged the laptop to a full 100% and it should be noted that during all tests, the Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JAaptop was on idle with sleep and display sleep power status turned to “Never”.

In the first test (Idling Test) the brightness was set at 50% and no tasks were done on the laptop. After fully charging, the Zenbook was let alone and the time was noted beginning from when the test began to when the Zenbook’s battery died out. In the second test (Average Battery Timing Test) the brightness was set at 50% and normal tasks were carried out such as web surfing, watching some videos, etc. In the third test (Extreme endurance test) the brightness was set at a full 100% and Unigine Heaven was run with the battery being left to die.

Performance In Content Creation Software

We tested out how well the Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA performed in content creation software. As stated earlier, the prowess of this particular laptop does not lie in this realm but we measured it anyway to see how well it can withstand the tests. We used Adobe Premiere Pro and Handbrake for our tests since these two are the more popular ones. In both cases, we used a 4K video sample with 60fps and duration of 2:32.

For Adobe Premiere Pro, we used 4K, 1080p, and 720p preset. And for Handbrake, we used 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolution along with medium encoder preset, H.265 codec, and Constant Quality 15. For Adobe Premiere Pro, it took 8 minutes for 4K, 6:56 for 1080p, and 5:12 for 720p. And for Handbrake, the results were 16 minutes for 4K, 8:23 for 1080p, and 7:24 for 720p. The results can be seen above.

Thermal Throttling

Managing temperatures is an integral part of not just the physical design of the laptop but the hardware selection too. If the temperatures get too high, there can be thermal throttling. When that happens, your laptop starts to dump performance so that it can dissipate heat quickly and more easily. We carefully tested the thermal throttling capabilities of the Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA and used AIDA64 for our results. It should be noted that this laptop is not intended for high-end usage such as video rendering etc. This laptop is intended for normal, everyday tasks.

The idle temperature and clock were recorded at 52-degrees Celsius and 1.3GHz respectively. After putting the CPU under stress, the clock speeds rose up to 3.6GHz as the load increased, the temperature also increased, and the maximum temperature that was recorded as 98-degrees Celsius when the load clock was 3.6GHz. At that point, we noticed thermal throttling and the CPU started to downclock. With little decrements, the CPU went all the way down to 1.2GHz with the temperature stabilizing at 66-degrees Celsius. AIDA64 showed that there was a CPU throttle of 26%, quite alarming numbers.

After 10 minutes, we observed that the CPU clock kept oscillating between 898MHz to 1.2GHz, with the majority of the time staying at 1.2GHz. After repeated stress to the CPU, this changed and the clock did go down to 898MHz for most of the portion of usage but the time it retained the 1.2Ghz clock is respectable nonetheless.

For the purpose that this laptop is designed for, there really shouldn’t come a time where you’ll be facing performance degradations of this magnitude. This thermal throttling can be explained by the fact that the cooling solution and the thermal capabilities of this laptop are quite subpar at best. But, that shouldn’t worry you if video rendering and gaming are not on your agenda.

Acoustic Performance / System Noise

Asus’s Zenbook variants are known to be quiet in their modes of operation. The Zenbook 14 UX425JA follows the same footsteps, albeit with a little variation. For our tests, we placed the microphone 20cm away from the back of the laptop and recorded noise levels. Three measurements were made- ambient, idle, and load. In ambient readings, the laptop is turned off. In idle, the laptop is not put under any use and the readings were found with the laptop turned on. Whereas in load, the CPU was put under stress and the noise levels were calculated. The noise levels were a little higher than what most variants of Asus’s Zenbooks have had, but they were still within the acceptable range. The results are shown below:

Conclusion

The ASUS ZenBook 14 UX425JA is one of the best laptops in its range. It is perhaps the most portable and easily transportable of all laptops. It is extremely lightweight and is of modest size. ASUS has achieved the rather remarkable feat of fitting in a bunch of high-end features into a very small sized laptop. While they have certainly made some sacrifices on features that people require such as the audio jack or the lack of a dedicated GPU. The processor could have certainly been better especially for the price range of the ZenBook 14.

Through a few drawbacks, the ASUS ZenBook 14 UX425JA is still one of the best laptops at this time. Its high portability makes the ZenBook 14 one of the most ideal laptops for people that have a lot of traveling to do in the course of their daily lives. For processes that are required for office work, this laptop will work really efficiently. The new ZenBook has a lot of very strong competitors from well-known brands such as Lenovo or Acer. Although, it is not able to beat them in pure performance the ASUS ZenBook provides other qualities that give others a run for their money.

Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA

The Best From The Zenbook Lineup

Pros

Sturdy metal build
MIL-STD 810G Certified
Highly portable due to its lightweight
Harman Kardon Audio
IR webcam

Cons

No 3.5mm audio jack
Mediocre webcam quality
26% thermal throttle at full load

Processor: Intel Core i5-1035G1 | RAM: 8GB DDR4 | Storage: 2GB + 512GB Intel Optane Memory H10 SSD | Display: 14-inch Full HD IPS | GPU: Intel UHD Graphics

VERDICT:Zenbook 14 UX425JA is designed for anyone who's looking to get an aesthetically pleasing device which doesn't lack behind in any of the innovations that are being implemented in this era, with a few drawbacks such as the absence of the 3.5mm jack, the Zenbook still manages to balance out things with its futuristically designed touchpad, making it a worthy contender amongst its competition

Check Price

The post Asus Zenbook 14 UX425JA Review appeared first on Appuals.

Honor MagicBook 14 Review – Justified With The Price Tag

Hassam Nasir — Sun, 10 May 2020 22:29:43 +0000

Huawei needs no introduction in the tech world. Having consistently put out smartphones like Honor 9 that have always been well praised and often given the likes of Samsung and Apple a tough competition, they have built an enormous fan base. Enter 2020 and Huawei brings out the Honor Magicbook 14, a fantastic looking notebook with pricing that attracts all. Huawei has managed to prove themselves in the smartphone world plenty of times. With the Magicbook 14, they’re set out to make a mark in the laptop market. This is also the brother Laptop of Honor MagicBook Pro and the latest Honor MagicBook 14 2021.

The HonorBook 14 At First Glance

PRODUCT INFO

HONOR MagicBook 14

Manufacture Huawei

Available at View at Amazon UK

PRODUCT INFO
HONOR MagicBook 14
Manufacture	Huawei
Available at	View at Amazon UK

Honor MagicBook 14 Review

There are a number of laptop brand names that have already established their roots. In order to compete with them, it was important that Huawei delivers a laptop worthy of you taking money out of your pocket yet without raising the price to an absurd amount. The Honor MagicBook 14 variant in our hands comes with a Ryzen 3500U CPU and that’s the one we’ll be reviewing today. A full metal chassis and a very professional and sleek looking laptop is what the MagicBook 14 is. But, the underlying question is whether this is worth investing in or not. So without any further ado, let’s find out!

Unboxing

Honor MagicBook 14 comes in very standard packaging that most laptops have. In a cardboard box is this Honor laptop wrapped around a sleeve for protection. All of the contents are packed nicely together and it makes for a rather simple and beautiful presentation of what you’re getting. The box contents are as follows:

Honor MagicBook 14 laptop
USB-C charging cable and brick
Documentation

System Specifications

Battery: 57.4Whr（TYP）8 hours
CPU: Ryzen 5-2500U
GPU: AMD Radeon XFR mobile graphics
Storage: 8G DDR4 +256G SSD only
Charger: 65W Type-C charger
Sound Effect: High / deep bass separated design (Dolby Atmos Sound System)
Keyboard: Backlit keyboard
Display: 14” FHD IPS Display (5.2 mm thin bezel)

Dimensions

Height: 221 mm
Width : 323 mm
Depth: 15.8 mm
Weight: 1450g

I/O Ports

1 x USB-C（Multi-functional）
1 x USB-A3.0
1 x USB-A2.0
1 x HDMI
1 x 3.5 mm

Design and Build Quality

The Honor MagicBook 14 has a clean and simple design that seems to be rather understated. Being a professional monitor mostly intended for work-related tasks, this works well in this laptop’s favour. Something, we thought that HP Pavilion x360 does as well. Smooth and polished edges and an aluminium chassis make for a very elegant looking design that this monitor boasts. The MagicBook 14 is definitely one of the better-looking laptops that we’ve come across. This laptop is available in 2 different colours, Space Gray and Mystic Silver. Despite having a full metal chassis, its weight is only 1.38kg which is absolutely perfect. The metal chassis adds a certain density to the MagicBook 14. Its weight is low enough to make for easy portability while the density reassures that this laptop is durable. With the weight and dimensions that the MagicBook 14 has, it easily fits in your Laptop Backpack, where you can carry it around anywhere you like.

Smooth and polished edges and an aluminium chassis

The design of the Huawei MagicBook 14 is really exquisite and looks more premium than what the price entails. The top panel has the Honor logo which is off centre and sits a little to the left. Around the edges and the Honor logo, MagicBook 14 has a metallic blue finish which gives off a beautiful looking effect when light shines on it. Huawei cuts right to the point and delivers a laptop with a minimalistic design that looks just as good as some of the more expensive laptops on the market. Flipping the MagicBook 14 over shows you the rubber feet as well as the vents for airflow. The rubber feet give this laptop a little bit of height when placed on the surface so it helps with smoother airflow.

Backside of the HonorBook 14

The I/O ports, as well as the speakers, are located on both sides. We’ll be getting in more depth about the two below. Opening up the lid of the laptop, you’ll see that the MagicBook 14 has nice and thin bezels. This laptop has an 84% screen to body ratio and the bezels on three sides are 4.8mm. The screen can be rotated to a full 180-degree angle. We’ll be getting more into how that is particularly useful for this laptop later below.

MagicBook 14’s keyboard has nice travel time about it which makes for easier and faster typing. In terms of noise, the keys do have clicky feedback but they do not produce that much noise. The keys have LED lighting under them with two illumination levels for you to choose from. In the F-row, one of the buttons is for the pop-up camera that this laptop has. Honor puts your privacy concerns to rest with the addition of a pop-up camera that you can let out only when you need it. The angle of the camera might not be of liking to everyone, but it’s a minor inconvenience compared to everything else that you’re offered.

On the top right corner, you can see the power button which also acts as a fingerprint scanner. Having a fingerprint scanner on the power button is awfully convenient. Since it is quite fast, all you need to do is hold your finger over the power button and you immediately can get right in.

Fingerprint/Power Button

Seeing the MagicBook 14 from the side, you can observe the slant design of the bottom panel. This further helps in giving this laptop a certain amount of height which improves airflow. Lastly, we’re left with the trackpad. The left and right buttons are integrated onto the trackpad itself, which is quite common to see these days. It has a nice and smooth feel to it which I’m sure everyone can quite easily appreciate.

There is very little not to like about the MagicBook 14 when it comes to how well it looks and is designed. The metal chassis ensures that this laptop is well protected and can withstand normal amounts of damage that might befall on it. On the other hand, Honor’s unique selection of colours with the blue accents on the edges makes sure that no compromises are made when it comes to aesthetics.

The Processor

Honor MagicBook 14 Specs

When it comes to choosing your MagicBook 14, Honor gives you the option of either an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U or 3700U. The variant that we have in our hands comes with the Ryzen 5 3500U. Announced early in 2019, this Picasso APU offers about an 8% performance improvement over its predecessor, the Raven Ridge. For those unfamiliar with the term, Picasso is a series of desktop and mobile APUs that operate on Zen+ CPU and VEGA GPU microarchitecture. Their fabrication is based on 12nm processes, as compared to Raven Ridge’s 14nm. They consume less power and are more powerful.

The Ryzen 5 3500U is an 8 thread (4 Zen+ cores) processor, with the cores operating on a 2.1Ghz base frequency and 3.7Ghz boost frequency. These are not the highest numbers we’ve seen, however, they are still pretty impressive. With 8 threads and a low TDP of just 15W, the power consumption is very efficient. With this APU, up to 32Gb of DDR4-2400 dual-channel RAM and Radeon Vega 8 graphics are supported. The integrated Vega 8 graphics have a 1200MHz frequency and supports DirectX12. DX12 and 8 Gigs of DDR4 RAM is pretty much what’s necessary for laptops these days, so it’s great to see Honor keeping up with that.

The Ryzen 5 3500U is not categorized as a CPU intended for gaming so you can’t expect to play any high-end latest gaming titles on this laptop. That being said, many of the relatively older gaming titles can be played on the MagicBook 14. When the clock frequency is boosted to 3.7GHz, the TDP is 35W, which is quite higher than base 15W but still, relatively power efficient. We’ll be talking more about our stress tests and what the results of those were in the benchmark section below.

The Ryzen 3500U is more than enough for just about any work that you would require from an office-class laptop. Multi-tasking, video rendering and some gaming on the side are all a cinch with the 4 cores and clock frequency that this CPU has.

The GPU

Honor MagicBook 14 Graphics Card

The Radeon Vega 8 is an integrated GPU used by the Ryzen 5 CPUs. The MagicBook 14 is really not the right pick if you also want to run the latest titles on this laptop. As such, the Vega 8 is a mediocre level GPU at best. With that being said, it does offer some improvements over the Raven Ridge integrated graphics. Most notably, the DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. As I have already stated, this is not ideal for the latest games. However, being a Radeon GPU, it does have AMD FreeSync Technology. Though I doubt it’ll be of much use to people looking for a laptop of this category.

The Vega 8 has a variable TDP between 12-25 Watts and its performance changes and depends upon the selected TDP, as is the case with GPUs. The MagicBook 14 has 1Gigs of DDR4 VRAM and 8 cores. We’ll be getting more into the benchmark results how well it can hold its own later on. This GPU, for the most part, is well suited for video rendering and photo editing software like Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Lightroom etc. Vega 8 in the MagicBook 14 has a core clock of 1200MHz, which is pretty power efficient. However, it can go up to 1500MHz when Boosted.

The Display

No matter how great a laptop overall is, one thing that never goes overlooked due to how important it is is the display quality. Having brightness levels that are high enough for you to easily see what’s going on in your screen when sitting in sunlight is a vital subset of determining the quality of the display. After all, what good is your portable computer if you’re not going to be able to get the full value of the screen?

Honor MagicBook 14 IPS Display

The MagicBook 14 has a 14-inch Full HD display with 4.8mm bezels and an 84% screen to body ratio, as mentioned before. The display is an IPS panel with a max resolution of 1080p. The tiny bezels have been something that I have really come to like when using the MagicBook 14. My focus is rarely ever hindered by them and I value the quality of the screen more because of that. Being an IPS panel, the viewing angles are exceptional as always. The pictures come off as crisp and it felt perfect for a working laptop. One thing that I was a little disappointed with was the low brightness levels. Obviously, it’s not like the ASUS Zenbook Pro 15, that comes with 4K 60hz Screen, but it still gets the job done, given the price point.

Datacolor Spyder X Calibration device mounted on the display of the HonorBook 14

As I wrote earlier that having the freedom to sit comfortably under the sun and use your laptop is something that is a dominant factor for some. The MagicBook 14’s screen only has 250-nits of brightness, well under even the 300-nits threshold. This is not a problem at all for when you’re working indoors, as I do, but may be problematic outdoors. The display is TÜV Rheinland certified and has a blue light filter in it which prevents excessive blue light from causing strain on your eyes over long periods of usage.

I/O Ports, Speakers, Webcam and Honor Magic-Link 2.0

The left side of the I/O Ports.

Honor MagicBook 14’s ports are distributed on both the left and right sides. The number of ports that are offered does seem a little bit of a let down because there aren’t many. On the right, you can see one 3.5mm audio jack and one USB 2.0 port. Going completely free of USB 2.0 is going to be a waste of throughput because connecting keyboards and mice to USB 3.0 will just be wasting resources. Therefore, I understand why we need to have at least one USB 2.0, especially on a laptop where you may need to connect an external mouse.

The right side of the I/O Ports.

On the left-hand side, there’s USB 3.0/Type-C and Type-A port along with one HDMI port. It is great to see the Honor MagicBook 14 is using Type-C ports because they’re much more power-efficient while offering almost double the transfer speeds. This laptop makes use of the USB Type-C to charge its battery as well. While this is, of course, better, it does mean that you’re going to be losing your Type-C port when charging.

MagicBook 14’s speaker grilles are located at the sides and honestly, this is a better position than being on the front. Not always are we placing our laptops on an ideally flat surface like a tabletop. By having the speakers on the sides allow them to not be blocked by any potential object that may otherwise end up reducing the volume. The speakers are Dolby-Atmos certified so you know the stamp of quality is there. That being said, these aren’t the loudest sounding speakers that I’ve come across from a laptop, but the audio quality easily exceeds that of many budget laptops that are offered in this price range.

All of your privacy concerns addressed

I talked about the positioning of the webcam earlier but let me go in a bit more detail here. In the top F-row of the keyboard, the key before F7 is actually one for the webcam. Pressing that pops open the camera and doing so again will close it. Many people have privacy concerns regarding their webcams since the traditional positioning of the webcam provides no actual way of concealing it. Of course, there’s always the black tape over the webcam remedy but you’re not going to get away with it without making your laptop look ugly. While the angle does provide privacy benefits, the angle of it feels a little odd. In your Skype or Zoom calls, the other side will end up looking at your neck and chin most of the time as it is a rather steep and low angle. Luckily, the quality is good and we compared it to ASUS Zenbook 14, where this had better quality.

We already are familiar with Honor’s name due to their footprints in the smartphone industry. This is not to say that Honor’s laptops have not gained the praise that they sought out, but there are still ways to go before their name gains in popularity in the laptop market. Having an ecosystem that promotes a seamless connection between your devices is an important part. Your phone is just as important to you as your laptop these days. With the MagicBook 14, you get the Magic-Link 2.0.

PC Manager.

It is essentially an NFC protocol that lets you pair up and connect your phone with your MagicBook 14. However, you can only connect certain Huawei and Honor phones so you should keep that in mind. This may not be of use to you if you’re not a Huawei phone user, but you’ll easily appreciate its worth if you are.

Keyboard and Trackpad

Being a 14-inch laptop, the MagicBook 14’s keyboard does not have the numeric keypad in it. The keyboard is standard chiclet styled keyboard with about 1.3mm key travel time in between. The keys are not completely silent, but compared to other laptops they generate low noise. Unless you’re smashing the keys on the keyboard, no one else is going to be really bothered by them. The keys have LED lights underneath them which can be toggled on or off.

A very familiar keyboard and trackpad setup, if you’ve been using a MacBook.

As usual, the top Fn keys are also used for other multimedia functions. One of the keys is used to change the lighting of the keyboard. Other than that, the selection is pretty generic- volume control, brightness control, airplane mode etc.

The hidden camera sandwiched between the F6 and F7 key.

The trackpad of the MagicBook 14 has quite a smooth and nice feel about it. It does not register any ghosting effects and detecting multi-gesture inputs are done with ease. The LMB and RMB buttons are not separated from the trackpad. Instead, they are integrated with the trackpad itself, much like Apple’s Macbooks. In fact, the keyboard and trackpad both have similar designs which is not too bad since there aren’t any downsides to that.

Cooling Solution

Seeing cooling vents on the side are generally better because the sides are almost always open when you’re using a laptop. Putting your laptop on your lap can somewhat block the airflow of the vents that are on the bottom, but the sides remain open. However, due to the MagicBook 14’s slim design, the cooling vents are reserved only for the bottom. They’re not overkilled and unlike ASUS Vivobook S14, these do a decent job at keeping your laptop cool. After all, you don’t really require big pipes and loud fans from a laptop of this niche.

Honor MagicBook 14 Edges.

The somewhat elevated design of the MagicBook 14 does help in giving it a bit of height over the surface. That results in better cooling but the height advantage is really not that much. Using laptop pads and cooling fans will make sure that your laptop temperatures never go high, however, that may not be quite necessary. These 12nm processors do offer a bit of a power consumption advantage.

Testing Methodology and In-Depth Analysis

Having talked about the “physical” aspects of the Honor MagicBook 14, it is time for us to move on to the benchmark and performance. Before I get in on that, you should know how the tests were obtained. We’ll be explaining these through the results as we talk about them but a general overview is important as well. The tests were performed with the laptop plugged in the wall outlet to maximize the performance. No extra cooling pads were used and the ambient room temperature in which we performed these tests was about 25-degrees Celsius.

Cinebench R15, Cinebench R20, Geekbench 5, 3DMark Advanced Edition, and PCMark 10 Advanced Edition were used to testing CPU performance. Unigine Superposition, Geekbench 5, and 3DMark Advanced Edition were used for GPU. And Furmark, CPU-Z stress test and AIDA64 were used for thermal throttling test of this laptop.

Moving on, screen testings and colour uniformity testings were done after calibrating the screen with SpyderXElite. For media-encoding tests, we used Adobe Premiere Pro and Handbrake. Acoustics test was done by placing a microphone 20-cm away while getting the results. The results of all of these tests will be mentioned below and I will try and talk more about them wherever need be.

CPU Benchmarks

The MagicBook 14 that we have our hands on has the Ryzen 5 3500U CPU in it. The results of our benchmarks for the CPU testing will be for those.

3DMark Time Spy Benchmark

Starting out, the first test was done in Time Spy in which, MagicBook 14’s CPU scored 2555. Seeing as gaming is not this laptop’s primary focus, this score is quite good for the work-related tasks that you may need to do.

Huawei MagicBook 14 GeekBench Single/Multi-Core Performance

Single Core Performance		Multi Core Performance
Single Core	759	Multi Core	2997
Crypto	1713	Crypto	3352
Integer	656	Integer	2846
Floating Point	823	Floating Point	3264

Geekbench 5 was used to measure the single-core and multi-core performance. In very simple terms, Geekbench just assigns and runs a series of tasks on a processor and measures the time it takes for it to complete those tasks. Higher the score in Geekbench 5, lesser is the time required by said processor to complete that task. In our tests, MagicBook 14’s processor scored 759 in a single-core test and 2997 in a multi-core test, making the ratio of the two to be 3.7.

Cinebench R15 Benchmark

Next up, we have the scores of Cinebench R15 and R20. In R15, Ryzen 5 3500U had a score of 139 with an MP ratio of 4.56. This single-core performance and score of this processor are actually quite impressive. Theoretically, this processor can manage a bit of relatively heavy gaming however, you will be bottlenecked by GPU anyway. I will be getting into that later on.

Cinebench R20 Benchmark

In Cinebench R20, the single-core score was 292 resulting in an MP ratio of 4.72. Cinebench R20 benchmarks use a more complex and demanding test as compared to R15. In fact, it is 8 times more computational power dependant. Therefore, these two results cannot be really compared. But, it is evident that despite a higher demanding test, these scores were quite decent.

PCMark 10 Benchmark

Finally, PCMark 10 was used which gave us a score of 3161. PCMark’s scores help in determining how good the processor will be for office related work, such as content creation and video rendering software. For smooth video renderings, a score of about 3400 is recommended however, MagicBook 14’s performance stats are still quite decent. You can easily get good value from it due to its overall well-rounded performance.

GPU Benchmarks

MagicBook 14’s processor uses a Vega 8 GPU, which is an integrated one. This is a 1GB GPU with a core clock speed of 1200MHz. Our first test was done on Unigine Superposition which yielded a score of 470.

Unigine Superposition Benchmark

The score of 470 is actually higher than Nvidia Geforce MX250 but only by a margin. However, in both cases, the GPU will bottleneck and prevent demanding gaming titles from being played.

And lastly, the Geekbench 5 OpenCL benchmark test resulted in a score of 8004 for the Vega 8, which is not that great.

Geekbench 5 Benchmark

Display Benchmarks

The display of this laptop is nothing special and we knew it from the start because getting a professional-quality display is not possible in this budget. However, this display should be fine for people who simply want to work in office applications or browse the internet, watch movies, etc. Let’s have a look at the benchmarks of this display. We used SpyderX Elite for the benchmarks and the images below describe various parameters of the display.

Full Calibration Result

As you can see here, the display came with slightly off gamma value, at 2.27, which got improved by a little and finally got to 2.24. The black levels are pretty normal and similar to other screens in the market.

Brightness And Contrast Test

In the above picture, we can see that the brightness level of the display is abysmal and could not even get to 250 nits. Although the static contrast ratio of the display is good with high brightness, it gets a huge downfall as the brightness is reduced, going as low as 200:1 on the lowest brightness.

Colour Gamut

The colour gamut of the display is similar to other low-end screens and has a 68% sRGB coverage and 50% AdobeRGB and DCI-P3 coverage, while good screens cover at least 99% sRGB colour space.

Colour Accuracy Before Calibration

The colour accuracy of the display is very impressive in the non-coloured areas, having delta E of less than 1, however, the coloured-values have a much higher deviation, going as high as 9,84.

Colour Accuracy After Calibration

This result is pretty interesting because the average delta E value got increased from 3.14 to 3.41 after calibration. We checked the values and it came to our notice that though the deviation in coloured-values got less, the grey ones got worse and that is why the average delta E got raised to 3.41.

Screen uniformity at 100% brightness
Screen uniformity at 83% brightness
Screen uniformity at 66% brightness
Screen uniformity at 50% brightness

With the screen uniformity test, we saw that the display had up to 15% difference, which is quite a lot and that is why this display is not particularly good for professional workloads like photoshop, video editing, etc. Still, for an average user, this display is more than enough, so if you’re looking to buy this laptop for work/school purposes, fret not.

SSD Benchmarks

CrystalDiskMark Benchmark

Honor MagicBook 14 uses a PCIe NVME SSD of 256Gb. It is to be noted that a variant with 512Gb is available but we had the 256Gb one. The first test is from CystalDiskMark.

In CrystalDiskMark, the sequential read and write speeds are 1795.40 Mb/s and 1524.92 Mb/s respectively. These numbers are impressive and prove that no hindrance will be caused in your work. The 4K speeds are 30.89 Mb/s for reading and 59.31 Mb/s for writing. Not the best we’ve seen but they’re more than sufficient for your everyday tasks, even if they do get a bit demanding from time to time. For a laptop that has a price tag that this has, these results are pretty good.

Battery Benchmark

The battery timing of the laptop is pretty impressive and one of the reasons for that is the use of power-efficient hardware. We did three tests with the laptop for the battery performance; first, we left the laptop in idle mode, where there were no tasks performed but the screen was on with 50% brightness for the whole time. Next, we fully charged the laptop and performed usual tasks like web browsing, Youtube, etc. with 50% brightness and did this until the battery gave up. In the last, we raised the brightness to 100% along with Unigine Heaven benchmark and ran the test till the battery got depleted.

The battery timing on idle mode is super impressive at 15 hours and even with the usual work, it lasted more than six hours, which is pretty good for a slim laptop like this. With extreme endurance test in the last, it lasted around two hours, which is similar to some high-end gaming laptops and the reason for this is that those gaming laptops have much higher power consumption and their large battery is compensated with that and the resulted battery timing gets similar to this one.

Performance In Content Creation Software

As stated earlier in the CPU benchmark results, the MagicBook 14 is a good enough choice for video rendering softwares such as Adobe Premiere Pro. For our test, we used a 4K video with 1 minute and 32 seconds of duration and 60 FPS for the test. We utilized Handbrake and Adobe Premiere Pro for the tests, where we used 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolution along with fast encoder preset, H.265 codec and Constant Quality 15 in Handbrake and used 4K, 1080p, and 720p (H.264) high-quality presets in Adobe Premiere Pro. The results of the tests are provided below.

Thermal Throttling

Honor MagicBook is not a laptop that should be suffering from thermal throttling because it comes with very power-efficient hardware and this hardware demands very low power. Despite this fact, there was a slight thermal throttling in the laptop, the reason for which is probably the use of a light-weight cooling solution. We used HWMONITOR and HWInfo64 for checking the parameters and stressed the laptop with AIDA64 Extreme.

Thermal Throttling Test

The laptop uses a CPU with a low TDP of 15 watts, however, most of the time it stays at around 12 watts. When we initially ran the test, the power consumption of the CPU was around 12 watts, with clock rates roaming around 3.2 GHz on all cores. But as time passed and the temperature got past 70 degrees, we noticed a decrease in the clock rates and the power consumption of the CPU, going as low as 3.0 GHz and 9.7 watts respectively. Overall, this thermal throttling is not so problematic, as there is not a lot of difference in performance. But the fact remains that even this could have been prevented through the use of a better cooling solution.

Acoustic Performance / System Noise

The graphs above are showing the noise level of the MagicBook 14 in ambient mode, idle and when there’s high load. For noise levels, the Decibel scale is used to measure the sound levels and ideally, you want it to be as low as possible. For a little bit of reference, the sound level is around 26-28dB when in a quiet room. From our tests, we observed that the sound level was 32.5dB for ambient and idle mode. Anything less than 30dB is barely audible to the human ear. Therefore, these sound levels should really not be any trouble for you. You can easily focus on your work without having to worry about a distracting laptop fan bothering you. Similarly, the load noise of 39.9dB is relatively quite low as well. This can be decreased down a little more if you’re using an additional laptop cooling pad fan.

When testing for the noise, we make sure that all the parameters are fixed and remain constant. Keeping that in mind, it is quite clear that the MagicBook 14 has low noise levels which are simply ideal from an office-grade laptop. Rest assured, the MagicBook 14 will not distract you and you can instead focus on your work or the awesomeness of this laptop.

Conclusion

We’ve already been pleased with Huawei phones as they have consistently satisfied their fans. And with the MagicBook 14, it is evident that Honor is just as dedicated in making a mark with their laptop. It seems like a jack of all trades but master of none choice, however, that is easily justified with the price tag that his laptop has. For this price, it does outperform certain laptops that may otherwise not be considered its contenders.

A minimalistic and simple design is enhanced even more with the Space Grey colour and Azure Blue Chamfer. These tiny details to attention are what catches your eye and lure you into praising this laptop even more. And it is just so satisfying to see vendors finally embracing the USB 3.0 mark. While you do lose the Type-C port when charging, it has its benefits as well. Most notably, the fast charging. In just 30 minutes, you can fast-charge this laptop up to 40%.

Conclusion.

The Honor MagicBook 14 is a fantastic student laptop that gives great value for money. From its design to its performance, there is very little that is not to like. And if you’re using Huawei phones that support Magic-Link 2.0, you’ll be even well pleased with the use of that. As of yet, Honor may not be enough to dethrone other powerful companies but it’s evident that they’re on the right track. For now, the MagicBook 14 sits atop a throne that it definitely deserves.

Honor MagicBook 14

Best Budget Laptop for Students

Pros

Space grey colour with chamfered blue edges make for a remarkable design
Fast-charge 40% battery in 30 minutes
Speakers on the side make for high volume without being blocked
Efficient power consumption

Cons

You lose the Type-C port when charging
Webcam positioning is kind of awkward

Processor: Ryzen 5 3500U | RAM: 8GB DDR4 | Storage: 256GB PCIe SSD | Display: 14-inch Full HD IPS Display | GPU: AMD Vega 8 1GB

VERDICT:Honor MagicBook 14 is a fantastic choice for your everyday related tasks. Without skimping out on any major fronts, the MagicBook 14 gives you a very well balanced performance along with a very elegant looking design. The quad-core processor comes out to be a pick that is going to be perfect for just about everyone out there.

Check Price

Price at the time of review: N/A (USA) and £550 (UK)

The post Honor MagicBook 14 Review – Justified With The Price Tag appeared first on Appuals.

Laptops - Appuals

The 5 Best Laptops for Small Businesses in 2024 [All Budgets]

Table of Contents

What should the best laptop for small business have?

The Best Laptops for Small Business

1. Apple MacBook Air M1

Pros

Cons

Specs

2. Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon

Pros

Cons

Specs

3. HP ProBook 450 G9

Pros

Cons

Specs

4. Dell XPS 13

Pros

Cons

Specs

5. Microsoft Surface 5

Pros

Cons

Specs

Why we selected these 5 laptops for small businesses?

Budget-friendly without compromise

Availability of refurbished and used options

Battery life & performance

Durability & reliability

Connectivity options

Which one should you pick for your small business?

Best Laptop for Working From Home in 2024

1. Apple MacBook Pro M2 (16-inches)

Pros

Cons

2. Dell XPS 15 OLED

Pros

Cons

3. Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5

Pros

Cons

4. Microsoft Surface Book 3

Pros

Cons

5. Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10

Pros

Cons

Factors to consider when choosing work from home laptop

Weight, size, and form

Battery life

Processing Power

Usability

Security

Webcam

Final Thoughts

The 9 Best i7 Windows Laptops To Buy In 2024

The Best Performance Core i7 Windows Laptop – Our Picks

Why you should trust us when it comes to buying laptops

1. Dell XPS 13 9310

Pros

Cons

2. MSI GL66

Pros

Cons

3. Dell Inspiron 13 5310

Pros

Cons

4. Acer Nitro 5

Pros

Cons

5. ASUS TUF Dash 15

Pros

Cons

6. Razer Blade Pro 17

Pros

Cons

7. Acer Predator Helios 300

Pros

Cons