Should you’re in search of a thin-and-light Home windows laptop computer with a premium construct, highly effective CPU and an OLED show, you need to positively take note of Honor’s lineup. The corporate’s MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon is a notch above the established fashions in its class – the Dell XPS 13, the Asus Zenbook 14, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, and naturally, the Apple MacBook Air.
We’ll let you know what makes the MagicBook Artwork higher but it surely’s essential to begin off with the value – at €1,699, it is cheaper than virtually all of these rivals, and Honor is operating a killer promo that will get you the 1TB/32GB laptop computer with a present haul that features the Honor Pad 9 pill, and the Honor Earbuds X6 for €200 off at €1,499. Solely the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X can match that worth (it is €1,499 on the time of this text on Amazon).
The Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon is available in a single configuration with 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. You will get it solely within the silky clean Starry Gray coloration – Honor is seemingly holding the textured Emerald Inexperienced we loved on the Intel-powered model of this laptop computer off European shores. The laptop computer ships with a 65W charger and USB-C cable.
A phrase on the Intel-powered MagicBook Artwork 14. It appears Honor is not planning on promoting it exterior of China, pushing the ARM-powered laptop computer internationally as an alternative. However although you will not have to decide on between the 2 it is sensible to check them as they’re so intently associated.
Design and construct high quality
The Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon is impressively made. The machine weighs roughly 1.02kg, which is kind of the feat given the laptop computer’s practically 15-inch show. The laptop computer can also be simply 1 cm thick (not counting the rubber toes) at its thinnest level – 1.15cm at its thickest.
Honor managed to attain such a powerful weight with a combination of light-weight supplies. The chassis is made out of magnesium alloy. The keyboard is a titanium alloy. The 2 followers are made from aluminum. The antenna and vapor chamber cooling system are built-in. The result’s a 14.6-inch laptop computer that weighs 490g (33%) lower than the 15.3-inch MacBook Air, 160g (14%) lower than the Dell XPS 13, 260g (21%) lower than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X, and 370g (27%) lower than the high-end Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Version. It’s actually spectacular. Only a few units weigh much less and handle to stick with the MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon specs-wise – the Huawei MateBook X Professional 2024 and the brand new Asus A14.
However it’s not all concerning the weight. The show has a fair 2.2mm bezel throughout. Honor managed it by displacing the digicam to its personal magnetic module. The tuck-away digicam module is undoubtedly revolutionary. It sits flush contained in the left nook of the laptop computer and could be popped in or out by a finger press. The module attaches very securely within the laptop computer physique, and it may be tucked in whichever means you need – even with the pins outward (although you should not try this).
It is a intelligent option to cope with the digicam on a laptop computer but it surely does push the 2 ports on the left aspect of the MagicBook Artwork 14 a bit additional down. It is an unbalanced look that will irk some.
Tuck-away magnetic digicam
Honor utilized a vine leaf idea to the design. There is a refined curve to the body, thickening on the level of connection to the magnetic digicam.
The Starry Sky paint job could be very clean. Honor calls the floor velvet-like and skin-friendly. The coating is UV cured to attain smoothness after which has been micro-arc oxidized. We are able to attest that the end feels very nice to the touch however have one way or the other managed to scuff it in just a few locations. This may very well be negligence on our half or a potential weak point of the end, we can’t be completely sure.
Show, keyboard, audio system, digicam
The MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon ships with a 14.6-inch OLED panel with a squarer-than-average 3:2 facet, as much as 120Hz refresh charge, and a promised brightness of 700 nits.
The FullView 10-bit show is 3120x2080px and has 10-point contact. The panel covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, in addition to a DeltaE (ΔE) score of beneath 0.5. The panel does 4320Mh PWM flicker-free dimming and even acquired TUV Rheinland to certify for low blue gentle emissions.
The show is shiny however does have an anti-reflective coating utilized. It does alleviate a few of the reflections however that is nonetheless a comparatively reflective panel. The display screen floor can also be weirdly wavy – reflections on the show at an angle produces wavy traces. The Huawei MateBook X Professional 2024 has a straighter show floor, for example. it isn’t an issue, simply one thing we observed.
The panel is rated at 700 nits in HDR mode. We measured a constant above-540 nits total with practically 600 nits within the backside a part of the display screen in SDR mode. When viewing HDR content material, the display screen ramped as much as round 750 nits. The SDR outcomes are round 50-60 nits higher than what we acquired with the Intel MagicBook Artwork 14, whereas the HDR brightness was equal.
We have at all times recommended Huawei and Honor for transport their machines with proprietary show coloration help and the MagicBook Artwork 14 follows that pattern. Proper-click on the desktop and go into Show Supervisor, the place you possibly can select what coloration spectrum the laptop computer adheres to – sRGB, P3, or native. This is a superb characteristic that almost all different PCs lack and is very helpful for content material creators. That is additionally the place you possibly can alter the colour tone of the display screen, put it in eBook mode, and finetune the colour.
These display screen modes work solely if you’ve turned the worldwide Home windows HDR setting off. When you flip HDR on, the display screen reverts to its Native setting, that means vivid colours, deep blacks, and the utmost potential distinction. The problem with that is that saturation is excessive when the display screen is in Native mode. Pictures, whether or not within the browser or by means of the Home windows Pictures app are overly saturated to the purpose that they do not look good. Placing the display screen in sRGB mode fixes the problem.
Honor and Huawei keyboards have lengthy been wonderful for typing however the MagicBook Artwork 14 is a step above. We won’t actually say we are able to recognize the titanium construct however the keys really feel barely softer and extra dampened than on the MateBook X Professional 2024.
The keys have the usual 1.5mm key journey and are very well-spaced. Avid avid gamers will scoff on the smaller Up and Down arrow keys, however that is the one criticism that we might consider.
The trackpad on the Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 is gigantic and really prime quality. The sleek glass floor is great for gliding your fingers and being a solid-state unit, you possibly can click on wherever you want with the identical exact really feel. You may alter the monitoring sensitivity and the vibration power to your liking.
The trackpad helps as much as 5 fingers, although Home windows presently tops out at 4. There are a number of proprietary gestures by means of Honor’s pre-installed software program just like the knock to screenshot. All of them get quick demo movies and you’ll determine whether or not to allow them or not.
This laptop computer has a six-speaker spatial audio setup and three microphones, and so they’re doing a superb job. There’s sufficient quantity to fill a room and there are even some hints of bass beneath, making the sound full.
You get a fingerprint scanner with Home windows Good day help inside the facility button and it really works with out points. It helps fingerprint caching so a single press will energy on the machine and routinely log you into Home windows as soon as it boots to the login display screen.
The magnetic 1080p digicam would not characteristic IR sensors for Home windows Good day. High quality-wise, it is a adequate webcam however nothing particular. The picture high quality is okay however there isn’t any HDR, for example.
The sphere of view of the webcam could be very extensive and you’ll set it to trace your face throughout the body. You may as well mess around with digital backgrounds.
Doing calls by means of the MagicBook Artwork 14 is a good expertise. Callers reported that they heard us tremendous by means of the laptop computer’s trio of mics and appreciated the energetic noise cancellation.
One space the place the ARM-powered model is inferior to the Intel one is ports. You get the identical bodily ports – two USB-C on the left, one USB-A, an HDMI, and a 3.5mm on the suitable. On the Intel machine, one of many USB-Cs on the left aspect is a Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 unit with 40 Gbps of throughput. On the Snapdragon mannequin, each USB-C ports are USB 3.2 Gen 2 with 10 Gbps of bandwidth. The USB-A is 3.2 Gen1 with 5 Gbps.
Ports on both aspect
Technically, you possibly can run into limitations if you wish to cost the machine and connect with a monitor utilizing the identical USB-C cable. On the upside, the HDMI is 2.1 with 4K@60Hz help, providing you with an alternate monitor connection choice. Nevertheless, the dearth of true USB 4 connectivity makes a single-cable resolution unimaginable.
Snapdragon X Elite processor and battery life
The Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon ships with an ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite SoC. The processor has 42MB of cache, and 12 Oryon cores with a 3.4GHz peak clock in multi-core extra and a peak single-core velocity of 4.0GHz. The Adreno GPU is rated for 46 TFLOPS (floating level operations per second), whereas the Hexagon NPU has 45 TOPS (tera operations per second). As compared, Intel’s newest Core Extremely 7 258V’s NPU brings 47 TOPS, whereas AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has as much as 50 TOPS.
The Snapdragon X Elite is the X1E-80-100 variation of the chip, with the 4.0GHz peak clock velocity. There are two extra highly effective variations of the X Elite – the identical variety of bodily cores, however increased clock velocity. The X1E-84-100 and X1E-00-1DE with a multi-core peak clock velocity of three.8GHz, and a single-core peak clock velocity of 4.2GHz and 4.3GHz, respectively. We do not count on the as much as 300MHz to ship an enormous profit. Whereas we’re on the subject – there are two different Snapdragon X chips – the X Plus with 8 or 10 Oryon cores, and the X with 8.
The Snapdragon chip helps the newest Wi-Fi 7, in addition to Bluetooth 5.4.
benchmarks, the Snapdragon X Elite is a tremendous performer. Importantly, it scores round 30% higher than the Intel Core Extremely 7 155H in single-core and multi-core exams and round 20% higher in graphics exams. Basically, you are giving nothing away, performance-wise, by going with the Snapdragon MagicBook Artwork 14 quite than the Intel one (if, for the sake of argument, you had a selection of shopping for both).
| Benchmark | Check | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 | Single-Core | 2824 |
| Geekbench 6 | Multi-core | 14493 |
| Geekbench 6 GPU | Vulkan | 28340 |
| Geekbench AI CPU | Single-precision | 1106 |
| Geekbench AI CPU | Half-precision | 1728 |
| Geekbench AI CPU | Quantized | 3474 |
| Geekbench AI NPU | Quantized | 27051 |
| Cinebench 2024 | Single-Core | 121 |
| Cinebench 2024 | Multi-core | 593 |
The SoC posted strong numbers in Cinebench 2024’s single and multi-core exams as properly. The built-in Micron SSD is not the quickest. It is also displaying PCIe 3.0 speeds, not current-gen PCIe 4.0 ones which can be double the velocity.
Cinebench 2024, Disk Velocity
We ran our common 1-hour stress take a look at on the MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon and the Snapdragon X Elite confirmed good sustained efficiency underneath load. The chip was briefly as much as its peak multi-core velocity of three.4GHz and, inside just a few seconds, throttled all the way down to 2.5GHz. After the followers ramped up, the processor settled at round 2.95GHz-2.97GHz and stayed there for the rest of the take a look at. The followers have been going full blast for everything of the take a look at, however we might name them inaudible past 1 meter in a standard workplace surroundings.
Thermals
As compared, the Intel Core Extremely 7 155H we examined within the MagicBook Artwork 14 managed to maintain round 2.1GHz. It was additionally barely hotter to the contact – the palm relaxation space was 29.4° C in comparison with the 26° C of the Snapdragon mannequin. One other key level is real-world efficiency – the Intel machine cannot attain its full potential on battery, whereas the Snapdragon one can.
If we evaluate the 2 SoCs on effectivity, per Cinebench 2024’s Multi Energy Effectivity take a look at, the Snapdragon X Elite scores round 22 Factors Per Watt, whereas the Intel Core Extremely 7 155H reaches 14 PPW.
An enormous good thing about the Snapdragon chip is the instantaneous operation of this machine – open the lid, and the display screen has lit up earlier than you have even seen it absolutely. It is nice!
As a result of that is an ARM-based laptop computer, you’d want to consider your apps. Home windows on ARM has come a good distance, and you would be stunned what number of apps now have an ARM-ready model. The favored apps are largely lined – Microsoft’s Workplace suite, LibreOffice, 7-zip, Viber, Sign, Slack, WhatsApp, Dropbox, GIMP, Adobe’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Professional, Davinci Resolve, Luminar Neo, VLC, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Avast, TeamViewer, you identify it. And in case your particular app is not but absolutely ARM-ready, likelihood is it is in growth.
What about emulating X86 apps? This is the place Prism is available in – it is Home windows 11’s emulation layer that interprets X86 apps to run on the Snapdragon X Elite. It is seamless – you simply set up an app such as you would on an Intel or AMD-powered laptop, and it really works. There’s code translation occurring within the background, however you would not even discover it more often than not. It is in additional demanding apps that the emulation may cause a launch delay or a efficiency hiccup, however we hardly ever observed these.
We even put in Steam with just a few video games and so they labored. Nevertheless, efficiency was noticeably worse than on the Intel Core Extremely 7 155H. Age of Empires II Definitive Version is a comparatively simple recreation to run on trendy {hardware} but it surely hovered beneath 60fps in our take a look at. It held a gentle 100fps on the Intel-powered Artwork. On the upside, we by no means acquired an app or recreation that merely refused to work.
You may have built-in Copilot with a devoted key on the keyboard. Copilot works on-device to offer customized solutions and is deeply built-in with Microsoft apps reminiscent of Outlook and Microsoft 365.
It may generate formulation, create charts and graphs, summarize key factors in emails, and transcribe conferences in actual time. Dwell Caption can generate subtitles to movies in 44 languages in actual time too.
Honor Join brings screen-sharing and cross-OS drag-and-drop of app home windows between the laptop computer and an Honor Android pill. With Honor Share, you possibly can share recordsdata, photographs, and movies between Honor units cable-free.
In our Intel-based Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 assessment, we hypothesized that the mannequin with the Snapdragon X Elite would be capable to squeeze extra battery life out of the 60Wh battery, and we have been appropriate. The MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon lasted 8:00 hours in our searching loop take a look at (at 400 nits) and 10:00 hours in our YouTube video loop take a look at (400 nits, 80dB). That is one hour extra within the searching take a look at and practically three and a half hours extra within the YouTube take a look at than the Intel mannequin. Transferring to ARM actually brings all the advantages and only a few compromises, even at this early stage.
Charging the laptop computer from 0% to full took round an hour and a half, and it acquired to 43% within the first half-hour.
Conclusion
The Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon is an impressive laptop computer. It masterfully mixes premium specs with nice manufacturing high quality to create a machine with a real edge over its competitors.
On the time of this text, the 32GB/1TB MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon retails for €1,499 with an Honor Pad 9 and Honor Earbuds X6 thrown in without spending a dime. At that worth, it is notably cheaper than the Dell XPS 13 MacBook Air and Huawei’s MateBook X Professional 2024. We might argue it additionally packs higher specs – the 14.6-inch show that is additionally a match by way of tech – 120Hz and 700 nits of brightness – is about as elite as you will get lately. And other than the Huawei, the MagicBook Artwork 14 is lighter at simply 1.02kg.
There are two head-on rivals the Honor wants to fret about – Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7X and Asus’ A14 UX3407. Each have 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, OLED shows, and the Snapdragon X Elite SoC. Each laptops are additionally precisely the identical worth – €1,499. Nevertheless, you get 70Wh batteries on each and higher ports – the Yoga Slim 7X packs three USB4 Gen 3s, whereas the Asus A14 has two. The Yoga is a bit heavier (although not heavy), whereas the Asus is even lighter at just below 1 kilo.
Lenovo and Asus have a greater availability in worldwide markets and extra recognizable model names with non-tech people. That would play an element regardless of Honor’s killer tablet-and-buds bundle. Then there’s Honor’s personal retail footprint – on the time of this text, you will get this machine in China, France, Germany, and Italy.
Honor MagicBook Artwork 14 Snapdragon is an amazing laptop computer that does not compromise. It is a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ kind of resolution. It is higher than the Intel-powered unit in each means that issues – higher efficiency and longer battery life, the identical wonderful show, physique, and worth. Being an ARM-based laptop computer does imply there are some hypothetical points alongside the way in which, however these concern non-mainstream customers – they are going to hardly discover any draw back.
Professionals
- ARM mannequin is best than the Intel one in each conceivable means
- Snapdragon X Elite is quieter, smoother, and prolongs battery life
- Strikes a superb steadiness of dimension and weight
- We just like the silky end
- Coloration-accurate OLED show with 500 nits of SDR and 700 nits of HDR brightness
- Good port choice – USB-C, USB-A, HDMI
- Modern magnetic digicam design
Cons
- No USB4/Thunderbolt 4 is an actual downside
- Digicam slot pushes USB-C ports to the center of the laptop computer
- SSD not fairly as much as PCIe 4.0 requirements
- Restricted availability
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