Progress is a harsh thing, it rushes forward rapidly and does not ask what we think about it. And now, for the convenience of work, accelerators with artificial intelligence have been added to laptop and desktop processors, without which, according to rumors, the new Windows 12 will no longer be able to run. Lenta.ru tested one of the few such laptops – HONOR MagicBook Pro 16 with Intel Core Ultra 5. What is an innovative laptop and whether competitors without AI are more profitable – in the Lenta.ru review.
Unusual appearance
Lenta.ru reviewed the latest junior version of the senior HONOR laptop — with a Core Ultra 5 processor. Although in the maximum version, in the same case as thick as a typewriter-class laptop, there may also be an RTX 4060 (available only in China). But we are more interested in what you can buy not at the maximum price and how this already powerful 14-core laptop will cope with tasks using its processor, integrated graphics and AI accelerator.
By 2024, laptops with colors in the spirit of “we almost have a MacBook” will be pretty boring. Just as “wet asphalt” colored cars once went out of fashion, so will laptops. Who needs gloomy colors when there is a bright one? Although white is considered impractical, in fact, a white laptop is even less easily soiled than a silver one. Dust is less visible on it.
Photo: Lenta.ru
The dark version, in fact, is not in the classic color either. The company called the color simply and succinctly – “purple”. The layout of the ports is unusual, but if you don’t like wires sticking out from all sides, you’ll like it.
There are few ports: two Type C are on the right, there is also a headphone jack. Where are the other ports? They are located on the rear end surface. A more practical place for HDMI, for example, is unlikely to be found in a laptop – you remember how thick and inflexible HDMI cables are today, right?
The keyboard is almost full-size: there is a row of function keys (F1-F9) and NumPad. But the latter does without the rightmost vertical row so that the keys remain standard, not reduced in size (it is difficult to use a reduced laptop – you will constantly miss the letters because they will be shifted along the horizontal axis). But the key travel is comfortable, and the sound when pressed is pleasant.
Visually, the touchpad is matte, produces almost no reflections, and your fingers don’t get caught on it. Is it smoother than necessary? Perhaps, but it’s hard to call it glossy.
Photo: Lenta.ru
Dimensions
The thickness of the new MagicBook Pro 16 model is 2 (excluding legs) centimeters. The weight is 1.8 kilograms. For a 16-inch laptop, this is quite modest; together with the power supply, such a set in a backpack will not weigh down your back. Although, of course, this is not as compact an option as the 14-inch models that are ideal for nomads today.
The Apple MacBook Pro, of course, stands out for its battery capacity (for the better) and weight (for the worse). The Acer is thinner and lighter with a 65-watt-hour battery, but its Core i7-13620 consumes a lot under load. The Lenovo laptop is just a little bit smaller: weight, thickness, and battery.
The MagicBook Pro 16 has six speakers: two low-frequency speakers and four tweeters, which together create surround sound according to the DTS standard. This is the world’s first laptop with spatial audio support – that’s why six speakers were packed into the case.
Display
The HONOR MagicBook Pro has one of the best IPS displays in a laptop. The 165 Hz frequency itself is impressive right from the start. But why is it needed in a laptop without discrete graphics? Firstly, for China, this laptop is also available in a version with RTX 4060, and the junior configurations get an IPS matrix as a gift. The smoothness of the picture is outstanding, everything flies great, although in Windows itself (and not its games) you can hardly feel the difference from, say, 120 Hz.
The main feature of the screen, besides compliance with the DCI-P3 standard, is its resolution. No bright Full HD at sixteen inches – serious 3K in a rather “square” aspect ratio of 16:10.
There is a huge reserve of brightness here – not even every smartphone can give out 500 candelas per square meter in manual adjustment mode today (and in auto mode, super-brightness works when the sensor pleases, and not for long). And here such brightness and on 16 inches, which is enough even for working on a very sunny day outside with excellent readability. And for indoors, 100 percent brightness is not needed, there is so much of it.
It is worth noting that such brightness means that the laptop can display HDR content, dimming or increasing the backlight of individual sections of the display. By the way, rare monitors can boast of such a feature, and even those are very expensive.
The DeltaE value, which is responsible for the differences from the standard colors, is less than 0.5 here, meaning the picture is perfectly configured and makes the laptop suitable for professional work with visual content. The color temperature, which is responsible for how white color will look on your screen, is slightly shifted towards warm shades. But the main thing is that it is not towards cold ones.
Artificial Intelligence Accelerator
Now Intel, AMD and Nvidia are saying that it is advisable to buy laptops with an AI accelerator, because soon it will become as necessary as modern DirectX or support for new video codecs.
HONOR MagicBook Pro 16 is one of the few (so far) laptops sold in Russia with a processor that includes an AI accelerator (NPU). In this case, it is the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H. Abroad, they are already being advertised as AI PCs, that is, computers running on artificial intelligence. They say that a new era has arrived, users are still stubborn and say out of habit: “We don’t need your AI, give us more cores and gigahertz!” But the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Remember how DLSS was launched by Nvidia? By the way, it was also a function of image rendering using AI so that the video card could handle high graphics with little effort. And buyers also declared that it was “not needed”, but now they play their Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 with AI scaling enabled, I bet. So, at first, there were also very few games with DLSS support (or FSR, if we are talking about AMD). And then there were more and more of them, and now there are only a few new games without support for this function.
At the processor presentation in December 2023, Intel promised a quick increase in laptop performance from the AI accelerator, but the final (not beta or alpha) versions of software with AI support are appearing only now, in the summer of 2024.
In general, you can do a lot without an AI accelerator, on the processor. But it will either take too much time. So, restoring one photo to a higher quality can take minutes, and a video recording, even a short one, can take hours). Or, if you want to do it quickly and without AI, you will need a discrete video card. And it will click these AI tasks under load quickly, sometimes even a little faster than the AI accelerator built into the processor, but with crazy power consumption and 100 percent load. And your laptop will be discharged to zero from such a blow, if you do not work strictly next to an outlet.
Now the AI accelerator supports Zoom, in which you can simulate in calls, sitting in a dark room, with the help of AI, as if you were sitting in a well-lit room. Well, in Adobe Photoshop/Premiere + DaVinci Resolve, normal NPU support is about to be added.
Details
Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is a fourteen-core processor (18 threads) with 4 productive + 8 energy-efficient cores and two additional ones, located in a separate block called Low Power Island, which is necessary for the processor for light tasks with low power consumption and without loading other cores. In the case of MagicBook 16 Pro, the processor is allocated up to 65 W TDP.
In terms of performance, Intel Ultra 5 is on par with the 13th-generation Intel Core i7 (i7-13650HX) or, for example, the Ryzen 9 7000 series (Ryzen 9 7940HS). I don’t even want to talk about how much slower other Intel and AMD processors are. And compared to the chips from Apple MacBook, this Core Ultra 5 occupies an intermediate level between the 12-core and 18-core M3 Pro. And faster than the M2 Max.
When working at the limit (when converting video or 3D modeling), the 14-core complex does not overheat, but it heats up the bottom of the laptop decently, and the temperature can reach 100 degrees. But this is only in benchmarks, in work tasks it will be 10-15 degrees less. And when working in the browser and small tasks (photo processing), the laptop is quiet and “cold”, the heating does not exceed 58 degrees.
The RAM here is of the LPDDR5X-6400 standard, non-standard in size at 24 gigabytes. Which, by the way, is not bad – competitors either have 32 gigabytes, but LPDDR5, which is slower, or LPDDR5X, but 16 gigabytes is not enough for a laptop costing over 100 thousand rubles. The included 24 GB of LDDR5X is enough for any task: you can open Dota, a project in Adobe Premiere (necessarily in 4K), and also run Ableton or FL Studio in the background of your choice with a bunch of plugins on top. Or even more.
The laptop has two SSD slots: the first is occupied by a terabyte YMTC PC300 drive (PCIe 4.0, 1024 GB), the second is free, but only shortened M.2 2242 SSDs can be installed in it.
Photo: Lenta.ru
It’s also playable, and most games will run at 45-60 fps even at 1080p if you select medium detail and enable FSR or XeSS. But by and large, even a cheaper laptop with discrete graphics like the RTX 3050 will be faster at gaming.
The laptop is powered by a neat white 135-watt power supply with a Type C connector. There is plenty of power here, because, again, the power supply is the same for the version with the starting Core 5 Ultra and for the older modification with the Core Ultra 7 155H and RTX 4060.
Summary
It is well known how important “future-proofing” is in the hardware of desktop computers and laptops. Yesterday it seemed that no one needed hardware support for these VP9 and av1 codecs, because you download movies in Xvid or H.264 formats, and today YouTube is already slowing down. Yesterday it was thought that the old flagship video card was better than the new budget one, and today modern games do not work and Windows 11 crashes into a “blue screen” because the video card is powerful, but does not support DirectX 12. A similar story was with “four cores are enough for everyone” for Intel versus multi-core Ryzen.
It is unknown whether Windows 12 will necessarily require an AI chip in the processor, as rumored.
But if you need a 16-inch non-gaming laptop, but one that is sensible in size, easy to carry, with a bright screen capable of displaying HDR content, dimming or increasing the backlight of individual sections of the display, spatial audio, the ability to play games and good battery life, you should take a closer look at the MagicBook Pro 16. There are many options on the market, but Chinese manufacturers have turned out to be objectively more interesting and high-quality.
#Eternal #gadget #Power #intelligence #case #HONOR #MagicBook #Pro #laptop #afraid #time