Honor MagicBook 14 (2021): What does the Tiger Lake upgrade bring us?

When updating laptop models, the design often remains the same and current hardware improves the performance. This is also what we expected when testing the MagicBook 14, which Honor presents with an unchanged design in 2021. This also includes an unchanged selection of connections.

Instead of an AMD CPU, Honor now uses Intel processors, making the MagicBook 14 (2021) either available with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 or an Intel Core i7-1165G7. In our test, we compared the latter with previous year's model with an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U.

With this, the CPU performance remained almost the same and the whole system performance only improved marginally. Thanks to 16 GB of working memory in a dual-channel configuration, the internal Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 was able to achieve a better graphics performance than was the case with the Radeon RX Vega 6 of the AMD processor.

Due to the higher power consumption of the Intel CPU while the battery capacity remained unchanged at 56 Wh, the battery life dropped considerably in our WLAN test. Instead of lasting more than 14 hours like last year's AMD model, the Tiger Lake laptop only lasted for less than 10 hours.

We also noticed a compromise in terms of the display. While this now produces a higher brightness and better color space coverage, the contrast ratio and black value became worse.

Our test shows what else has changed in the Honor MagicBook 14 with Intel's Tiger Lake CPU.