Huawei MateBook D 16 2024 review - A multimedia laptop now with the Intel Core i9-13900H

At first glance, the dark gray case doesn't differ from its predecessor, but it is a new shell and the internal design has also changed. Thanks to the slim bezels, the design appears more modern and the surfaces are not especially prone to attracting dirt and fingerprints. One new feature is the display hinge which now has a maximum opening angle of 180 degrees. The hinges sit very tightly and it's impossible to open the lid with one hand. Nevertheless, a clear, visible wobble is present when adjusting the opening angle.

Quality-wise, the case makes a decent impression. Huawei has opted against using metal and although the plastic construction is mainly solid, the base unit and lid give easily when pressed in the central area. This doesn't lead to any drawbacks in everyday use. Twisting the base unit results in rather unattractive creaking noises.

The comparison devices don't take up much space and weighing a little over 1.7 kg, the MateBook can be considered average. At 204 grams, the 65-watt PSU is very light.

When it comes to ports, you only get the bare minimum and the situation is a clear backwards step, even in comparison to the old MateBook D 16 2022. Huawei has completely opted against using Thunderbolt or USB 4. Instead, there is only a single USB-C port (3.2 Gen.1) which is also used for the PSU. On the right-hand side, the lone USB-A connector only uses the 2.0 standard. In this price category, that is an absolute no-go. The HDMI output also only supports the 1.4 standard which means that rather than being able to operate external 4K monitors at 60 Hz, only 30 Hz is possible. Even the old 2022 model had an integrated HDMI 2.0 output, as well as an additional USB port. The only benefit in this section is cross-device operation if you use other Huawei devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets).

The webcam in the top bezel only offers a measly 720p resolution and can therefore definitely no longer be considered up-to-date. Accordingly, images lack detail and are not particularly sharp.

At 12 x 7.3 cm, the clickpad is sufficiently large and works flawlessly. As usual, the bottom part of the pad can be pressed physically but this is met with loud and cheap-sounding clicking noises. In practice, we would only recommend tapping the pad for inputs. 

In Huawei's PC Manager, there are two energy settings - firstly, the preset Balanced mode and, secondly, the Performance mode. The latter doesn't offer much more in the way of performance with only an additional 5 watts available when under continuous load (40 instead of 35 watts TDP). This is disproportionate to the noisy fans (46.2 vs. 36.2 dB(A)). That means you can safely use the Balanced mode which is the one we used for our forthcoming benchmarks and measurements.

The Intel Core i9-13900H is a very fast mobile processor in the Raptor Lake series with 6 fast performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. In total, it can process up to 20 threads simultaneously. The performance potential is very high, however, the Core i9 in the MateBook D 16 is limited by low power limits of 64/45 watts (and then later 35 watts). The only really impressive aspect is that the single-core performance is really impressive and although this plays an important part in everyday use, at the end of the day, the Core i9 was only really chosen to look good on the data sheet. With the cheaper Core i7-13700H, customers would have gotten almost the same overall performance. In addition, the multi-core performance drops significantly after a short period and the same processor in the MateBook 16s is more than 20 % faster when it comes to multi-core load. In battery mode, the CPU performance remains almost constant.  Additional CPU benchmarks can be found here.

Viewed subjectively, the MateBook's performance level is very high and every input is implemented swiftly. The synthetic benchmark results did not reveal any abnormalities and we were also unable to detect any during testing.