The new Huawei MateBook D 16 is not a price-performance champion

With the MateBook D 16, Huawei offers a multimedia laptop with a large 16-inch display. Until now, the device used an AMD processor and was able to impress with a lot of performance at a good price. However, this year the device gets an extensive update, which includes a new case, a 16:10 display, and a keyboard that includes a dedicated numeric keypad. 

However, Huawei also switches from AMD CPUs to Intel Alder Lake processors. The basic model for 949 Euros (~$958) is now equipped with the Core i5-12450H, but this offers less cores and also only a slower iGPU, so the performance should turn out worse overall than in the predecessor with the old Ryzen 5 5600H. We had the model for 1299 Euros (~$1311) in our test, which uses the Core i7-12700H with the faster version of the Iris Xe Graphics G7. The rest of the equipment with 16 GB of LPDDR4X-3733 RAM and a 512-GB PCIe 3.0 SSD is identical, so the additional premium of 350 Euros (~$353) is only for the processor. 

However, there are also some problems, since the cooling performance is limited. Huawei uses basically the same mainboard as in the more expensive MateBook 16s but leaves out one of the two fans. This means that the 45-Watt processor can only run constantly at 35 watts (or 40 watts in Performance mode, which leads to significantly louder fan noise, though). Although the processor can briefly benefit from a higher consumption (up to 64 watts), after a few minutes the performance won't be much higher than that of the predecessor. 

Considering the high price, there are also some other aspects that stand out negatively: Huawei saves on the licensing fees for a Thunderbolt 4 connection, the 65-Watt charger is too weak, and there is an aged USB-2.0 port on the right side. In addition, the change to the Intel processor leads to a significantly shorter battery life and louder cooling.

While the change to the Intel processor might make some sense for the marketing material and the performance in shorter benchmarks is also good, in everyday operation, the overall package of the new MateBook D 16 with the Intel i7 processor is worse than that of the AMD processor, which was also significantly more affordable. We therefore have some trouble giving a recommendation, even though objectively, the new MateBook D 16 is still a good multimedia laptop. You can find all the additional information including the benchmarks and measurements in our extensive test:

• Huawei MateBook D 16 review (Core i7-12700H, 16:10)