HONOR MagicBook 14 Review – Finally A Dedicated GPU!
now I’ve been reviewing a lot of laptops that have been excellent but they’ve all just had integrated Graphics but here finally from honor of their magic book 14 we have the option to get this model here with an RTX 2050. it’s got four gigabytes of ddr6 RAM and while it’s not a gaming monster of a laptop it’s not really meant for gaming but it can do a little bit of light gaming but it’s more for productivity for people that do things like CAD work 3D editing and of course video editing it’s all going to be
boosted with of course the cuticles on this and nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2050 now this model while just being 14 inches has a good weight to it it’s 1.57 kilos and the screen resolution is 2160 by 1440p it’s all powered by the Intel Core i5 the 12500h now it’s clocked up to the power limit that is a 70 watts and its power boost mode it has 12 cores and 4.5 gigahertz is the maximum turbo it’s quite a monster considering the size of this it’s paired out with 16 gigabytes of ddr5 RAM and it does have a
PCI 4.0 spec SSD which is 512 gigabytes Wi-Fi ax and a 75 watt hour battery and because this is the RTX 2050 model it’s got a beefier power supply to
with a very nice keyboard for a 14 inch laptop so you see that we do have half sized arrow keys we’ve got a function lock button so you don’t always have to hold down function and then for example use the media controls here at the top you can just simply lock that in it’s backlit as you can see right now so that is the backlight on the first level it’s off right now that’s the first and I just turn off the light so you can see what it looks like that it’s relatively bright there and
what I like about it is it’s evenly distributed there’s no uneven patchy parts and if you’re looking at it of course at a bit of an angle you won’t really be blinded by it either you can see it’s not overly bright but it’s enough that you can make it out in the cabin of an aircraft so our power button right here it also acts as a fingerprint reader so there’s a capacitive one and you can use that to scan in with Windows hello so Windows hello just works with the fingerprint reader unfortunately the camera the
HD webcam doesn’t support Windows hello and then I’ll touch pad nice size to it it’s not overly large but for a 14 inch tablet it’s very good the Palm rest is all alloy right here supports gestures finer movements it’s very accurate you don’t have the cursor jumping about all over the place so it’s a good combination with a nice keyboard to type on with about 1.5 millimeters of travel good touch pad I really don’t have any complaints it’s high quality and very nice to use on the left side of the magic book 14 we have
two type c ports now they’re full spec ones so that means they do run display out on both of them and you can get up to 8K 30 Hertz I believe I’m able to run 4K 120 no problem status LED so it’s flashing when charging and charge time is only about 80 minutes it’s very quick we get 135 watt charging with this model here and 80 with the model that doesn’t have the dedicated GPU because I’ve got the RTX 2050 in this so both of the ports can charge and that’s good imagine you accidentally damage
one of the ports well you can still charge with the others you’ve got to back up there basically 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support quality out of this is very good it’s nice clean audio there’s no horrible static over it no interference or anything like that then on the right we’ve got a of course normal type a port here so great that they’ve made this decision so you can easily plug in a mouse or USB pin drive and not have that problem of having to use a dongle or an adapter so we do have
here a HDMI 2.0 so it’s only 4K 60 but that’s not a problem because the two type c ports will output 4K up to 120 hertz and even 8K 30. then our laptop weight well it’s 1.57 kilos so just over one and a half kilos considering it’s got a dedicated GPU a lot of copper in here the two coolers I don’t think it’s too bad of a weight now it’s not super lightweight but it’s an acceptable travel weight and definitely a great travel size at 14 inches so we’ve got the fans in here this is
the intake Grille so a lot of fresh air can get through downwards firing speakers and some rubber feet on the bottom then up the front there is a cut out so you can easily open it and we’ve got two microphones right here now I do like this location I think it’s better than having the mics left or right of the camera because here of course they are closer to you so you do get better microphone quality so the display it has reasonably sized bezels top and bottom they’re not bad for a 14 inch notebook so
we have a 16 by 10 aspect ratio the resolution is 2160 by 1440p IPS fully laminated covered with glass up the top here that is our little webcam so it’s an HD web cam now the hinge does feel very good and it has a bit of a lip to it but it doesn’t Flex it it feels really quite a strong screen and the way they’ve done it it’s optically bonded means that of course it’s going to be a little bit more stronger than just simply having a matte screen here however saying that I would have
preferred to have a matte display I think a matte display would have looked a little better for the reflections and everything and because it’s glass I often keep tapping it thinking that it’s supporting touch which it does not color coverage here is well srgb 99 ntsc is 69 Adobe RGB is a decent 75 percent and P3 is also 75 percent the brightness is 319 nits what I’ve measured with the Spyder x Pro so indoors it does look good it is a bright screen vibrant screen and overall really no complaints apart from it’s glossy it’s glass
but you can fix set with an anti-glare screen protector at least this magic book 14 does come with 16 gigabytes of RAM we almost get all of it usable to us there is a tiny portion that is dedicated to the iris Graphics so there is no 32 gigabyte option that would be good to see but I’m really happy we do have dedicated graphics with this model which which is optional that I do have that model as mentioned there at the start so Windows 11 home single language Edition here that means I don’t think you can
actually store language packs it just comes with the language that you order it with so do bear that in mind and a ram that 16 gigabytes it is running in dual Channel and it’s ddr5 spec and it’s running at 4.8 gigahertz so it is very quick so the whole laptop is super Snappy and fast and I’ll just show you some synthetic benchmarks that you can compare to your own Tech your own current laptop so it’s great to see we’ve got a Samsung half a terabyte SSD it’s not actually a port a 512 terabytes there but
no it’s gigabytes pciu full speed you can see very good speeds there really quick drive and it’s great great that they did not actually go with a pci3 model even though the starter course does support it now I have a couple of synthetic benchmarks here I’ll just show you cinebench just to report on that speed of the chipset so it’s the core i7 and sorry I5 the 12500h it’s a very powerful chipset as you can see from this result it’s really quite good maximum turbo is 4.5 gigahertz it has 12 cores 16 threads yes 16
threads in total and they have configured it to up to 70 Watts now we do have a power mode so if you press function then P you’ll see it’s gone into the smart mode so that’s basically a balanced mode and then power mode is pushing up those power limits for us so we can just get out the maximum performance out of it so there are a few more other synthetic benchmarks that I’ll just quickly go over this one here is the opencl score so it gets 50 000 using that RTX 2050 Graphics of course now
if you use the integrated Graphics it’s about 19 000 points you can see we’re well over double the performance of integrated Graphics having that Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 and I’ll get a little bit more onto that particular GPU soon so geekbench 5 scores again very good performance here really strong performance when it comes to the multi-core score and considering that this is a 14 inch laptop it’s packing quite a bit of power so a couple of Graphics benchmarks Times by you’ll see that it’s getting a very good score here so just over 4 000 for
the RTX 3050 sorry 2050 is not a bad score at all now that is kind of similar but it’s a little bit lower to an RTX 3050 which is another GPU with the same architecture but this one’s just clocked a little bit lower uh fire strike extreme over 5000 points this in fact is a higher score than what I got with the xiaomi redmi book The redmi Book 15 Pro with uh actually a better chipset but the same GPU scored uh 4900 so this is a little faster here which is great to see of course
for included software there is no bloatware so there’s no horrible McAfee virus on here that takes you about like five goes to uninstall no you do get this nahimic okay that is there running in the background that’s just to do with our audio it’s audio software it’s it’s not bloatware and then on a PC manager now PC manager you have this option you’ve got quite a few good things in here if you do own other devices like one of their tablets or their phones you have tablet collaboration modes you can still have multi-screen collaboration you
can drag and drop files with on a share too that’s quite good and you’ve got phone collaboration and even with your TV okay so you can project that that’s just using like mirror Vision Wireless casting and under system optimization you have the power modes there so you can see your battery life and things too drive management you can scan to see the health of the system and there are driver updates now I wanted to point out here that this performance mode I am running for all of the benchmarks you see all of the gaming so
it’s increasing the power limit it so it’s up to 70 watts and it’s normally on this smart mode that’s by default now if you unplug it then it will not be able to run the high performance mode or just demonstrate so as soon as I pull out that type c cable it switches then to the smart mode and it’s not going to let me swap over no matter what I do though on a magic book 14 does have those downwards firing speakers on the underside that I showed you at the beginning of this video but
how do they sound well here’s a sample at 100 they’re not bad for a 14 inch laptops because overall there’s a bit of bass to them and the volume is good and this is our webcam so now you know exactly what to expect out of it well it’s nothing amazing as you can tell from this quality it’s 720p and it is at least 30 frames per second so as I move my hand up and down it’s not all choppy the motion like this at least if you tend to move a little bit with your webcams
when you talk and the audio that you are listening to of course is being recorded by those built-in microphones so the two jewelry mics that are just in front of the touchpad what about 4K 60 decoding this is something that comes up quite a bit because a lot of systems will drop frames but we have the Nvidia Graphics here and I’m in Chrome hopefully the performance should be good so I’m just going to hit play there and I will enable those stats you can see that drop frames oh okay 43 and it’s occasionally dropping frames
here so I think this is more of a chrome problem than the actual PC here so it’s steadying out it looks like it’s stable now look it’s occasionally dropping frames so this is pretty good look just now and then it’s going to drop a frame or two which is quite standard for Chrome now this is where that GPU really comes in handy so having the Cuda cores handling this instead of the iris XE Graphics from Intel it’s just so much better with the playback and the timeline of Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 so if you’re doing
3D work 3D editing work CAD Work video editing and in the light gaming as well this is where you really do need that GPU especially for this so the performance of the timeline scrubbing ahead everything the playback so much better than the integrated Graphics it’s very fluid and I really don’t have any problems with it at all it’s good so let’s take a look at the export times now that we have the Nvidia graphics I have here the YouTube preset so that’s 4K that’s going to export one minute of footage this is the test they
do across all of my laptop reviews so here we go start and then export this should be very quick and you can see the load is mostly on that Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050 and the iris XC well that’s about 50 there so they’re both working together and it’s ripping through this encoding that so quick that is crazy fast so there we go that was about you could say probably about 20 seconds maybe even 19 because of my delay to hit start on this timer so really good performance you do really notice that RTX 2050 with
its dedicated four gigabytes of ddr6 RAM and onto a little bit of gaming performance as a cyberpunk 2077. we’re getting up to about 50 frames per second now 1080p is uh not a demanding resolution at all so it’s handling it all right now if you wanted a better frame rate you could lower it down to 720p of course and I do have it set to the low settings that’s why you’re not seeing a lot of traffic because the population density I mean that’s that’s right down and if you are sense and everything else so even
in a demanding game like this is going to be okay so a little bit of light gaming it’s not a high-end GPU not even mid-range just as low end from Nvidia so of course it’s not their best but I’ll just test out a couple more games just to give you an idea of what you can expect gaming wise on the magic book 14. and now GTA here so this is on high settings you can see we’re getting a good frame rate always over 100 frames per second performance looks great and it’s what I would expect
out of a dedicated card like this with RTX 2050 Graphics similar performance to an RTX uh 3050 similar but this of course is a lower clocked version but it’s got the same chip in it basically so looking very very good here and lastly The Witcher 3 1080p medium settings looking very good so this is over 100 frames per second occasionally I’ve seen it dip down to 80 but good performance so if you stick to 1080p perhaps lower the settings down with some of the more demanding games it is a laptop at 14 inches that can
also be well pretty much a little gaming laptop and our thermals and the fan noise so it will Spike you can see here up to 100 degrees Celsius on the CPU so it does pull a lot of power up to 120 watts from that Core i5 12 gin now when it hits 101 this is only for a few seconds as the fans ramp up it then drops the temperatures down now an example of that is right here too if I just bring this up this was when it was under load with cinebench you’ll see that
while it was going through the 10 minute Benchmark three minutes into it the temperatures were about 71 so that’s when when it’s at the high RPMs the fan noise yes you do hear it a little bit okay so it’s not going to be super ultra quiet when you are pushing it very hard and the keyboard in the middle does get up to around about 45 46 degrees so a little hot there but considering how small it is how thin it is the power that this laptop hacks into it I don’t think this is bad at
all I think it’s quite good actually so it doesn’t get up to 50 degrees like I’ve seen with some laptops on the keyboard or above it the Palm rest and the touch pad do remain always cool to the touch then battery life how was it well 75 watt hour battery it’s not actually too bad if you keep on the integrated Graphics that is you can get up to an over eight hours that’s at 30 brightness light documents spreadsheets office kind of work normal stuff there anything that’s really demanding and if you’re specially using that RTX
2050 then the battery life absolutely plummets because it can pull up to 60 watts and if you game on it or you’re editing videos using that dedicated GPU then the time drops down to two and a half two hours 40 minutes or so it’s not good now Linux support just wanted to quickly mention it that I booted up Linux mandaro it’s working okay the touchpad’s working Wireless and everything the screen’s not a touch screen so there’s no issue there with touch drivers for it which is good so I really like this little laptop I think
it’s got so much going for it it’s got the ports it has a very fast charge rate it’s got decent battery life it’s got a really good backlit keyboard a nice touch pad the screen well it’s only 319 net could be a little bit brighter and then of course the dedicated GPU and that power from the core i5 the 12500h at 12 core 16 thread well monster in this form factor is really good so if you’re someone that needs a laptop with the dedicated GPU and it’s for just video editing and on the go you
need something compact portable good build quality this is it this really is it it’s it’s a fantastic laptop the cons well some of them are nitpicky kind of things uh one of them is well it’s a glass display but it doesn’t have touch we don’t have Thunderbolt forward this sadly I guess the licensing fee for it would have push the price up too much and that’s why they decided that hey no we won’t actually give it Thunderbolt 4 and there is no option to order this with 32 gigabytes of ddr5 RAM that would have been
really good for those that need more than 16. there’d probably be a few people in the comments that will say oh if only it had 32 because when you edit a lot of videos some of those programs especially Adobe Premiere Pro that I use can really eat into the Rams so I did run into sometimes with my video edits uh the the ram was a bit borderline there too for some of the work even I was doing so it’s just the the cons there and well SD card reader would have been good on this too
as well but hey again it’s kind of nitpicking there overall fantastic 14 inch laptop with a huge amount of power for the size it’s really good and it does get a big thumbs up from me and comes recommended if this is what you’re after dedicated GPU small size windows 11. this is it thanks a lot for watching this review of the magic book 14. I do have a review of the honor 70 that just launched as well the global version and the honor pad 8 which is an affordable Android 12 tablet from honor
