Here’s Why Huawei MateBook 14 Is A Solid Value For Money Laptop

You’re in the market looking for a new laptop. You aren’t necessarily looking for the top of the line, but you don’t want something too basic either. Well, today, we’re taking a look at what might possibly be the best value for money laptop out there, the Huawei MateBook 14.

Now if you’re familiar with the design of past Huawei laptops, the new MateBook 14 won’t surprise you. But that’s not to say that it’s bad. In fact, it’s otherwise.

It has a really minimalistic design, with rounded edges, a simple logo on the lid, really thin bezels and the entire chassis is made out of aluminium while featuring a sandblasted finish. This results in a laptop that looks and feels pretty great, and comes in at just about 1 point 5 kilograms.

You do of course get a 14-inch display. It is an IPS panel, with a resolution of 2160 by 1440, covers 100% sRGB and can get to about 300 nits in max brightness. What’s unique about this display however, is that Huawei has opted to go for a 3 by 2 aspect ratio. Unlike the standard 16 by 9 aspect ratio in most laptops and monitors, 3 by 2 allows for much more vertical space.

This is actually preferable when working on documents, or even just viewing and scrolling through a website. You are able to see and do more at a glance, compared to the standard 16 by 9, because you just have that much more additional information presented.

But there is one other advantage with a 3 by 2 aspect ratio, and that actually translates down to the keyboard.

The typing experience on this keyboard is actually pretty great. It does feature slightly larger than normal keycaps, which has a decent amount of key travel with light tactile feedback. But what makes the typing experience a tad better than most, is because of the 3 by 2 aspect ratio for the display.

Due to the choice of display, it naturally made for a larger surface area on the chassis where you can rest your palms on while typing, which really does make it more comfortable especially for extended periods of typing. This also translates to being able to fit a much larger trackpad, which performs admirably. Huawei Share is also supported on the MateBook 14 by tapping your Huawei smartphone onto the trackpad.

On the top right corner, is also where you can find the dedicated power button, which doubles as a fingerprint reader.

The first drawback, however, has to be the webcam, which is recessed into the chassis and located at the top of the keyboard.

This placement for the camera is not ideal, but if you just need a webcam, you do at least have it. On the brighter side, your privacy is also ensured if you don’t use it.

As for ports, you do get a couple of USB 3.2, HDMI, 3.5mm combo jack and a USB Type-C. The USB-Type C doubles up as the charging port which also supports fast charging. A 15-minute charge can get you about two and a half hours of usage. A full charge with the included 56 watt-hour battery will last you an average of about 7 hours or more with mixed usage.

But we now come to what really makes the MateBook 14 possibly the best value for your money.

It comes equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. Here’s the kicker. You get all of that at a price of just S$1,298.

That is an insane spec sheet for the price. The AMD Ryzen 5 4600H is an amazing chip, with 6 cores and 12 threads. Couple that with 16GB of RAM, and you can just blaze through day-to-day productivity tasks without much issue at all. In fact, we got admirable results in Cinebench R20, and it can even take on video editing on DaVinci Resolve which is an application that requires quite a lot of CPU and GPU horsepower.

With that being said, temperatures are definitely on the higher side, with the chip hovering in the mid-90s during extended workloads when the processor is pushed to 100%. But also to mention is that the fans are really quiet even under full load.

So if you want to, you can probably tweak the fan profile and obtain even better performance with much lower temperatures at the expense of noise.

In any case, it performs great but just know that it can get toasty.

To sum up. With the MateBook 14, you get a well-designed laptop with a great display, a comfortable typing experience, decent battery life and performance that really punches above its weight class. True, it does have a few drawbacks, like the recessed webcam and the pretty toasty temperatures under full load. But, again, you are getting all of that in a package that costs just $1,298 Singapore Dollars.

At that price, you can’t really complain. It is offering that much value for your money, and we would say that the Huawei MateBook 14 is well worth it.

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This content is brought to you in partnership with Huawei