This is Huawei’s new Huawei Matebook D16 a 16-inch laptop that is powered by intel’s 12th generation chips. There are two models with the Core i5, but this review unit that Huawei sent out to me is a loan unit 2. By the way, does have the core i7. It’s the 12700h, and compared to the previous gen with the 11th gen intel, this is quite a big step up in performance.
So this model here comes with either eight gigabytes of ram or 16 gigabytes. which I do have and 512-gigabyte SSD which are PCI e3 it’s got wi-fi ax. so that’s wi-fi six a 60 watt-hour battery and a backlit full-sized keyboard it also does run windows 11 home. so in this post I’m going to go over it in detail and I’ll let you know all the pros and cons now in my time which is a week of testing out the Huawei Matebook D16 from Huawei.
Huawei Matebook D16 unboxing
In the box, you’ll find a warranty card for our type c to type c cable. Which is of a good length and then the charger, so it’s Huawei’s supercharge 65 watts type c charger will also work with other Huawei products and I really like just how small and compact it is.
Build design keyboard and ports in Huawei Matebook D16
Laptop has a nice alloy finish to it. So this is the grey version. You can also get a silver one, and it is a matte paint finish to it. You can see here the embossed Huawei logo. The hinge does feel excellent opening it up. There is a little bit of a lip here, but as you can see I cannot open it. It’s up to one hand you do need two hands to open it.
This one up, we’re presented now with a standard full-sized keyboard. Here with good travel, it’s about 1.6 millimeters, very comfortable to type on. It is a backlit keyboard now pressing down firmly there. In the middle, there is not that much flex. It’s a very small amount that it does have half-size error up and down keys, but we do get a full size uh numerical keyboard, here too, so we’ve got the number pad. which is excellent for those that want it.
Now you will see that the touchpad is off-centered when you look at it. Still, if you factor in the keyboard, which is just in front, it’s actually in the center, so that’s why they’ve moved it to one side because of our number pad right here various shortcuts we’ve got them along here you’ve got a print screen. By default, we do have all of the controls up here, so, for example, our media’s screen brightness controls Huawei share by default if you needed f2 or f3. Then you have to push the uh function key. There for those, so I like the keyboard.
The palm rest here is made out of the same alloy, which is a brush that paints a job and here our power button also has a fingerprint reader for windows hello. So very fast to use this to log in instead of typing out a password. This keyboard is also backlit. So this is the first stage, the first light level, and the second, the brightest. It’s evenly distributed. So I don’t see any dull patches at all on the touchpad on this model. It does support Windows 11 gestures, as you’d expect, and we have a built-in left and right mouse button. It’s not super large, but the size I do find is adequate and I’ve got no complaints. It is an accurate touchpad, and the cursor does not jump even with the finer movements. Around all over the place it works really well.
Now the underside of the Huawei Matebook D16 still has that alloy finish. So it feels good we’ve got a little talk screw holding everything in place, and unfortunately, because this is a lone unit, I’m not allowed to open it up and show you the internals. We’ve got two downward-firing speakers with rubber feet at the front. Here and a larger rubber foot. But it does have this gap in the middle to help with the airflow, so this is where the cooler air will be sucked in, then blowing out the back. I’ll cover the thermals in this review, too on the right side of the Huawei Matebook D16, we do have a USB 2 port and USB 3.2 gen 1. so it’s a little unusual they put a USB 2 on here. Now I’ll just be plugging my mouse into it. So it doesn’t matter, but I believe that two USB 3.2s. Would have been a little better, but we do get two type c ports. Here on the left status led right there now, they both support power delivery. But one of them does support video out 4k 60.
We’ve got HDMI 2.0. so not HDMI 2.1. which the hardware does support. However, connecting up my LG 6 4k 120-hertz tv, I can end up running 120 hertz 4k, which is an excellent 3.5-millimetre headphone jack with mic support quality out of this is loud. It’s clear there’s no annoying static. So that’s great, and keeping with the tech that they’ve bought through initially with the matebook x line, we have now the four microphones. At the front, so I like the location they bring the mics. Closer to you and the fact that there are four of them, the sound quality from these mics is superior to other laptops that only have two on either side of the webcam. Looking at the laptop closely, I can see that it just seems to have a single cooling fan. So not a twin setup like we see on the matebook x pro series. So interesting to see how this will fare the thermals, especially in the performance mode.
Display
Although the shape and size of the laptop are about a 15.6-inch laptop, the screen on the Huawei Matebook D16 is 16 inches, so we have matte bezels on the outside, and there’s a little plastic well rubber lip around the edge to stop it from scratching when the lid is closed you’ll see at the top here, It’s our 1080p AI camera, with a status right next to it, and the left and right bezels are nice and thin. So the screen itself it’s a 1920×1200 IPS resolution. It’s not super sharp, but it still looks good at average viewing distance. I would have preferred 1440p at this size, especially 16 inches, but I think it will still be enough for most people.
It looks good when you look at it, and they say the screen brightness is 300 nits, but my spider x pro measurement exceeds their claim, and it’s 317 nits, so that’s with the anti-glare coating indoors, so well. This brightness is perfectly acceptable. I see that, of course, I prefer to be bright, but it is actually perfect for most people, and even in direct sunlight, you can still do it with the anti-glare coating, so the color coverage here is gamut SRGB 97 NTSC, 69 adobe RGB 74 and The p3 cover is also 74, which is an exemplary screen but definitely not at the level we get on their more expensive matebook x models.
Windows 11 video playback and devices
and here we are in windows now. Generally, with my reviews, I would show you. The bias, but there’s nothing to show you with Huawei machines. Because it’s locked down, you can’t adjust power limits. You can’t make any changes apart from boot order and secure boot. You can disable that too. So it does run Windows 11 home. We’ve got 16 gigabytes of ram. While most of it is available to us, they’ve dedicated a little bit to the iris xe graphics. But that will scale up automatically. Anyway, now the general performance of this laptop is excellent. It’s exceptionally quick and fast, so I don’t need to. Show you document spreadsheets browser, performance because that is all really quick everything’s. Instantaneously, there’s no lag when you pop up the menu or anything like that on lower spec machines that I often cover on my website. Now you’ll see here that it’s listed as quad channel ram, but it’s not now. What they’re using is low powered ddr4 ram, and it can clock.
Itself right up to two 4200 and sixty-seven megahertz, but they haven’t gone with ddr5. Which is a little attractive with this now you will see here too. We’ve got iris xc graphics. Uh now, this does have 96 executional units, and it’s not bad graphics. At all for integrated that is at least so the CPU which is, of course, the core i7 the 12700h very potent. It’s got a lot of cores. There are six performance cores, and it can clock up to 4.7 gigahertz with eight efficiency cores. So that is why when you look here too in the device manager, which I’ll quickly bring up, you’ll see that there are 20 processors listed. Here well 20 cores. That’s because of the threads too, so in total, we’ve got 20 threads. It’s an absolute monster.
As you see with benchmarks, later on, the 12th gen is a substantial massive step up from the 11th gen, and I’m so glad that Huawei finally does have it. So it’s a powerful CPU, their general performance excellent. So this is the 1080p, sorry 4k demo file that I always play, and I’ll just play this with films and tv now. It always does this for some reason. Windows is a bit of a start at the beginning. It’s a very demanding bitrate, too, 140 megabits per second. It’s when you resize it or first play it, but after that, it’s smooth and no problems with it and the sony swordsmith. So this is 4k 60 video playback. You’ll see a game that this one very, very quick, and initially, it does that little pause for some reason. So the performance of that is excellent. So anything you throw at it, it can handle it. When it comes to video files, the spec of pc.
Benchmark on Huawei Matebook D16
Then there are a few benchmarks where you can see the performance, as I mentioned earlier, so the single-core score here with cinebench r23 is really high. This might actually be a little better now. I ran it in active mode, but after 10 minutes of looping, The score is dropping a bit because we are currently undergoing heat stress. And I run this here in the background to observe that heat, and you will see that it is more than 100 degrees. So after 10 minutes, it goes down a bit because it’s not so good, so we have a geekbench five score here too, which is impressive now it runs without throttling. This is when I use the p function. I will show you a balanced mode here, and it is now a balanced mode.
Function Switch between performance mode, and it does with the active mode. Still, if you get a little faster, it increases the power limit to 54 watts, and then it is a very powerful score. They have used SSD, which is 512 gigabytes in this mode, and I have There is one, and you can clearly see that this is a PCIe 3.0 speed, so this 12th gen now actually supports that they never used a PCI for SSD again. We know why they did, but they did not go to ddr5 ram or pci4 SSD to save cost.
Included Huawei software
Then our included software we do get with the Huawei Matebook D16, so there is this which is Huawei’s pc manager. Now, this is not what I would classify as bloatware and is very handy, so you’ve got your devices paired up to your Huawei account here. You can connect up their Huawei shares for other Huawei devices, so I have covered this before in my other reviews. It’s a convenient way of seamlessly connecting up you’re, say, Huawei p50 pro.
You can transfer files, and you can also answer text messages. Things like that all wirelessly. You can set it up as a second display if you have a tablet. So convenient, and you’ve got some tips for troubleshooting their quick services, but for me, this is the best optimization so you can sit and update all of the drivers here. Now I did have two bios updates that it comes through already, and I updated them.
All of the drivers here, so one spot is effortless to do, which is excellent, and you also have this: performance tuning so you can set it to balance, which is by default or performance. But that also works, as I mentioned before, with the function p shortcut. So you can go over then into the balance mode, or the performance increases the power limit and boosts the speed. But the trade-off is more heat generated. As you would expect, the fans will come on a little more. There is this then, too, the control panel.
1080p web camera and features
The webcam is 1080p, and now when you use it in standard mode, it is 30 frames per second, and four microphones record the audio in front of you, so this is a technology they have acquired from the matebook x to further line up the expensive line. Affordable d series now I’m going to change the background, so it’s a global setting to show you that it’s functional.
So it’s going to work with any application, and now they call this the living room background looks a bit fancy, and we got the office meeting room. If you want to hide all your messy background because it’s blurred, you can blur it out now, then you can see the stitching now, then it’s not perfect, it’s normal when I raise my hand I see the stitching is good, but I’m fast It’s a bit of a joke to move around. The speed slowed down, but if I go this way, you can watch the e-camera follow me, and I put it in the middle of a lovely frame. It has an excellent webcam, and I like these AI features.
Linux test and battery life
I did a quick test boot here of Linux and encountered some difficulty with the touchpad drivers. So that’s one thing you’re going to have to sort out. If you do intend to run Linux on the Huawei Matebook D16, then our battery run time so just the brightness set at 30 office tasks on this. so documents spreadsheets uh youtube browsing six hours and 55 minutes was what I was able to achieve out of it which is all right for a 60-watt hour battery but of course, if you do something very demanding it’s really going to bring down that battery life there.
