Matebook X Pro 2021 upgrades to 11th Gen Intel Core

For its third generation of Matebook X Pro, the Chinese Huawei offers (finally!) 10nm Intel chips. After staying on “fakes” 10^e generation in 14 nm for the previous generation, the ultraportable with the splendid 3K touchscreen at 3/2 ratio modernizes all its electronics by welcoming the new batch of mobile chips from Intel, the Core 11^e generation called “Tiger Lake”.

On the menu, it is obviously an SoC embedding not only a more powerful and more energy efficient CPU (Willow Cove cores) but also a very powerful integrated graphics part, the famous Xe chip from Intel. A chip powerful enough to play the majority of games in Full HD at a sufficient level of detail, which makes it possible to oust the Nvidia MX250 and MX350 graphics chip of previous generations. The level of performance should be the same, but consumption should logically drop, again, a notch. This allows Huawei to offer 10 hours of autonomy.

Another notable improvement, the arrival of Wi-Fi 6, largely absent from the previous platform of the Matebook X Pro 2020. The Thunderbolt is still in the game and the two configurations (Core i5 and Core i7) both incorporate 16 GB of RAM. Making the Matebook X Pro 2021 a laptop with a near-perfect spec sheet. Almost ? Yes, the damn webcam is still built into the keyboard. On the stack side, the advantage is that you can avoid piracy – you are only visible when you want to. But on the front side, in the age of galore videoconferences, its viewing angle will not be to your advantage.

Home touchpad and cooling

One of the notable innovations of the device is its new touchpad, entirely haptic and without mechanical part (no risk of wear). Developed in-house like Apple, this touchpad does not use any technology from industry giants like Synaptic and can reproduce the touch and responsiveness of smartphones. The secret lies in eight pressure-sensitive piezoelectric plates. Very sensitive: Huawei prides itself on doing better than Apple and says it is ” a great victory for (the ecosystem) Windows ”. Who will test will judge.

On the cooling side, this 2021 version inaugurates the new “SharkFins” dissipation system. Huawei has developed a system of two fans equipped with a very large number of blades (60 instead of 40 in the past).