Tech Advisor – October 2019

100 TECH ADVISOR • OCTOBER 2019

BUYING GUIDE

It’s good to see a standard headphone socket, but

disappointing not to find any kind of card reader.

The top-spec model, which we are reviewing

here, has a Core i7 processor, the 8th-gen 8550U. It

alsohas16GBofRAM,a 512GBNVMeSSDandan

NvidiaMX150 graphics chip. The latter means you

canhavereasonablegamingperformancewithout

stumpingupfor an external GPU.

In the lower-spec version is an i5-8250U, 8GB

of RAM and no separate GPU. That means you get

essentially the same graphics power as the original

MateBook X which also used the Intel chip’s built-in

graphics. And it isn’t much cop for gaming.

Oddly, the hard drive on our review model is

partitioned into 80GB for Windows 10 and 380GB

foryourfiles.Thisis farfromideal,sinceWindows

updatesandapps(whichyou’llinstallontheC:drive

bydefault) will quickly fill it up.

Another upgrade is the audio system. There are now

four separate speakers, with tweeters added alongside

the stereo woofers. There’s Dolby Atmos branding

again. Sound is very good for a laptop this thin. The

speakers offer a good stereo soundstage, and even

good surround effects. They’re reasonably loud, but

sound does get a little muddy at very high volumes

when there’s a lot going on in the soundtrack. But at

normal listening levels, it’s great.

Display

Returningtothescreenfora moment,Huaweihas

usedthe same LTPS technology it uses in some of

its phones. It’s an LCD panel, which uses a different