introduction
Honor has made a name for itself in the laptop market with sleek and powerful laptops that have undermined many of the established gamers and its latest attempt is the MagicBook 14 2022. It offers a redesigned chassis, 12-generation Intel CPU, 75 Wh battery. and an optional Nvidia RTX 2050 discrete GPU.
MagicBook 14 2022 was initially announced in China with AMD’s Ryzen 6000 CPUs and no dedicated GPU options. Luckily for us, we got the international variant, which was just launched most recently and is the best spec model with the discrete graphics card.
Honor is advertising this laptop as a one-size-fits-all, suitable for work and play, but is that really the case and should it be on the list of favorites for a new laptop in 2022? This reviewer spent nearly two weeks with the MagicBook 14 2022 and used it for work and play to see how well it holds up.
Design, display, keyboard
Honor MagicBook 14 is a sleek aluminum unibody laptop measuring just under 17mm at its thickest point and weighing 1.58kg. Carrying your laptop in a backpack on your daily commute or from room to room is easy enough and won’t leave your arms tired. The machined aluminum alloy frame feels cool to the touch and feels solid. The laptop is offered in a Single Space Gray color, which looks pretty hidden even though it is prone to picking up smudges.
The MagicBook 14’s 14.2-inch display is of the a-Si TFT LCD variety, which is an older cheaper alternative to LTPS LCD and AMOLED screens in newer premium laptops. The resolution here is 1440 x 2160px, while the refresh rate is only 60Hz. Having used laptops with high refresh rate screens, the difference is noticeable even though the 60Hz panel should result in better battery life.
As with many recently announced laptops, the MagicBook 14 2022 gets a 3: 2 aspect ratio screen, great for productivity and multitasking, but leaves videos with large black bars compared to 16: 9 screens. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus.
Honor claims 300 nits of brightness on the panel while we measured 347 nits of peak brightness with our specialized equipment. Brightness above 300 nits is solid for indoor use, albeit a far cry from class-leading laptops that can produce 500 nits or more. Viewing angles aren’t great on this panel with noticeable changes in contrast when looking from the sides.
Outdoor visibility isn’t great on the glossy screen. The display has 100% sRGB coverage. The panel has a 145 degree opening angle and you can open and close the lid with one hand, not a key selling factor but a premium laptop brand nonetheless.
Honor has also added a rather average HD 720P camera for video calling and the good news is that it now resides at the top of the display bezel, unlike the previous MagicBook 14, which had the camera hidden under a keycap. Port selection is solid with two USB-C ports of the 3.2 Gen2 variety on the left side along with a 3.5mm headphone / microphone combo jack. The opposite side has a USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port and an HDMI output.
2 USB-C 3.2 ports, headphone / microphone combo • one full-size HDMI and one USB 3.2 (Type A interface)
The laptop packs two microphones and two speakers from below. The speakers become very noisy even if their placement is not ideal and clarity is lost. There is a fingerprint reader built into the power button for secure logins while connectivity is handled by Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6. The software side is handled by Microsoft’s Windows 11 Home edition.
MagicBook 14 is equipped with a backlit QWERTY keyboard. It offers a good typing experience with its 1.5mm key travel and the keycaps feature a resin coating that is less prone to greasy fingertips.
The only downside, as with most other similarly sized laptops, are the narrow arrow keys, which I continually hit poorly. The plastic trackpad has a decent size and all gestures work as expected.
Performance
The international variants of the Honor MagicBook 14 2022 are equipped with Intel i5-12500H processors based on the Alder Lake architecture. You get 16 threads with 4 high performance cores supporting Hyper-Threading and 8 low power consumption cores. All twelve cores share the 18MB L3 cache. The base clock on the performance cluster ranges from 2.5 GHz to 4.5 GHz, while the efficiency cores fall between 1.8 GHz and 3.3 GHz. The TDP is rated at 45 W.
The laptop has a default 50W “Smart Mode” which helps preserve battery life that should handle most daily tasks. The 70W “Performance Mode” is a quick Fn + P key combination, although you’ll need to be plugged into the power supply to use it. We used Performance mode for our benchmark tests.
Honor also has its own system-level performance and power consumption optimization called OS Turbo. Identify specific usage scenarios and optimize the system to balance performance and power consumption. Honor claims that OS Turbo can increase the battery life of daily work by around 20%. You can also use Honor Connect and Honor Share which allow you to connect and mirror your Honor phone or tablet and transfer files seamlessly across all devices.
Our review unit also comes with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 dedicated graphics card with 4 GB GDDR6 video memory and a power of 60 W. It is a mid-range graphics card for laptops that supports DirectX 12 and OpenGL 4.6 although it takes life only during gaming or video editing – everything else is handled by the integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics unit.
With the hardware overview out of the way, let’s look at some benchmark scores.
Geekbench 5 reveals a single-core score of 1,630 points and 10,033 points in the multi-core test. We can see a small improvement in the single-core department over last year’s MagicBook 14 that we tested with the 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1165G7 chipset.
The big difference is in the multi-core score where the new 12th generation Intel chip holds a 96% advantage over its predecessor. The new 12-generation Intel chip is also faster in both single-core and multi-core performance than AMD’s Ryzen 7 6800H processor (1,500 single-core points; 9,300 multi-core points).
MagicBook 14 2022 Geekbench scores
Moving on to Cinebench R23 we again see the pure power of the latest Intel chip. It achieved a single-core CPU score of 1,720 points and 12,072 points in the multi-core test. A comparable Ryzen 7 6800H would fare 15% worse in the single-core test, although the Ryzen still has an 8% advantage over the Intel chip in the multi-core test.
Cinebench R23 scores
Having a decent graphics card certainly helps in the most demanding tasks. We tested the RTX 2050 GPU in GFXBench 5.0 in DirectX 12 and Vulkan modes. The Aztec Ruins test showed better performance under Vulkan with a solid 130fps in High Tier mode. DirectX 12 mode took us to 100fps in the High Tier option, which is equally impressive for a laptop of this size and weight.
Nvidia RTX 2050 GFXBench (Vulkan) • GFXBench (DirectX 12)
You can expect to play AAA games at medium to high settings with this setup, as well as edit 4K videos and other creative work in apps like Photoshop with many layers. We also tested a few games to see how the laptop would perform and managed to hit 160fps at native resolution in Rocket League. Of course the screen only does 60Hz, so anything above that is wasted.
The MagicBook 14 2022 comes with 16GB of dual-channel LPDDR5 RAM and a 512GB Samsung PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. The sequential read speed reaches over 6,700MB / s while the write performance is just over 4,800MB / s, needless to say this is fast storage. A cold boot takes just under 8 seconds.
CrystalDiskMark scores
The cooling configuration of the MagicBook consists of two fans and a double horn heat sink. The laptop runs at 32-3 ° C in idle mode and the fans are quiet at around 20dB.
MagicBook 14 2022 in idle mode and under stress
Games and benchmarks running in performance mode made the laptop warm up to 49 ° C and the decibel levels went up accordingly.
Battery life and charge
Honor has packed an impressive 75 Wh lithium-polymer battery into its MagicBook 14 2022, which is among the largest cells we’ve seen in 14-inch laptops. Honor claims 15 hours of local video playback at 1080p and 10.5 hours of mixed use.
In our web browser stress test, the MagicBook 14 2022 managed 14 hours and 20 minutes with the screen set to 50% brightness. This is one of the highest scores we’ve seen from a laptop of this size and is a testament to the improved efficiency of Intel’s 12th generation chipsets. We also ran a YouTube playback test (1080p video) on Chrome with both brightness and volume set to 50% and got exactly 7 hours before the battery ran out.
Honor has really nailed the battery life here and we can safely assume that most users will be able to get a full day of office work out of this machine without needing to recharge. The laptop is equipped with a 135W USB-C SuperCharger which is a bit bulky but handles a full charge in just 80 minutes. You can charge from either of the two USB-C ports on the laptop.
Verdict
A slim notebook with a 12-generation Intel chipset, a spacious 14-inch screen with a 3: 2 aspect ratio and an Nvidia RTX 2050 graphics card, all wrapped in an aluminum chassis and complemented by a 75 Wh battery – this is the Honor MagicBook 14 2022 At a glance. At € 1,099 for the base i5 model and € 1,299 for the RTX 2050 discrete GPU variant the MagicBook 14 makes a lot of sense.
There aren’t many 14-inch laptops with similar specs, and those available cost more. We found Lenovo’s IdeaPad 5i Pro 14 at € 1,399 and the HP Pavilion Plus 14 at € 1,649 even higher as two main alternatives.
The performance of the MagicBook 14 is among the best in the segment, the battery holds up, the build is solid and there’s a decent amount of ports. We cannot overlook the poor screen and speakers which are a step below competing high-end ultrabooks in this class.
Honor MagicBook 14 2022 is a true all-rounder that can work and play thanks to its powerful chipset and discrete graphics card. Battery life is stellar and port selection is more than adequate. If you’re looking for a sleek, capable laptop that can do it all, the Honor MagicBook 14 2022 is a safe bet and gets our recommendation.
Professionals
- Powerful 12th generation Intel processor
- Optional Nvidia RTX 2050 graphics
- Stellar battery life
- Good selection of ports
- Premium design and solid keyboard
versus
- Poor screen: poor viewing angles, brightness of only 348 nits
- Lower focus speakers
- Plastic trackpad
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