Honor MagicBook Pro 16 review: the king of office automation

The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is a large 16-inch laptop PC initially presented at MWC 2024, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and a dedicated graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

Since this announcement, Honor has made choices to adapt the MagicBook Pro 16 to the French market and, unfortunately, all the spice of this configuration has been greatly toned down. For the French version, the manufacturer is satisfied with a Core Ultra 5 125H accompanied by 24 GB of RAM. The GeForce RTX 4060 has been abandoned to make do with the Intel Arc part integrated into the processor – which means that the “Pro” name could also have been abandoned by Honor for this model. Fortunately, the Chinese manufacturer had the good sense to keep the 16-inch panel displaying 3072 x 1920 pixels at 165 Hz.

The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is more of a comfortable portable screen, intended to stay on the home desk for office use and small video game use. The lack of a dedicated graphics card prevents this in fact to claim to effectively create content, photo editing or video editing. However, at the time of writing, the Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is available for less than €1000.

Construction

The MagicBook Pro 16 is a very large 16-inch chassis with a midnight blue metallic finish, almost purple. The design is particularly sober with numerous vents, whether at each corner of the case or even below. The coating still has a tendency to catch fingerprints on the cover, the touchpad and the keyboard.

The screen can be opened with one finger using the notch provided for this purpose. Once deployed, the MagicBook Pro 16 reveals its keyboard with black keys against a background of the same type as the rest of the chassis. The 16-inch panel is particularly well integrated with relatively thin borders.

The backlit keyboard offers pleasant typing, but the layout of the keys will take some getting used to, particularly the arrow keys without demarcation, which disrupt the grip and cause many typing errors.

The touchpad is less well off with loud clicks and, above all, very pronounced depression of the surface.

On the connectivity side, we find the traditional trio of HDMI, USB and USB-C, including a port with the Thunderbolt standard. A jack accompanies the USB-C ports on the left edge, while the rest of the connectivity is located behind the screen.

The wireless part uses the Intel AX201 chip responsible for wifi 6 (2400 Mb/s) and Bluetooth 5.3. We would have greatly appreciated the presence of a WiFi 7 chip in this 2024 model.

The webcam, which sits discreetly in the upper border of the screen, has a 1080p sensor. Its rendering is a little messy, especially in the details, but for video use it should be sufficient. Little more, Windows takes advantage of the 11 TOPS NPU in the Core Ultra 5 to activate Windows Studio Effects (blur, auto framing and eye tracking).

Good news regarding cooling, since despite the absence of a dedicated graphics card, Honor has left the entire system with two heat pipes connecting three radiators to dissipate the calories released by Intel’s Core Ultra 5. Suffice to say that this one, with its 28 W base and 115 W peak, can express itself very freely.

During our video encoding, we noted a maximum temperature of 36°C in the center of the keyboard and a little less than 39°C at the air extractions.

As for noise pollution, Honor does not seem to have changed its ventilation profile despite the absence of the GeForce RTX 4060. At the end of our encoding of a good ten minutes, we noted 39.1 dB; it therefore remains clearly audible, but in return, as explained above, the system is kept cool.

Performances

The MagicBook Pro 16 made available to us by Honor is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H (14C/18T) processor that can reach 4.5 GHz. It is accompanied by 24 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD.

With its Core Ultra 5 125H particularly well cooled, as we saw above, this “transportable” teases Core Ultra 7 155H models generally running around an index of 140. It is even close to the Core Ultra 9 185H of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra (index of 159).

The MagicBook Pro 16 is very quick to perform our video encodings or renderings in Blender, but we must not forget that it does not have a dedicated graphics card, which is very useful for reducing this type of task by more than half. In traditional office use (Office, Chrome, video), the Core Ultra 5 125H will therefore be perfectly at ease.

Thanks to its integrated Intel Arc graphics part, the MagicBook Pro 16 can even run a few games without blushing. We thus obtained 32 fps in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider at 1920 x 1200 pixels with the Very High setting and without enabling Intel XeSS scaling (46 fps in performance mode).

In a newer game such asAssassin’s Creed Miragefor example, you will have to review your expectations and settle for the lowest graphics setting to hope to play at 33 fps, still at 1200p.

The SSD did not show any signs of weakness during the transfer of our test files. Its speeds of 4.9 GB/s read and 3.5 GB/s write contribute to the responsiveness of the Honor MagicBook Pro 16.

Screen

The MagicBook Pro 16 screen is a 16-inch IPS panel displaying 3072 x 1920 pixels at a maximum of 165 Hz. All it needs is variable refresh to take full advantage of its speed.

Under our probe, the panel appears well calibrated with a delta E of 1.5, well below the threshold of 3 beyond which the eye perceives colorimetric drifts. The color temperature is 6609 K, just above the video standard of 6500 K. The contrast ratio is 1154:1, a more than correct value for an IPS panel which unfortunately cannot display almost infinite contrasts. of its Oled technology counterparts.

The brightness has been increased to 540 cd/m², a value halfway between the Apple MacBook Air 15 M3 (509 cd/m²) and the MacBook Pro 14 M3 (596 cd/m²), still from the brand to the apple. Couple all of this with the very low light reflected by the matte coating of the panel (17%) and you will be able to operate in the brightest environments.

Set at 165 Hz, the panel is also very responsive with retention measured at 6 ms, which is as good as laptop PCs gaming.

Compare photos

1. Delta E by color 2. Color temperature curve 3. Gamma curve

Audio

The audio part of the MagicBook Pro 16 is made up of two tweeters placed on each side of the keyboard, while two woofers are placed under the keyboard and oriented towards the support.

When listening, the MagicBook Pro 16 offers a rendering that unfortunately focuses a little too much on the mids and highs. The latter sparkle a lot with a somewhat unpleasant appearance. Thanks to its large size, the MagicBook Pro 16 offers a well-defined stereo scene.

The headphone output is a little less fun, in particular because of the inability to deactivate the audio effects applied by Honor. Crosstalk is low: the left signal overlaps the right signal and vice versa. Apart from this defect, the rest of the characteristics are quite correct with sufficient output power, high dynamics and imperceptible distortion.

Mobility / Autonomy

Helping slab, the MagicBook Pro 16 is an imposing machine with dimensions of 35 x 24 cm and a weight of 1.8 kg. It is mainly its 2 cm thickness which is the most annoying, especially since this PC does not have an integrated graphics card. In addition, Honor has kept its 135 W 477 g charger intended for configuration with the GeForce RTX 4060. For comparison, an ultrabook with Core Ultra 7 normally requires a 65 W charger.

In video playback (Netflix under Chrome, screen set to 200 cd/m²), the Honor Magic Book Pro 16 lasted a little less than 9 hours. This is ultimately enough if we compare to the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, which has a processor of the same generation and an almost identical battery with 76 Wh compared to 75 Wh for the Honor. In absolute terms, this remains very correct, but compared to its competitors we expected better.

Conclusion

Overall rating

How does the rating work?

The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 offers very consistent services, including a screen that benefits from the best of IPS technology, a willing processor and an efficient cooling system. In the absence of a dedicated graphics card, it loses substance and misses its Pro target, especially since the chassis and charger have not been resized accordingly, a card reader would also have been welcome. Thus configured by Honor, the MagicBook Pro 16 is placed under house arrest and will be perfect for office automation and content consultation.