Honor MagicBook 14 Review: Nvidia RTX 2050 GPU and 14.2-Inch Display

With its stylish and potent laptops that outperform many of the industry leaders, Honor has made a name for itself in the laptop market. The MagicBook 14 2022 is the company’s most recent release sporting a new chassis, a 12-generation Intel CPU, a 75-watt battery, and a discrete Nvidia RTX 2050 GPU that is optional.

When the MagicBook 14 2022 was first revealed in China, it only had AMD’s Ryzen 6000 CPUs and no options for a discrete GPU. Fortunately for us, the international version—the highest-specced model with the dedicated graphics card has just been released.

Appearance.
The elegant aluminum unibody Honor MagicBook 14 laptop weighs 1.58kg and has a thickness of just under 17mm, making it portale. The machined aluminum alloy chassis feels substantial and is cool to the touch. The laptop is available in a single shade, Space Gray.

Screen.
The 14.2-inch display of the MagicBook 14 is an a-Si TFT LCD panel, an older, less expensive option to the LTPS LCD and AMOLED screens found in more recent high-end laptops.

This display has a resolution of 1440 x 2160 pixels and a refresh rate of only 60Hz. Although the 60Hz panel should lead to increased battery endurance, you certainly feel a difference having used laptops with high refresh rate screens.

The MagicBook 14 2022, like many other recently introduced laptops, has a 3:2 aspect ratio screen, which is excellent for multitasking and productivity but results in wide black bars when watching films in comparison to 16:9 screens. It is protected by the Gorilla Glass Victus.

Honor states that the panel is 300 nits bright. Although it is still far from class-leading computers that can produce brightness of 500 nits or more, it is good for use indoors. This panel has poor viewing angles, with obvious contrast shifts when viewed from the sides. On the shiny screen, vision outside is not very good. There is 100% sRGB coverage on the display. Even if it’s not a major selling point, the panel’s 145-degree opening angle and one-handed opening and closing make it a premium laptop.

In addition, Honor has included a rather okay 720P HD camera for video calls. The good news is that, unlike the previous MagicBook 14, which had the camera concealed beneath a keycap, this camera is now located in the top portion of the display bezel.

There are two 3.2 Gen2 USB-C ports on the left side as well as a 3.5mm headphone/mic combination jack, making for a good port selection. A USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port and an HDMI out are located on the other side.

The laptop has two bottom-firing speakers and two microphones. The speakers are quite loud however, you do miss out on clarity and their placement is not perfect. The power button has an integrated fingerprint scanner for safe logins, and Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6 handle connectivity. Windows 11 Home edition from Microsoft takes care of the software side.

With the MagicBook 14, a backlit QWERTY keyboard is included. With its 1.5 mm key travel and resin coating on the keycaps, it offers a comfortable typing experience even for greasy fingers. The tiny arrow keys are the sole drawback, as they are on most other laptops of a comparable size. All of the gestures on the reasonably sized plastic trackpad function as intended.

Performance.

The Honor MagicBook 14 2022 is available in foreign markets with Intel i5-12500H CPUs, which are built on the Alder Lake architecture. You get 16 threads with 8 power-efficient cores and 4 performance cores that allow hyper-threading. The 18MB L3 cache is shared by all twelve cores. The efficiency cores operate between 1.8GHz and 3.3GHz, while the performance cluster’s base speed spans 2.5GHz to 4.5GHz. 45 W is the TDP rating.

The laptop’s built-in 50W “Smart mode” helps to conserve battery life and should be sufficient for the majority of daily tasks. You can quickly use the Fn+P keyboard combo with the 70W “Performance mode,” which however requires plugging into the power source.

Additionally, Honor offers OS Turbo, a system-level speed and battery consumption optimization feature. It pinpoints particular use cases and adjusts the system to strike a compromise between efficiency and power utilization. According to Honor, OS Turbo can almost 20% extend the battery life of your normal workday. You can also link and mirror your Honor phone or tablet and move files between devices with ease by using the Honor Connect and Honor Share features.