Sadly, the Huawei MateBook X exhibits massive throttling as well

[Redaktion]

Is it acceptable to refer to a notebook that loses up to 37 % of its initial performance after a few minutes of high load already as performant? We are faced with this conundrum once again with the latest Huawei MateBook X with its innovative MEPCM cooling system. A short excerpt from our extensive review focusing on persistent load.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Sadly-the-Huawei-MateBook-X-exhibits-massive-throttling-as-well.237820.0.html

[Tankdave]

Sorry to ask, but if its so bad how come it still scores 88% in recent review?

[A.P.]

Sorry to ask, but if its so bad how come it still scores 88% in recent review?

It is not quite something that will cure your butthurt but, to the best of my knowledge, notebookcheck does not take into account marketing materials when grading review units. With a decent screen and keyboard, that unit did look like a Macbook-level laptop. And, like it or not, Macbooks do receive high grades these days whatever performance they offer.

[Necovek]

I think this relates to https://www.notebookcheck.net/Opinion-It-s-time-we-talked-about-throttling-in-reviews.234232.0.html — basically, NotebookCheck will note throttling down in their reviews (unlike most other outfits), but it does not affect the laptop score.

Thanks to their reviews and my experience with Fujitsu U904 with i7-4600u, I've stopped buying i7 CPUs in ULV laptops: they just cost extra and usually provide no performance gain for longer workloads (where I would care about it, like doing test suite runs on software I am developing or contributing to).

[Douglas Black]

Actually, we do penalize the laptop's performance score for throttling -- but perhaps not enough.

[Necovek]

Oh, cool: sorry for jumping to conclusions, Douglas. I based my opinion on the fact that comparison charts usually just give top scores for competing machines — thanks for correcting me!

Yeah, while there are use cases where a few minutes of higher performance would be useful, I imagine in most cases it is not that much of a difference, so longer lasting, cooler and cheaper i5 cpus should get even higher scores — just like XPS13 with 1080p gets much better scores than the 1800p version due to battery life, even though the latter screen is better (other than glare).