Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025 Intel Core Ultra 7 255H review | Infinium-tech

Introduction

This is Honor’s third MagicBook Art 14 laptop in about a year – the first featured an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, and the second one had Snapdragon X Elite and runs Windows 11 on ARM. This one makes a return to Intel silicon with the Core Ultra 7 255H, a processor that’s a generational improvement in technology.

If you’re unfamiliar with the MagicBook Art 14, it’s Honor’s thin-and-light 1.03kg laptop with a 14.6-inch OLED display and 60Wh battery. And, more importantly, an attractive price – lower than the likes of the Apple MacBook Air, the Dell XPS 13 and 14, and the Asus Zenbook 14.

The MagicBook Art 14 2025 is available in Mocha Brown and Emerald Green (our review unit). Like its predecessor, the 2025 model comes in a single configuration in overseas markets with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. The laptop ships a USB-C cable and a 65W charger.

Unboxing the laptop

You can buy the MagicBook Art 14 from Honor’s own website. Normally, it’s £1,500/€1,500/CNY 8,500, but Honor often discounts the machine down to around £1,100/€1,100 through various promos.

Design and build quality, ports

Honor hasn’t changed the design of the laptop since the first model, and that’s no bad thing. It’s already impressively light at just 1.03kg. To put that into context, the MacBook Air 13 is 1.24kg.

Honor managed to achieve such a weight with a mixture of lightweight materials. The chassis is made out of magnesium alloy. The keyboard is a titanium alloy. The two fans are made of aluminum. The antenna and vapor chamber cooling system are integrated.

The laptop has a slightly textured surface that’s pleasant to touch. It’s less slippery than the silver Snapdragon model we last handled, not that we expect people will carry it in their hands all that much. But that finish smudged up easily; this one doesn’t.

Because Honor decided to offload the camera to its own magnetic module on the side of the laptop, the display enjoys symmetrical bezels on three sides – there’s a slightly thicker bezel on the bottom. The display is a 14.6-inch OLED touchscreen with an aspect ratio of 3:2 – an Honor and Huawei favorite. More on the panel in a bit!

Back to the magnetic camera module. The tuck-away camera module is undoubtedly innovative. It sits flush inside the left corner of the laptop and can be popped in or out with a finger press. The module attaches very securely in the laptop body, and it can be tucked in whichever way you want – even with the pins outward (though you shouldn’t do that).

It’s a clever way to deal with the camera on a laptop but it does push the two ports on the left side of the MagicBook Art 14 a bit further down. It’s an unbalanced look that may irk some.

The tuck-away camera module is undoubtedly innovative. It sits flush inside the left corner of the laptop and can be popped in or out by a finger press. The module attaches very securely in the laptop body, and it can be tucked in whichever way you want – even with the pins outward (though you shouldn’t do that).

The only two USB-C ports on the laptop are just below the magnetic camera. One is a 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps), the other is a Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbps), marked by a tiny lightning. This is the port you should use to connect more powerful peripherals, like a 120Hz monitor, for example.

The magnetic camera

There’s one USB-A 3.2 (10Gbps) port on the right side, along with an HDMI 2.1 (4K@60Hz), and a 3.5mm headset and microphone jack.

You get a fingerprint scanner with Windows Hello support inside the power button and it works without issues. It supports fingerprint caching so a single press will power on the machine and automatically log you into Windows once it boots.

Like its predecessor, the 2025 model has a six-speaker spatial audio setup and three microphones, and they’re doing an excellent job. There’s enough volume to fill a room, and there are even some hints of bass underneath, making the sound full.

Display, keyboard, speakers, camera

The display is unchanged on the 2025 model. It’s a 14.6-inch, 3120x2080px 10-bit OLED with a 3:2 aspect ratio, a 120Hz maximum refresh rate. The panel covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut and has a DeltaE (ΔE) rating of below 0.5 out of the box. The panel does 4,320Mh PWM flicker-free dimming and even got TUV Rheinland to certify for low blue light emissions.

Display settings

The panel is a 10-point touchscreen, which comes in handy when scrolling long pages or viewing photos, but Windows is still rather non-touch-friendly as an OS and doesn’t invite you to use your fingers all that much.

The 2025 model has a deeper anti-reflective coating than the Snapdragon unit. It’s now at the level of Huawei’s MateBook X Pro. However, the anti-reflective layer is seemingly laminated to the display, and it’s not perfectly flat – there are wavy lines visible under strong light. It by no means disrupts normal viewing, but will surely bug the more nitpicky user. Perhaps it’s a one-off issue with our unit.

Honor claims a peak brightness of 1,600 nits when viewing HDR content. We measured nearly identical numbers to the Snapdragon model – a peak HDR brightness of 780 nits, and a very uniform brightness of around 540 nits. This is a subjectively excellent result, though we expected a higher HDR output.

The panel can be set to either 60Hz or 120Hz, just like its predecessor. There’s no Auto behavior; it’s one or the other.

We’ve hailed Huawei and Honor laptop keyboards for years now, and the latest deserves the same praise. The layout is excellent and you’ll be typing away at speed in no time. The titanium keys have a solid yet softer feel under your fingers. It’s something you need to try to appreciate, but it’s pretty nice!

The magnetic 1080p camera doesn’t feature IR sensors for Windows Hello. Quality-wise, it’s a good enough webcam, but nothing special. The image quality is okay, but there’s no HDR, for instance.

The field of view of the webcam is very wide, and you can set it to track your face across the frame. You can also play around with virtual backgrounds.

Camera samples

Honor’s excellent PC Manager suite is here to let you tinker with settings, download and update drivers, and control the laptop’s performance tuning. It’s an excellent software suite for keeping things shipshape on the machine.

Honor PC Manager

Intel Core Ultra 7 255H, performance and battery life

The Intel Core Ultra 7 255H is a solid step up from the 155H. The new processor uses TSMC’s 3nm N3B node, a significant jump up from Intel’s 7nm on the older processor, and an improvement, on paper, even on the 4nm process in the Snapdragon X Elite.

The Core Ultra 7 255’s processor has 16 physical cores (6 performance, 8 efficiency, 2 low-power efficiency), and 16 threads. The performance cores have a peak clock of 5.1GHz and a base clock speed of 2.0GHz. The CPU has a 24MB cache.

For graphics, the Core Ultra 7 255H relies on the Intel Arc 140T GPU with a clock speed of 2.25GHz and 8 Xe cores, up to 74 TOPS (tera operations per second), and it supports Ray Tracing, DirectX 12.2, OpenGL 4.6, and OpenCL 3.0.

Finally, there’s the Intel AI Boost NPU that’s capable of delivering 13 TOPS.

We ran our usual benchmarks on the Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025 and found the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H to be an excellent performer. It scored nearly identically to the Snapdragon X Elite in Geekbench 6’s single and multi-core, but is some 23% in front of the ARM chip in Passmark CPU. The new chip is impressively 20% faster in single-core and 23% faster in multi-core than its predecessor, the Core Ultra 7 155H. Heck, it even beat the Ryzen AI 9 365 inside the Minisforum X1 mini-PC.

The Core Ultra 7 255H is a small step up from the Snapdragon X Elite in terms of graphics performance as well.

Benchmark	Test	Result
Geekbench 6 CPU	Single Core	2702
	Multi Core	14357
Geekbench 6 GPU	OpenCL	36740
Geekbench AI (CPU/NPU)	Single Precision	4587/4551
	Half Precision	4719/9582
	Quantized	10598/14544
Passmark	CPU	31863.9
	2D Graphics	874.1
	3D Graphics	5991.3
	Memory	3205.6
	Disk Mark	49209.4
	Overall	7471.7
Cinebench 2024	Single Core	120
	Multi Core	797

You can do a bit of gaming on the Intel Arc 140T too. Think of it as a direct rival to the likes of the NVIDIA RTX 3050, AMD’s RX 6600, and the Radeon 880M, even beating them. We got around 36fps in Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p, low), just under 40fps in F1 25 (1080p, high), around 36fps in Witcher 3 (1080p, high), around 39fps in GTA V (1080p, high), and locked-on 60fps in Civilization VI and Age of Empires II Definitive Edition at 1080p, maxed out.

Where the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H proved underwhelming is in sustained performance. We ran a 1-hour stress test, and the MagicBook Art 14 2025 managed to stay above 2GHz for just 20 minutes. The processor kicks off at around 2.9GHz (around 42W) but then quickly drops down to 2.4GHz (around 30W). After about ten minutes, it went further down to 2GHz (around 25W), then consistently stayed below 2GHz. First at 1.6GHz, then 1.5GHz, then 1.4GHz (around 21W). The processor jumped between 1.3GHz and 1.6GHz for the remainder of the test. We never got near the theoretical 5.1GHz peak clock speed.

The fans were on full blast, but that wasn’t at all audible in a busy office environment. This may be where the issue lies – that Honor simply chose to tune this laptop to be quiet at the expense of performance.

At least it didn’t get very hot either. Keeping below 50°C just under the SoC with a cool palm rest.

The thermals under load

The built-in 1TB SSD is a YMTC PC411-1024GB-B and a solid performer with excellent read/write speeds.

We ran a few battery life tests on the MagicBook Art 14 2025, all at 60Hz. The laptop lasted 6:40 hours in a browsing loop at 400 nits, and 8:10 hours when browsing at 200 nits. It managed 7:00 hours of constant YouTube streaming at 400 nits and 80dB. These are good numbers, but the ARM-based Snapdragon model is better in all tests – it lasted 8 hours and 11:30 hours in the browsing test (400/200 nits), and 10 hours in the YouTube test.

Conclusion

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025 is £1,500/€1,500 at the time of this article, but has seen a few discounts in the past few weeks. That’s not a bad price, considering it’s configured with 32GB of RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and Intel’s Core Ultra 7 255H processor.

Acer’s Swift Edge 14 with an OLED display and the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V is €200 more with 32GB/1TB, the Dell XPS 14 is €500 more with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM, the 13-inch MacBook Air is a whopping €2,200 with a matching 32GB/1TB configuration, and only the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED is competitive with the MagicBook Art 14. At the time of this article, a Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405 can be found for €1,200 with the same RAM, SSD size, and processor. But that’s a discounted price, down from €1,600, which is still €200 more than Honor’s machine.

And it’s not exactly fair to compare these laptops on an apples-to-apples scale, because the Honor MagicBook Art 14 2025 has a brighter OLED than these 400-nit rivals, and it’s also larger at 14.6 inches. The Art 14 is also lighter than any of the laptops we mentioned. It truly is in a league of its own.

There’s not much to complain about with this new release. The move back to Intel has granted users a Thunderbolt port. The screen is a bit less reflective and is otherwise still quite excellent.

The battery life numbers aren’t impressive, however, and we would’ve liked a bit more HDR brightness. And it feels like Honor can tune the laptop to take better advantage of the excellent processor on tap. But for a thin-and-light laptop that will do office tasks, the MagicBook Art 14 2025 is more than great enough!

Pros

• Excellent 32GB/1TB configuration for the money
• The Intel Core Ultra 7 255H is a solid processor
• 1.03kg with a nearly 15-inch OLED still feels crazy
• Color-accurate OLED display with 500 nits of SDR and 700 nits of HDR brightness
• Good port selection – USB-C, USB-A, Thunderbolt 4, HDMI
• Innovative magnetic camera design.

Cons

• The move to a 3nm isn’t reflected in the battery life numbers
• Unimpressive sustained performance, processor’s potential left unutilized
• HDR brightness lower than advertised
• Camera slot pushes USB-C ports to the middle of the laptop.
• No USB-C on the right, no charging on the right
• Limited availability.