Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon review | Infinium-tech

If you’re looking for a thin-and-light Windows laptop with a premium build, powerful CPU and an OLED display, you must definitely pay attention to Honor’s lineup. The company’s MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon is a notch above the established models in its class – the Dell XPS 13, the Asus Zenbook 14, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, and of course, the Apple MacBook Air.

We’ll tell you what makes the MagicBook Art better but it’s important to start off with the price – at €1,699, it’s cheaper than almost all of those rivals, and Honor is running a killer promo that gets you the 1TB/32GB laptop with a gift haul that includes the Honor Pad 9 tablet, and the Honor Earbuds X6 for €200 off at €1,499. Only the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X can match that price (it’s €1,499 at the time of this article on Amazon).

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon comes in a single configuration with 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. You can get it only in the silky smooth Starry Grey color – Honor is seemingly keeping the textured Emerald Green we enjoyed on the Intel-powered version of this laptop off European shores. The laptop ships with a 65W charger and USB-C cable.

A word on the Intel-powered MagicBook Art 14. It seems Honor isn’t planning on selling it outside of China, pushing the ARM-powered laptop internationally instead. But even though you won’t have to choose between the two it makes sense to compare them as they are so closely related.

Design and build quality

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon is impressively made. The machine weighs approximately 1.02kg, which is quite the feat given the laptop’s nearly 15-inch display. The laptop is also just 1 cm thick (not counting the rubber feet) at its thinnest point – 1.15cm at its thickest.

Honor managed to achieve such an impressive 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 result is a 14.6-inch laptop that weighs 490g (33%) less than the 15.3-inch MacBook Air, 160g (14%) less than the Dell XPS 13, 260g (21%) less than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X, and 370g (27%) less than the high-end Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. It is truly impressive. Very few devices weigh less and manage to stay with the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon specs-wise – the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 and the new Asus A14.

But it’s not all about the weight. The display has an even 2.2mm bezel all around. Honor managed it by displacing the camera to its own magnetic 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 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).

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.

Tuck-away magnetic camera

Honor applied a vine leaf concept to the design. There’s a subtle curve to the frame, thickening at the point of connection to the magnetic camera.

The Starry Sky paint job is very smooth. Honor calls the surface velvet-like and skin-friendly. The coating is UV cured to achieve smoothness and then has been micro-arc oxidized. We can attest that the finish feels very pleasant to touch but have somehow managed to scuff it in a few places. This could be negligence on our part or a possible weakness of the finish, we cannot be perfectly certain.

Display, keyboard, speakers, camera

The MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon ships with a 14.6-inch OLED panel with a squarer-than-average 3:2 aspect, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and a promised brightness of 700 nits.

The FullView 10-bit display is 3120x2080px and has 10-point touch. The panel covers 100% of the DCI-P3 gamut, as well as a DeltaE (ΔE) rating of below 0.5. The panel does 4320Mh PWM flicker-free dimming and even got TUV Rheinland to certify for low blue light emissions.

The display is glossy but does have an anti-reflective coating applied. It does alleviate some of the reflections but this is still a relatively reflective panel. The screen surface is also weirdly wavy – looking at reflections on the display at an angle produces wavy lines. The Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 has a straighter display surface, for instance. it’s not a problem, just something we noticed.

The panel is rated at 700 nits in HDR mode. We measured a consistent above-540 nits overall with nearly 600 nits in the bottom part of the screen in SDR mode. When viewing HDR content, the screen ramped up to around 750 nits. The SDR results are around 50-60 nits better than what we got with the Intel MagicBook Art 14, while the HDR brightness was equal.

We’ve always commended Huawei and Honor for shipping their machines with proprietary display color support and the MagicBook Art 14 follows that trend. Right-click on the desktop and go into Display Manager, where you can choose what color spectrum the laptop adheres to – sRGB, P3, or native. This is an excellent feature that most other PCs lack and is especially useful for content creators. This is also where you can adjust the color tone of the screen, put it in eBook mode, and finetune the color.

These screen modes work only when you’ve turned the global Windows HDR setting off. Once you turn HDR on, the screen reverts to its Native setting, meaning vivid colors, deep blacks, and the maximum possible contrast. The issue with this is that saturation is over the top when the screen is in Native mode. Photos, whether in the browser or through the Windows Photos app are overly saturated to the point that they don’t look good. Putting the screen in sRGB mode fixes the issue.

Honor and Huawei keyboards have long been excellent for typing but the MagicBook Art 14 is a step above. We can’t really say we can appreciate the titanium build but the keys feel slightly softer and more dampened than on the MateBook X Pro 2024.

The keys have the standard 1.5mm key travel and are very well-spaced. Avid gamers will scoff at the smaller Up and Down arrow keys, but that’s the only complaint that we could think of.

The trackpad on the Honor MagicBook Art 14 is enormous and very high quality. The smooth glass surface is excellent for gliding your fingers and being a solid-state unit, you can click anywhere you like with the same precise feel. You can adjust the tracking sensitivity and the vibration strength to your liking.

The trackpad supports up to 5 fingers, though Windows currently tops out at 4. There are several proprietary gestures through Honor’s pre-installed software like the knock to screenshot. They all get short demo videos and you can decide whether to enable them or not.

This laptop 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.

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 to the login screen.

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.

Doing calls through the MagicBook Art 14 is a great experience. Callers reported that they heard us fine through the laptop’s trio of mics and appreciated the active noise cancellation.

One area where the ARM-powered version is inferior to the Intel one is ports. You get the same physical ports – two USB-C on the left, one USB-A, an HDMI, and a 3.5mm on the right. On the Intel machine, one of the USB-Cs on the left side is a Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 unit with 40 Gbps of throughput. On the Snapdragon model, both USB-C ports are USB 3.2 Gen 2 with 10 Gbps of bandwidth. The USB-A is 3.2 Gen1 with 5 Gbps.

Ports on either side

Technically, you can run into limitations if you want to charge the machine and connect to a monitor using the same USB-C cable. On the upside, the HDMI is 2.1 with 4K@60Hz support, giving you an alternate monitor connection option. However, the lack of true USB 4 connectivity makes a single-cable solution impossible.

Snapdragon X Elite processor and battery life

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon ships with an ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite SoC. The processor has 42MB of cache, and 12 Oryon cores with a 3.4GHz peak clock in multi-core more and a peak single-core speed of 4.0GHz. The Adreno GPU is rated for 46 TFLOPS (floating point operations per second), while the Hexagon NPU has 45 TOPS (tera operations per second). In comparison, Intel’s latest Core Ultra 7 258V’s NPU brings 47 TOPS, while AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has up to 50 TOPS.

The Snapdragon X Elite is the X1E-80-100 variation of the chip, with the 4.0GHz peak clock speed. There are two more powerful versions of the X Elite – the same number of physical cores, but higher clock speed. The X1E-84-100 and X1E-00-1DE with a multi-core peak clock speed of 3.8GHz, and a single-core peak clock speed of 4.2GHz and 4.3GHz, respectively. We don’t expect the up to 300MHz to deliver a huge benefit. While we’re on the topic – there are two other Snapdragon X chips – the X Plus with 8 or 10 Oryon cores, and the X with 8.

The Snapdragon chip supports the latest Wi-Fi 7, as well as Bluetooth 5.4.

Looking at benchmarks, the Snapdragon X Elite is a fine performer. Importantly, it scores around 30% better than the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in single-core and multi-core tests and around 20% better in graphics tests. Essentially, you’re giving nothing away, performance-wise, by going with the Snapdragon MagicBook Art 14 rather than the Intel one (if, for the sake of argument, you had a choice of buying either).

Benchmark	Test	Result
Geekbench 6	Single-Core	2824
Geekbench 6	Multi-core	14493
Geekbench 6 GPU	Vulkan	28340
Geekbench AI CPU	Single-precision	1106
Geekbench AI CPU	Half-precision	1728
Geekbench AI CPU	Quantized	3474
Geekbench AI NPU	Quantized	27051
Cinebench 2024	Single-Core	121
Cinebench 2024	Multi-core	593

The SoC posted solid numbers in Cinebench 2024’s single and multi-core tests as well. The built-in Micron SSD isn’t the fastest. It’s also showing PCIe 3.0 speeds, not current-gen PCIe 4.0 ones that are double the speed.

Cinebench 2024, Disk Speed

We ran our usual 1-hour stress test on the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon and the Snapdragon X Elite showed good sustained performance under load. The chip was briefly up to its peak multi-core speed of 3.4GHz and, within a few seconds, throttled down to 2.5GHz. After the fans ramped up, the processor settled at around 2.95GHz-2.97GHz and stayed there for the remainder of the test. The fans were going full blast for the entirety of the test, but we’d call them inaudible beyond 1 meter in a normal office environment.

Thermals

In comparison, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H we tested in the MagicBook Art 14 managed to sustain around 2.1GHz. It was also slightly warmer to the touch – the palm rest area was 29.4° C compared to the 26° C of the Snapdragon model. Another key point is real-world performance – the Intel machine can’t reach its full potential on battery, while the Snapdragon one can.

If we compare the two SoCs on efficiency, per Cinebench 2024’s Multi Power Efficiency test, the Snapdragon X Elite scores around 22 Points Per Watt, while the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H reaches 14 PPW.

A big benefit of the Snapdragon chip is the instantaneous operation of this machine – open the lid, and the screen has lit up before you’ve even seen it fully. It’s great!

Because this is an ARM-based laptop, you’d need to think about your apps. Windows on ARM has come a long way, and you’d be surprised how many apps now have an ARM-ready version. The popular apps are mostly covered – Microsoft’s Office suite, LibreOffice, 7-zip, Viber, Signal, Slack, WhatsApp, Dropbox, GIMP, Adobe’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, Luminar Neo, VLC, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Avast, TeamViewer, you name it. And if your specific app isn’t yet fully ARM-ready, chances are it’s in development.

What about emulating X86 apps? Here’s where Prism comes in – it’s Windows 11’s emulation layer that translates X86 apps to run on the Snapdragon X Elite. It’s seamless – you just install an app like you would on an Intel or AMD-powered computer, and it works. There’s code translation going on in the background, but you wouldn’t even notice it most of the time. It’s in more demanding apps that the emulation can cause a launch delay or a performance hiccup, but we rarely noticed those.

We even installed Steam with a few games and they worked. However, performance was noticeably worse than on the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. Age of Empires II Definitive Edition is a relatively easy game to run on modern hardware but it hovered below 60fps in our test. It held a steady 100fps on the Intel-powered Art. On the upside, we never got an app or game that simply refused to work.

You have integrated Copilot with a dedicated key on the keyboard. Copilot works on-device to give personalized answers and is deeply integrated with Microsoft apps such as Outlook and Microsoft 365.

It can generate formulas, create charts and graphs, summarize key points in emails, and transcribe meetings in real time. Live Caption can generate subtitles to videos in 44 languages in real time too.

Honor Connect brings screen-sharing and cross-OS drag-and-drop of app windows between the laptop and an Honor Android tablet. With Honor Share, you can share files, images, and videos between Honor devices cable-free.

In our Intel-based Honor MagicBook Art 14 review, we hypothesized that the model with the Snapdragon X Elite would be able to squeeze more battery life out of the 60Wh battery, and we were correct. The MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon lasted 8:00 hours in our browsing loop test (at 400 nits) and 10:00 hours in our YouTube video loop test (400 nits, 80dB). That’s one hour more in the browsing test and nearly three and a half hours more in the YouTube test than the Intel model. Moving to ARM truly brings all the benefits and very few compromises, even at this early stage.

Charging the laptop from 0% to full took around an hour and a half, and it got to 43% in the first 30 minutes.

Conclusion

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon is an outstanding laptop. It masterfully mixes premium specs with great manufacturing quality to create a machine with a true edge over its competition.

At the time of this article, the 32GB/1TB MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon retails for €1,499 with an Honor Pad 9 and Honor Earbuds X6 thrown in for free. At that price, it’s notably cheaper than the Dell XPS 13 MacBook Air and Huawei’s MateBook X Pro 2024. We’d argue it also packs better specs – the 14.6-inch display that’s also a match in terms of tech – 120Hz and 700 nits of brightness – is about as elite as you can get these days. And aside from the Huawei, the MagicBook Art 14 is lighter at just 1.02kg.

There are two head-on rivals the Honor needs to worry about – Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7X and Asus’ A14 UX3407. Both have 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, OLED displays, and the Snapdragon X Elite SoC. Both laptops are also exactly the same price – €1,499. However, you get 70Wh batteries on both and better ports – the Yoga Slim 7X packs three USB4 Gen 3s, while the Asus A14 has two. The Yoga is a bit heavier (though not heavy), while the Asus is even lighter at just under 1 kilo.

Lenovo and Asus have a better availability in international markets and more recognizable brand names with non-tech folk. That could play a factor despite Honor’s killer tablet-and-buds bundle. Then there’s Honor’s own retail footprint – at the time of this article, you can get this machine in China, France, Germany, and Italy.

Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon is a tremendous laptop that doesn’t compromise. It’s a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ type of solution. It’s better than the Intel-powered unit in every way that matters – better performance and longer battery life, the same excellent display, body, and price. Being an ARM-based laptop does mean there are some hypothetical issues along the way, but those concern non-mainstream users – they will hardly notice any downside.

Pros

• ARM model is better than the Intel one in every conceivable way
• Snapdragon X Elite is quieter, smoother, and prolongs battery life
• Strikes an excellent balance of size and weight
• We like the silky finish
• Color-accurate OLED display with 500 nits of SDR and 700 nits of HDR brightness
• Good port selection – USB-C, USB-A, HDMI
• Innovative magnetic camera design

Cons

• No USB4/Thunderbolt 4 is a real drawback
• Camera slot pushes USB-C ports to the middle of the laptop
• SSD not quite up to PCIe 4.0 standards
• Limited availability

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