Huawei MateBook 14s

Look out for special offers on this high-quality laptop, but it isn't worth the list price of £1,300

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PRICE £1,086 (£1,300 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk

The Huawei Mate Book 14s is so nearly the perfect laptop. For a start, it's fast: a Core i7-11370H matched with 16GB of RAM is always a powerful combination, and so it proved here with results of 164 in the PC Pro benchmarks and 5,327 in PCMark 10. This isn't merely due to the core components but also the highly effective cooling mechanism.

Huawei also squeezes more out of Intel's Iris Xe graphics chip than any of its rivals, with a whopping 112fps in Dirt: Showdown at 1080p. That's not too far behind the HP Envy 14 with its GTX 1650 Ti graphics. When you switch to more graphically intensive games - even Metro: Last Light, where the MateBook's 56fps was far behind the Envy's 99fps - the Iris Xe chip will struggle, but this shows the Huawei is a fine all-rounder.