I'm back here with the Xiaomi Mi Notebook so this I have been using for the
last almost two weeks and it's the budget version cut-down version where
they did cut some definite corners compared to the mean up but pro model so
we have a metal lid on this one alloy that's the only metal you're gonna get
on this particular model now there's no flex when you push down hard on this the
hinge is good on this and we do have rubber around the outside giving it a
very quality feel to it the build is excellent and we do have yes larger
bezels much larger than my me notebook pro here because they want you to go for
if you want the slimmer bezels go for the more expensive model now this model
is far superior in many ways it has a much better GPU it has double the RAM
the configuration and much faster SSD would double the size storage so it
makes sense to go for this one with the larger battery but this particular model
here does have some pros going for the fact that you can upgrade many
components which I will show you shortly so the keyboard typing on this keyboard
is very good once I got accustomed to the slightly more crammed in style of it
because we've got the full number pad on here typing on this keyboard yet is very
little flex on that and I do like it it's not bad backlit like we get with
the pro model as well so you know there's a lot of things and reasons why
you would get that model over this one but if you want to save money then this
is one to go for so palm wrist plastic and yes it does show up fingerprints but
I feel it's going to hold up a lot better than the paint job that we get
with the middle and the alloy on the minnow but pro that is always showing on
the palm rest some fading on my unit after about 8 months of use which is not
good you're not going to get it with this so the touch pad is the same size
this is using Windows precision drivers it's a good touchpad and it's really the
same touch pad as this one - of course the fingerprint reader in that now
overall build wise it is good well put together and when we take a look at the
internals you can see that this is where things get a lot better
we've got slightly better cooling on this one the fans come on a lot less so
thermals are actually much better and I really do like the fan profiles the fan
was on this one you don't get an irritating fan that comes on now and
then just with like tasks which happens on the mean up a pro not here so
upgradable you can upgrade the wireless cards are
great for hackintosh and you can also swap out and put an even a larger a
terabyte drive there 2 terabytes if you wanted to or even for I think you can
get now for 2.5 inch drives but because they put that 2.5 inch drive in here we
do have a massive compromise with the battery capacity which is really quite
annoying so 41 watt hours instead of 60 you get on the pro and in my testing
this means battery life is terrible we're only getting three and a half
hours to four so that is not great at all now four ports we get a couple more
ports on this which is good but we don't have type C so on the right hand side we
have Gigabit LAN it's something that's missing on the pro model 2 USB 3 ports
and we also have an HDMI port on here which is only 1.4 speaker now wish it
was HDMI 2 I believe that everyone needs to start using HDMI to speak now in 2018
and of course a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack there now the output out of this
headphone jack is good clear sounds it supports a microphone and the loudness
is decent as well there then on the right hand side we have DC N so no type
C charging for this one charge times are close to about 3 hours so it's not as
fast a USB 2 port here great to have this on the right-hand side for you
right-handed people out there like myself now the SD card reader it is only
USB 2 spec so it's not the fastest here and then when you look at the weight of
both of these so this model the plastics a little bit heavier it comes out to be
two point two kilos and then we have the pro model which is still heavy is 2
kilos there so there is a 200 gram different state in weight but you get
the bit of cooling on this model less fan noise and of course you can upgrade
the RAM and all the rest of the components so now to focus on that
screen it is an IPS panel and it is 1080p met coated auntie Claire it's an
okay screen I have seen better and I have seen worse so I mean viewing angles
typical IPS that it is actually gonna be perfectly fine I mean they could have
gone with the TN panel which would be really bad and thankful that they did
not do that so when you take a look at the color reproduction
it is okay it's it's not really the grater so this is not a screen for
professional use and I'll show you the reason why because when you have a look
at the Adobe RGB percent here so I measured this with my spider 5 Pro you
get 48 percent Adobe RGB coverage which is not great so that's not a lot there
and then when it comes to your srgb that's 65% of srgb now the maximum
brightness is around about 200 Lux so it's not the brightest screen now at the
moment I have it set somewhere at about 50% which I use for indoor use in fact
that was less it's about 30% now and there it is at its 200 Lux which is its
ideal that's fine actually seemed perfectly fine for indoor use you know
gonna have any problems with it at all and it does dim down really quite dim
now that shimmering that flickering you're you're seeing right now this is
pulse width modulation but it's only been captured on camera here I can't see
that with my own eyes here in person now if you haven't seen my unboxing video I
went ahead and upgraded the RAM because my model only came with 4 gigabytes of
RAM and really that's not enough especially with us-spec so I'll CPU is
the i-5 8250 you and you can get the I 78550 you which has a higher turbo that
one goes up to 4 gigahertz and this one here maxes out at 3.6 I think it is so
you get 400 megahertz more now I do recommend if you can to put in more RAM
of course it's going to help improve the performance now you came with Windows 10
in Chinese so what I did here you don't have to do this you can do a clean
install it'll pull through the windows the key that is in the BIOS and it will
activate then just have to install Windows 10 home but I upgraded to pro
for the purposes of my review to keep the original drivers and to keep the
recovery partition so when you upgrade to pro that then allows you to install
an English an English language pack so it comes with a Samsung SSD that a set
of three 128 gigabytes you get about 98 or about a hundred or so gigabytes free
not a lot of space of course you've got the one terabyte drive now that one
terabyte drive is about a hundred and ten megabytes
reads and writes sequential and we look at these speeds of the SSD they are fine
for a set of three SSD no problems remember
if you want faster and more storage then I highly recommend going for something
like a Samsung 970 Evo that costs about a hundred euros and you can get the 256
gigabyte version and that will really give you super performance that's when
you get about 3500 reads and about 1500 write sequential so the a Cinebench r15
schools here you can see 705 CB is not bad at all when you think of this has
been about a 580 600 us laptop that their performance is good it's a decent
CPU because its quad-core it has eight threads and that's the opengl score as
well which you know is not as fast as the MX 150 you get in the Mino but pro
matte GPU is about twice as fast so this is the fire strike score here for the MX
110 now I did manage to do a little bit of overclocking so this is an overclock
score here this is the best that you about a squeeze out of this
so the Maxwell architecture does over caught pretty good
it always has for the desktops and the same goes here with the laptops so I
managed to get 135 to the core clock and then 920 on the RAM Club and this is
boosting it up probably giving us about 10% 15% extra frames per second
depending on what kind of game that you are playing and for those that are
interested here is the past mark 9 rating so 3546 here the weakness being
the GPU there and well we SSDs not as fast of course as the nvme one we get in
the mean up but pro now wouldn't you look at general performance of the
laptop it's as expected for a core i5 with the four cores eight threads it's
fast and with my 16 gigabytes of RAM of course I can do plenty of multitasking
so streaming 4k video here in Chrome not a problem
no issues whatsoever no dropped frames so your day-to-day general performance
is really good I don't need to really go through this because everything opens up
really fast even with a set of three SSD so scrolling performance in edge is
really good no issues there everything it opened up offer stocks excel really
quite quick no problems especially with me running the 16 gigabytes
of RAM so I've already shown you the Cinebench result I just wanted to
quickly play back here a high encoded bitrate file so this one see jellyfish
this says 140 megabits per second 4k 10 bit a TVC and this plays absolutely
flawlessly fine no problems Skippy here that's all gonna be quick so the
performance you get out of the core i5 here an eighth-generation chip even
though it is the lower voltage one is really very quick very fast and
everyone's gonna be pleased with it so I'm doing a little bit of editing here
this is 4k and it runs fine now this is because I do have that 16 gigabytes of
RAM so bear that in mind if you were to do this with just the 4 gigabytes that
this model originally had then it would be a completely different story here so
it is keeping up fine it is not a problem here
the time line when you're looking at the preview screen this is all in real time
I just quit you stroll through to show you that it's keeping up fine no issues
there I've noticed that when you resize some of the windows here you do get a
little bit of lag that comes into play there now a very large edits that
sometimes I do it it's up to about 25 minutes and notice that it will start to
slow down a little but overall it is pretty good and I will show you now here
with Windows sorry Intel's @xt you that I've done a little bit of a tweak here
to the power limits as well so if under vaulted point 0 9 and I've increased the
power limit to 45 watts there so that's helping and you'll see later on when I
do my encode that it's going to hold that turbo without any problems the
thermals are perfectly fine and the fan noise is also very good so that's great
so what I'm gonna do now is do my test here one minute of footage I'm gonna
export that with the YouTube 4k preset we'll see how long it takes to do that
ok so it's going to take just over a minute or so but do remember that Adobe
Premiere Pro now does feature the hardware acceleration so I think it's
using Nvidia's quick sync to really bolster up the speeds here so once that
finally finishes I'll hit pause once the hundred percent bar disappears so there
we go about one minute and 19 seconds to encode one minute of the 4k YouTube
preset which is not bad at all aside from the battery
this here at courses the other weakness the NVIDIA MX 110 which is basically
just a rebadged relabeled 920 MX so it's quite a weak GPU but at least it does
have double data rate 5 there is another version of this particularly chipset
well the 920 M that only has a double data rate 3 and it is really crippled
this means older titles you can see here this is Skyrim this is on the medium
preset we're getting around 50 frames per second so this is not a super fast
TPU but at least I mean you can get away with playable frame rates in 1080p here
if I start to pick a fight with some of the guards you see that that frame rate
is going to drop down a little so you do expect depths of under 40 frames per
second depending on what's going on if there's a lot on screen we see now 35
frames per second so it will get leggy at times here but let's test out a
lighter title League of Legends so you can see it's running this one on the
very high sitting perfectly find really good frame rate here so it's hovering
around 150 and 60 frames per second not an issue this is a very light title of
course though so a lot of hardware can play this you don't need a demanding
machine to run this game and GTA 5 here with normal settings 1080p is actually
getting quite a decent framerate but again bear in mind that I have
overclocked that GPU quite a bit so this is giving us about an extra 10 frames
per second or so more it is dipping down to mid-40s here but overall it still
looks great actually on normal and we're getting a very playable frame rate here
which is great considering the GPU that this has and for those of you out there
to still play counter-strike it's running around 60 frames per second
and this is on the high preset the very high settings so this is fine and after
three hours now are pushing it you can see these are the temperatures and max
temps on the CPU so 68 degrees this is not bad I mean as there's no thermal
throttling that has been triggered here and again I'm running an increased
Parliament here 45 was so did recommend that because it's going to handle it
just find the hardware and then we move over now to take a look at the GPU you
can see that gets up then to a maximum of 66 degrees so that's perfectly fine
again it is overclocked to sternal temps as well are actually better than the me
notebook Pro probably because it's a thicker laptop and it has a little bit
more space for cooling sore up the top here on the me notebook Pro gets close
to around 46 degrees this way here you can see is 34 36 38 so it is a little
bit cooler here now this is after about an hour of really pushing it quite hard
the system the touchpad that remains cool 26 degrees as well as the palm
rests at all times no matter what you're doing max fan noise tops out at 42
decibels which is also quite good I'll give you a sample of it now so laptop
has to downwards firing speakers they're 3 watt but this time around they're not
infinity tuned speakers they don't sound as good as their mean notebook pros but
they're okay they're fairly decent and the loudness is also good but here's a
sample of them
so here is a sample shot with the webcam that we get to 720p max and it's 30
frames per second the quality is okay it is I almost identical really to the Mino
pros I can't tell much of a difference between them so we have jewellery
microphones and there are left and right of the actual webcam there as well so
there's a good location for them I feel because you're not going to get as much
feedback from the keyboard so when you're typing on the keys you can hear
that coming through a little bit there and for those of you that like to run
Linux well it is running on here finally got screen brightness control options
that's all working the sound that's working the touchpad is working but what
is not working is the wireless card it does not like this Realtek wireless card
the good thing is that you can of course swap it out and use one of the intel
ones that should be picked up with the drivers okay so quickly recapping here
so the obvious choice if you don't have any issues with money that you can
afford to to get the $800 model go for it of course it's got so many things
that are better for you get an nvme SSD you get double the RAM you get better
the speakers fingerprint reader in here as well it is 200 grams lighter and the
list goes on but there's a lot of things that do like about this system here so
the biggest thing for me is you can upgrade a lot more components so you can
upgrade the RAM which is really good it has better cooling on here so the fans
come on waitlist most the time these fans are not on for light tasks when
with light tasks even just surfing the internet with chrome the fans on this
one come on and off especially when you're on AC they tend to come on a lot
more on the better it's not too bad so you get of course a wireless card you
can change that so if you were going to be buying one of these as a project for
say setting up half and Tosh and you can swap out that Wireless if you're not
happy with the speed of it and you're running Windows as well you could put
one of this Intel and gigabit ones in there with the Bluetooth 5 a lot faster
than what is in there you can add a 2.5 inch ad drive and they're cheaper
options as well for that so you've got a terabyte of storage since it comes with
more storage but you get the slow SSD you get the faster one with this model
here now the screen is another pro to me unless of course you're editing on this
you need to do color grading then this one slightly more accurate but
it's still not a wonderfully accurate screen we have on the minnow but pro so
both of them aren't wonderful screens for color grading and things like that
you need to get a more expensive better model of notebook for that with a better
screen but I feel for students for business and things like that the mat
coders screen is just a lot more practical less susceptible you're not
going to have problems where the reflections glare it is only 200 light
sprite and I feel that show me toned it down intentionally on purpose that this
panel will actually be able to be a lot brighter but they've really toned it
down to save on the battery life which they probably know why they've done that
of course is absolutely terrible the biggest con with this laptop here apart
from the weak GPU now a lot of people aren't gaming so the GPU might not be a
huge issue that they cut down on the GPU obviously saving money there but the
battery capacity I feel that would have been better if they ditched the 2.5 inch
driver no a lot of people won't agree with me on this and this include another
setter and MDOT two driver set a slot in there or nvme would be better I feel and
give us the 60 watt hour battery because the 60 watt hour battery in the mean up
a pro is good for up to about I can get eight nine hours sometimes out of this
one just running on integrated graphics this three and a half to four hours it's
just shocking it's so bad the battery life on this I can't believe how bad it
is and how show me pushed it out with such a small battery now I thought 31
watt hours yeah 41 watt hours is not a lot but I was hoping for at least five
hours six maybe but Tony get four hours four and a half tops and that's where
the brightness right down terrible which makes it really hard to recommend unless
of course better life for you isn't important and what is more important is
the upgrade ability that this machine has so end of the day if you've got the
cash get this model if you're on a budget you need the upgrade ability and
then this is a decent notebook as I said the keyboard is good to type on it has a
large touchpad the screen is good yeah it's got the larger bezels build quality
overall is typical Xiaomi it's a very good build it feels a lot more solid the
press the plastics on it are going to hold up a lot better than the Middle's
here in the long run because I noticed that
the paint can chip on this one and so this is the really the machine to go for
thank you so much for watching this review on xiaomi's in the notebook and I
do have to catch you back in the channel with a more upcoming reviews my latest
videos are right up here so check out those and I will see you soon bye for
now