so for the last week I've been using Xiaomi's Mi Notebook Pro it's their
latest model which is fifteen point six inches with a 1080p display eighth
generation Core i5 or i7 CPU options up to sixteen gigabytes of RAM and 256
gigabytes of storage with a spare set of three or nvme slot in there it's got a
60 watt hour battery wireless AC which is the Intel 82 65 chip very powerful
very fast do like the performance of it and it also has a touchpad you can see
down here that is rather large works really well it's a precision one with
full control over the gestures using Windows options that it does incorporate
a fingerprint reader which also works pretty much flawlessly unlocking windows
and going straight to desktop in a matter of seconds so much quicker then
typing in a password now the keyboard has 1.3 millimeters of travel very
decent keyboard I've been typing on it quite a bit using it the whole time and
I must say I really do like it it's a lot better than the 13 inch versions
keyboard which is not a bad keyboard but this really steps things up has a better
feel to it the keys aren't completely flat and they just spaced out a little
bit more making it more comfortable and I find that I have less typos on this
keyboard and can type quite a bit faster so on the bottom we have this grille
here for the intake so very similar to the 13 inch version two loudspeakers
which I'll give you a sample of later on in this review the screen hinge itself
quite firm I've noticed that it's better than 13 inch version which loosened up a
little bit after six months of use and after one year with my 12 inch version
feels a little bit more looser but this they have improved it feels a lot firmer
so they're listening to the complaints and the lid itself is really quite firm
there and it does weigh two kilos so a lot heavier than the 13 inch version so
four ports on the right hand side we have two USB 3.1 ports on them now one
of them only supports video out and charging that's the one closest to the
status led there so the status LED will light
up green once fully charged and fully charged it takes about an hour and 50
minutes it is very quick for a 60 watt hour battery and 30 minutes you can get
right up to 50 percent battery and you'll also notice an SD card reader
there now that is the card reader I have that of a complaint with that it does
end up sticking out the SD s when you insert them they don't fully it go in
and has a maximum read and write speed of only 30 megabytes per second which
isn't great now on the left-hand side we've got 2 USB 3 ports running at full
speed support external hard drives we also have a 3.5 millimeter headphone
jack that is clear the output of audio from that and supports microphones HDMI
out is a little disappointing on this because what I've found is that it does
not support 60 Hertz 4k it's only hdmi 1.4 spec and not 2.0 which i feel it
should have been we're also lacking a Thunderbolt 3 port
on this laptop you'll see the screen reclines to the maximum position like
that which isn't bad at all now the screen itself is a 1080p panel and this
panel has a coverage of 88% RGB and puts out a maximum of 360 Lux overall it's a
nice 1080p panel to put on there but of course at 15.6 inches if you look at it
really close you can see pixels here ideally I would have liked to have seen
at least a 1440p screen so the build of it in general is excellent
very well done here there's no logos on the top of the lid as you see it's a
very plain and minimalistic design that I happen to like so gaining access to
the internals isn't too difficult we have 95 Torx screws removal then there's
one hidden just under the foot in the middle here and then you just pry off
the rear case which is a little difficult to pry off at first but use a
guitar pick credit card or a pry tool so we have the original SSD in here that
they ship with this as a Samsung PM 961 now you can replace
if you want with something a little faster like a samsung 960 pro or Evo and
if you wanted to you could add a second SSD and the spare slot that it also has
note that the speed drive isn't limited to just set a three you can install a
faster m vm e drive for example like a samsung 960 Evo pro now one minor little
problem here that I have encountered is the read speeds on both of those is his
d slots so both of the ports I have confirmed our running at proper PCIe
times for speeds because I've used Samsung Magician to confirm this and
other software as well so that's not the issue I also know because the write
speeds here running at the full speeds I get from my desktop PC so when I
understood it this SSD and the other one in my tell PC I could get read rates of
3000 megabytes per second however here you can see we're getting approximately
1800 megabytes per second so we're missing out on quite a bit of speed
there on the read rates but not on the rights which is unusual so I think it
might just be down to drivers hopefully later on we're gonna get a software
update or some driver updates that will correct this problem now when it comes
to the system performance programs like Photoshop run perfectly fine as you'd
expect for an i-5 in fact performance really of an i7 which I will show you
later on how to get this one to perform like an i7 7700 HQ but right here I'm
running everything stock when it comes to the power limits in everything and
I'm editing a 4k video and you'll see that the timeline here this is all
running so that's at real time we there's no problem here this is a clip
that is approximately about 10 minutes long there my edit and really runs quite
fast now you will hear of course the fan comes on now and then kicks in and out
now decoding encoding performance sorry we'll check that out now I'll do a quick
test and code the same exact one ain't did for the me notebook air 13 so it
will be one minute with the YouTube 4k preset one minute of footage and we'll
see how long it takes with the factory the stock TDP limit and
then tweaked to 40 watts okay so that's a minute of footage they're testing code
number one and also time this here and we'll see how long it takes for it to
export with the standard TDP here which is the 15 watts of power limit so we'll
get this underway now so that's just finishing up now and there we go took
five minutes and on the me notebook here that took approximately six minutes so
only one minute faster here on the 4k encoding times however what I'm gonna do
now is set the TDP over an intel extreme tuning utility i'm gonna change this
over to 45 watts so the same exact wattage now as the i7 7700 and that also
has an under volt here that should be applied to that i can get away with and
it's still very stable with that and now we'll have a look at the difference in
doing that same encode so same length same settings so that just finished up
now at 3 minutes and 19 seconds shaving almost two minutes off that time and
more or less about as fast as my ice seven seven thousand seven out of HQ
gaming laptop so really impressive encoding times there when you tweak up
that power limit and if we have a look at the temperatures here so what a
thermals get up to the cpu did not go over 74 degrees there with all that
encoding and testing I've been doing in the last 58 minutes so right at the top
we have a webcam now when it's on you see little tiny little status LED that
will light up this audio is also being recorded by the jewelry microphones
either side of that webcam now the quality of the webcam itself you can see
is a little bit grainy a little bit pixelated it's not particularly good
however the audio quality I would rate as above-average better than most other
notebooks are you've tested out sue me the cheaper ones
it is and that's just a QuickStart guide there so when it comes to streaming in
4k so YouTube here perfectly fine the wireless can keep up and it's using the
vp9 code it you can see here with them it runs flawlessly they're multitasking
as well so a lot going on I still have that video there in the background edge
you can have various different things open so it's all very fast and changing
and swapping between all your different applications kilos there really no issue
there with that whatsoever when it comes to performance it's as quick feet as any
other core i5 eighth-generation laptop know now when it comes to wireless
performance it's excellent so is the range I mean it is really good
I am in the apartment here anywhere in the apartment I'm getting pretty much
the maximum speeds out of my three hundred megabit router here
unfortunately I can't do a file transfer test my router doesn't permit me to do
this I'll have to set that up in the future but it is really good the results
of this so it's got a two by two antenna setup and the chipset is the wireless AC
from Intel 82 65 is one of the more recent ones and it is really really good
and then having a look at benchmarks here so you can use these benchmarks to
gauge against your own laptop your notebook to see if it's faster or slower
this is Geekbench for very good multi score here multi-core score this turns
out to be approximately twice as fast as the amino Book Air 13
that's the revised 2017 model with the i-5 7200 you now the reason behind this
is because it's got two more cores okay so that version the 13 inch version is
only a dual core with four threads this is quad core with eight threads so
that's why we're seeing such good schools here the OpenCL score very
similar to the 13-inch model but it's around about 2000 to 3000 points higher
they're probably aided by the fact that maybe Cooling's just a little bit better
on this model and that is why the scores higher there now we have a look at fire
strike this is a gaming benchmark of course that's a very hello score if this
was a gaming notebook really low not good at all however you know for a
x1 50 this isn't too bad the physics school that you can see is really good
now if we do apply an overclock to the GPUs this is the boost we get here which
does increase approximately about 15 percent in this particular benchmark now
that same result of the overclock here is about 30 percent difference when you
have a look at heaven so in heaven we've got a score of 587 and then with the
overclock and also the CPU tweak I think goes up to 770 which is not bad at all
now Cinebench the stock score is 571 CB and then when you do go into Intel's
extreme tuning utility apply 40 Watts here to the power limits and the slight
under volt which i've done you can see then that score will go up here to 736
which is in fact faster than my i7 7700 HQ gaming laptop so thats cool there's
really impressive and it will hold those turbos three-point-four on all 4 cores
for as long as you want now you've seen from those gaming benchmarks like
firestrike that this is not a powerful gaming laptop that's in fact is not a
gaming laptop don't mistake that this is really only for more like work or
business use not really designed for gaming but however as you'll see if you
see my gaming review we can play a lot of top titles for triple-a titles can
run in 1080p as long as you set things to low settings now more demanding
titles that I tested out like Witcher 3 will require you to drop the resolution
down to 720p and then it was perfectly fine and playable again as long as you
keep things on low there now when it came to temperatures we got up to 82
degrees on the CPU and it did not go over 70 on the GPU and that was also
with the overclock applied so if you're not overclocking the GPU normally hovers
about 64 degrees and in the CPU about 78 degrees maximum so thermals have
improved on the outside of this model compared to the 13
version that got up to 50 degrees Celsius which I found to be way too hot
at the moment after 30 minutes of pushing the system very hard both stress
testing the CPU and GPU it's up to about 42 degrees here the highest I have seen
it get is 45 degrees after about an hour and a half of gaming so the temperatures
yes better palm rest about 28 degrees normally here it's about 25 so really
they hate I feel on this model isn't an issue because they have improved the
cooling now the laptop does get loud under full load I'll give you a sample
of that with pushing it really hard on both the GPU and CPU so we have some
harman infinity speakers on this and i must say they do sound excellent better
than some gaming laptops with little subs in them so let's have a listen to
them
so my test tear over Linux this is Manjaro build number 17 point 0.5 and of
course that has more or less the latest kind of kernels and everything's working
perfectly fine here so the drivers for things like the touchpad no issues with
that that is working screen shortcuts for brightness control using the
keyboard working audio as well completely working their Wireless of
course I'm connected up to that so no problems there the only thing I had to
do was in the bias you must add a password first before you can disable
secure boot and then boot your live Linux distros your USB pen drives in
that dear but great to see and it performs really well super fast too so
what about my final opinion now of this laptop I think it's brilliant I really
do like this I'm going to be keeping this one here I'm not gonna be keeping
the 13 inch version this is much more powerful I'm impressed with the
performance once I increase that TDP so I can boost it up to perform exactly
like the i7 7700 HQ which is great so it encodes my video very fast it is lacking
of course this particular option the 16 gigabytes of RAM I do feel that is
overpriced right now for the i7 16 gigabyte option it's really way too
expensive you have to pay an additional 300 or 400 for it so the display is
decent it's not perfect I would have preferred a 1440p screen on this and it
would have really liked them to have put Thunderbolt 3 on this and perhaps put an
Nvidia 1050 maybe they will revise this model next year or the end of this year
and add those options it's certainly doable they can do it I believe ok the
SD card reader they've got it on there which is great I can transfer my files
over but at a slow 30 megabytes per second I really wish that was faster and
I wish that the SD card would click right in so we don't risk damaging or
breaking it if you lift it in there putting in a backpack not that you would
really the other thing is better life could be a little bit better the heat as
well it does get a little bit warm 45 degrees I don't feel as a deal-breaker a
lot of other laptops will also get up to that temperature that as thin as this
one right here and the other probably very minor is the webcam
could be a little bit better and of course the HDMI it's only HDMI 1.4 spec
it should be HDMI 2.0 to output a full 60 Hertz
4k so that is really it apart from that this is a fantastic notebook here great
to see that we can boost the performance with my little tweak if you haven't seen
the video for that please check it out and also check out my extended gaming
review of this notebook here you'll see that it probably will surprise you that
you can get away we're playing some popular titles and decent frame rates
just lowering the setting seems a little there thank you so much for watching
this review do hope to see you back in the channel with more up-and-coming
reviews on tech out of China bye for now