Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro Review

**The Ultimate Gaming Laptop Review: A Powerhouse in Disguise**

As we delve into the world of gaming laptops, it's easy to overlook some hidden gems that pack a punch when it comes to performance and features. The latest addition to our test lineup is a powerhouse of a laptop that deserves attention from gamers and enthusiasts alike. In this review, we'll take a closer look at this remarkable device and see what makes it stand out from the crowd.

**Thermal Performance: A Significant Improvement**

One of the most impressive aspects of this laptop is its thermal performance. We put it through our usual stress tests, pushing both the CPU and GPU to their limits, and were pleased to find that temperatures remained under control. The highest temperature we recorded was 42 degrees Celsius after about an hour and a half of gaming, which is a significant improvement over the 13-inch version that reached scorching temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius. With improved cooling, this laptop can handle demanding games without breaking a sweat.

**Performance: Boosting Power**

When it comes to performance, this laptop truly shines. With its TDP boosted from 45W to 60W, we saw significant improvements in frame rates and overall responsiveness. The GPU, in particular, was able to keep up with even the most demanding titles, providing smooth gameplay at high settings. We tested popular games like Witcher 3 and found that lowering the resolution to 720p allowed for silky-smooth performance, making it a great option for gamers who want to enjoy their favorite titles without sacrificing too much graphics quality.

**Display: A Decent but Limited Option**

The display on this laptop is decent but not outstanding. With a resolution of 1920 x 1080, it's not the highest on the market, and we would have preferred a 1440p screen for a more immersive gaming experience. However, the colors are vibrant, and the display is responsive to touch, making it perfect for everyday use.

**Connectivity: A Missed Opportunity**

We were disappointed to find that this laptop only has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, which limits its connectivity options. The lack of an HDMI port that supports 4K at 60Hz is also a missed opportunity. While the SD card reader is a welcome feature, we wish it was faster and more convenient.

**Other Features: A Great Set of Extras**

This laptop comes with a range of features that make it stand out from the competition. The Harman Infinity speakers are excellent and provide clear, balanced sound that's perfect for watching videos or streaming music. The keyboard is also responsive and comfortable to type on, making it ideal for productivity tasks.

**Final Verdict: A Brilliant Gaming Laptop**

In our opinion, this laptop is a brilliant gaming device that checks all the right boxes. With its improved thermal performance, boosted power, and excellent display, it's a great option for gamers who want a powerful machine without sacrificing too much graphics quality. While there are some minor drawbacks, such as the limited connectivity options and the high price of 16GB of RAM, these can be easily overlooked in favor of this laptop's many strengths.

**Additional Tips and Tricks**

If you're looking to get the most out of your gaming experience with this laptop, we recommend lowering the resolution to 720p for smoother gameplay. You can also experiment with different GPU settings to find the perfect balance between performance and graphics quality. With a little creativity and tweaking, this laptop is capable of delivering some impressive frame rates and smooth gameplay.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, this laptop is an excellent choice for gamers and enthusiasts who want a powerful machine without sacrificing too much graphics quality. With its improved thermal performance, boosted power, and great display, it's a top contender in the gaming laptop market. While there are some minor drawbacks to consider, these can be easily overlooked in favor of this laptop's many strengths. If you're looking for a great gaming laptop that won't break the bank, look no further than this incredible device.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso for the last week I've been usingXiaomi's Mi Notebook Pro it's theirlatest model which is fifteen point sixinches with a 1080p display eighthgeneration Core i5 or i7 CPU options upto sixteen gigabytes of RAM and 256gigabytes of storage with a spare set ofthree or nvme slot in there it's got a60 watt hour battery wireless AC whichis the Intel 82 65 chip very powerfulvery fast do like the performance of itand it also has a touchpad you can seedown here that is rather large worksreally well it's a precision one withfull control over the gestures usingWindows options that it does incorporatea fingerprint reader which also workspretty much flawlessly unlocking windowsand going straight to desktop in amatter of seconds so much quicker thentyping in a password now the keyboardhas 1.3 millimeters of travel verydecent keyboard I've been typing on itquite a bit using it the whole time andI must say I really do like it it's alot better than the 13 inch versionskeyboard which is not a bad keyboard butthis really steps things up has a betterfeel to it the keys aren't completelyflat and they just spaced out a littlebit more making it more comfortable andI find that I have less typos on thiskeyboard and can type quite a bit fasterso on the bottom we have this grillehere for the intake so very similar tothe 13 inch version two loudspeakerswhich I'll give you a sample of later onin this review the screen hinge itselfquite firm I've noticed that it's betterthan 13 inch version which loosened up alittle bit after six months of use andafter one year with my 12 inch versionfeels a little bit more looser but thisthey have improved it feels a lot firmerso they're listening to the complaintsand the lid itself is really quite firmthere and it does weigh two kilos so alot heavier than the 13 inch version sofour ports on the right hand side wehave two USB 3.1 ports on them now oneof them only supports video out andcharging that's the one closest to thestatusled there so the status LED will lightup green once fully charged and fullycharged it takes about an hour and 50minutes it is very quick for a 60 watthour battery and 30 minutes you can getright up to 50 percent battery andyou'll also notice an SD card readerthere now that is the card reader I havethat of a complaint with that it doesend up sticking out the SD s when youinsert them they don't fully it go inand has a maximum read and write speedof only 30 megabytes per second whichisn't great now on the left-hand sidewe've got 2 USB 3 ports running at fullspeed support external hard drives wealso have a 3.5 millimeter headphonejack that is clear the output of audiofrom that and supports microphones HDMIout is a little disappointing on thisbecause what I've found is that it doesnot support 60 Hertz 4k it's only hdmi1.4 spec and not 2.0 which i feel itshould have beenwe're also lacking a Thunderbolt 3 porton this laptop you'll see the screenreclines to the maximum position likethat which isn't bad at all now thescreen itself is a 1080p panel and thispanel has a coverage of 88% RGB and putsout a maximum of 360 Lux overall it's anice 1080p panel to put on there but ofcourse at 15.6 inches if you look at itreally close you can see pixels hereideally I would have liked to have seenat least a 1440p screen so the build ofit in general is excellentvery well done here there's no logos onthe top of the lid as you see it's avery plain and minimalistic design thatI happen to like so gaining access tothe internals isn't too difficult wehave 95 Torx screws removal then there'sone hidden just under the foot in themiddle here and then you just pry offthe rear case which is a littledifficult to pry off at first but use aguitar pick credit card or a pry tool sowe have the original SSD in here thatthey ship with this as a Samsung PM 961now you can replaceif you want with something a littlefaster like a samsung 960 pro or Evo andif you wanted to you could add a secondSSD and the spare slot that it also hasnote that the speed drive isn't limitedto just set a three you can install afaster m vm e drive for example like asamsung 960 Evo pro now one minor littleproblem here that I have encountered isthe read speeds on both of those is hisd slots so both of the ports I haveconfirmed our running at proper PCIetimes for speeds because I've usedSamsung Magician to confirm this andother software as well so that's not theissue I also know because the writespeeds here running at the full speeds Iget from my desktop PC so when Iunderstood it this SSD and the other onein my tell PC I could get read rates of3000 megabytes per second however hereyou can see we're getting approximately1800 megabytes per second so we'remissing out on quite a bit of speedthere on the read rates but not on therights which is unusual so I think itmight just be down to drivers hopefullylater on we're gonna get a softwareupdate or some driver updates that willcorrect this problem now when it comesto the system performance programs likePhotoshop run perfectly fine as you'dexpect for an i-5 in fact performancereally of an i7 which I will show youlater on how to get this one to performlike an i7 7700 HQ but right here I'mrunning everything stock when it comesto the power limits in everything andI'm editing a 4k video and you'll seethat the timeline here this is allrunning so that's at real time wethere's no problem here this is a clipthat is approximately about 10 minuteslong there my edit and really runs quitefast now you will hear of course the fancomes on now and then kicks in and outnow decoding encoding performance sorrywe'll check that out now I'll do a quicktest and code the same exact one ain'tdid for the me notebook air 13 so itwill be one minute with the YouTube 4kpreset one minute of footage and we'llsee how long it takeswith the factory the stock TDP limit andthen tweaked to 40 watts okay so that'sa minute of footage they're testing codenumber one and also time this here andwe'll see how long it takes for it toexport with the standard TDP here whichis the 15 watts of power limit so we'llget this underway now so that's justfinishing up now and there we go tookfive minutes and on the me notebook herethat took approximately six minutes soonly one minute faster here on the 4kencoding times however what I'm gonna donow is set the TDP over an intel extremetuning utility i'm gonna change thisover to 45 watts so the same exactwattage now as the i7 7700 and that alsohas an under volt here that should beapplied to that i can get away with andit's still very stable with that and nowwe'll have a look at the difference indoing that same encode so same lengthsame settings so that just finished upnow at 3 minutes and 19 seconds shavingalmost two minutes off that time andmore or less about as fast as my iceseven seven thousand seven out of HQgaming laptop so really impressiveencoding times there when you tweak upthat power limit and if we have a lookat the temperatures here so what athermals get up to the cpu did not goover 74 degrees there with all thatencoding and testing I've been doing inthe last 58 minutes so right at the topwe have a webcam now when it's on yousee little tiny little status LED thatwill light up this audio is also beingrecorded by the jewelry microphoneseither side of that webcam now thequality of the webcam itself you can seeis a little bit grainy a little bitpixelated it's not particularly goodhowever the audio quality I would rateas above-average better than most othernotebooks are you've tested out sue methe cheaper onesit is and that's just a QuickStart guidethere so when it comes to streaming in4k so YouTube here perfectly fine thewireless can keep up and it's using thevp9 code it you can see here with themit runs flawlessly they're multitaskingas well so a lot going on I still havethat video there in the background edgeyou can have various different thingsopen so it's all very fast and changingand swapping between all your differentapplications kilos there really no issuethere with that whatsoever when it comesto performance it's as quick feet as anyother core i5 eighth-generation laptopknow now when it comes to wirelessperformance it's excellentso is the range I mean it is really goodI am in the apartment here anywhere inthe apartment I'm getting pretty muchthe maximum speeds out of my threehundred megabit router hereunfortunately I can't do a file transfertest my router doesn't permit me to dothis I'll have to set that up in thefuture but it is really good the resultsof this so it's got a two by two antennasetup and the chipset is the wireless ACfrom Intel 82 65 is one of the morerecent ones and it is really really goodand then having a look at benchmarkshere so you can use these benchmarks togauge against your own laptop yournotebook to see if it's faster or slowerthis is Geekbench for very good multiscore here multi-core score this turnsout to be approximately twice as fast asthe amino Book Air 13that's the revised 2017 model with thei-5 7200 you now the reason behind thisis because it's got two more cores okayso that version the 13 inch version isonly a dual core with four threads thisis quad core with eight threads sothat's why we're seeing such goodschools here the OpenCL score verysimilar to the 13-inch model but it'saround about 2000 to 3000 points higherthey're probably aided by the fact thatmaybe Cooling's just a little bit betteron this model and that is why the scoreshigher there now we have a look at firestrike this is a gaming benchmark ofcourse that's a very hello score if thiswas a gaming notebook really low notgood at all however you know for ax1 50 this isn't too bad the physicsschool that you can see is really goodnow if we do apply an overclock to theGPUs this is the boost we get here whichdoes increase approximately about 15percent in this particular benchmark nowthat same result of the overclock hereis about 30 percent difference when youhave a look at heaven so in heaven we'vegot a score of 587 and then with theoverclock and also the CPU tweak I thinkgoes up to 770 which is not bad at allnow Cinebench the stock score is 571 CBand then when you do go into Intel'sextreme tuning utility apply 40 Wattshere to the power limits and the slightunder volt which i've done you can seethen that score will go up here to 736which is in fact faster than my i7 7700HQ gaming laptop so thats cool there'sreally impressive and it will hold thoseturbos three-point-four on all 4 coresfor as long as you want now you've seenfrom those gaming benchmarks likefirestrike that this is not a powerfulgaming laptop that's in fact is not agaming laptop don't mistake that this isreally only for more like work orbusiness use not really designed forgaming but however as you'll see if yousee my gaming review we can play a lotof top titles for triple-a titles canrun in 1080p as long as you set thingsto low settings now more demandingtitles that I tested out like Witcher 3will require you to drop the resolutiondown to 720p and then it was perfectlyfine and playable again as long as youkeep things on low there now when itcame to temperatures we got up to 82degrees on the CPU and it did not goover 70 on the GPU and that was alsowith the overclock applied so if you'renot overclocking the GPU normally hoversabout 64 degrees and in the CPU about 78degrees maximum so thermals haveimproved on the outside of this modelcompared to the 13version that got up to 50 degreesCelsius which I found to be way too hotat the moment after 30 minutes ofpushing the system very hard both stresstesting the CPU and GPU it's up to about42 degrees here the highest I have seenit get is 45 degrees after about an hourand a half of gaming so the temperaturesyes better palm rest about 28 degreesnormally here it's about 25 so reallythey hate I feel on this model isn't anissue because they have improved thecooling now the laptop does get loudunder full load I'll give you a sampleof that with pushing it really hard onboth the GPU and CPU so we have someharman infinity speakers on this and imust say they do sound excellent betterthan some gaming laptops with littlesubs in them so let's have a listen tothemso my test tear over Linux this isManjaro build number 17 point 0.5 and ofcourse that has more or less the latestkind of kernels and everything's workingperfectly fine here so the drivers forthings like the touchpad no issues withthat that is working screen shortcutsfor brightness control using thekeyboard working audio as wellcompletely working their Wireless ofcourse I'm connected up to that so noproblems there the only thing I had todo was in the bias you must add apassword first before you can disablesecure boot and then boot your liveLinux distros your USB pen drives inthat dear but great to see and itperforms really well super fast too sowhat about my final opinion now of thislaptop I think it's brilliant I reallydo like this I'm going to be keepingthis one here I'm not gonna be keepingthe 13 inch version this is much morepowerful I'm impressed with theperformance once I increase that TDP soI can boost it up to perform exactlylike the i7 7700 HQ which is great so itencodes my video very fast it is lackingof course this particular option the 16gigabytes of RAM I do feel that isoverpriced right now for the i7 16gigabyte option it's really way tooexpensive you have to pay an additional300 or 400 for it so the display isdecent it's not perfect I would havepreferred a 1440p screen on this and itwould have really liked them to have putThunderbolt 3 on this and perhaps put anNvidia 1050 maybe they will revise thismodel next year or the end of this yearand add those options it's certainlydoable they can do it I believe ok theSD card reader they've got it on therewhich is great I can transfer my filesover but at a slow 30 megabytes persecond I really wish that was faster andI wish that the SD card would clickright in so we don't risk damaging orbreaking it if you lift it in thereputting in a backpack not that you wouldreally the other thing is better lifecould be a little bit better the heat aswell it does get a little bit warm 45degrees I don't feel as a deal-breaker alot of other laptops will also get up tothat temperature that as thin as thisone right here and the other probablyvery minor is the webcamcould be a little bit better and ofcourse the HDMI it's only HDMI 1.4 specit should be HDMI 2.0 to output a full60 Hertz4k so that is really it apart from thatthis is a fantastic notebook here greatto see that we can boost the performancewith my little tweak if you haven't seenthe video for that please check it outand also check out my extended gamingreview of this notebook here you'll seethat it probably will surprise you thatyou can get away we're playing somepopular titles and decent frame ratesjust lowering the setting seems a littlethere thank you so much for watchingthis review do hope to see you back inthe channel with more up-and-comingreviews on tech out of China bye for now\n"