Xiaomi Mi Gaming Laptop Review

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Nowadays, Xiaomi is not the manufacturer which only focus on smartphone business anymore. In fact, it has expanded the business into many markets including laptop market. It has been a year and a half since Xiaomi launched its first laptop. Now, Xiaomi has added laptop product line – Mi gaming laptop product. Today, we will test the Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop with the highest specification to see its performance.

Specification

Screen 15.6-inch 1920x 1080 60Hz IPS screen
Processor Intel Core i7-7700HQ (2.8GHz, 6M Cache, up to 3.8 GHz)
TDP 45W
Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB + Intel® HD Graphics 630
Memory 16GB DDR4 2400MHz dual channel
Storage 256GB Samsung PM961 PCI-E NVMe M.2 SSD + 1TB HDD
Connectivity Intel 8265AC + Bluetooth 4.1
Ports 4x USB 3.0, 1x Type-C, 1x HDMI 2.0 port, RJ45 jack, SD, 3.5mm jack
Battery 55 Wh
Battery life 5 to 6 hours
OS Windows 10
Weight 2.75kg; 3.4kg (with adapter)
Extras 720P Web webcam

Appearance Design

Lei Jun, the CEO of Xiaomi, has claimed on the launch event that this gaming laptop can be taken to the company. With a simple design, it is hard to recognize that this is a gaming laptop.

cover
There is no Xiaomi’s logo or other elements on the cover of this laptop. At present, this laptop uses black and gray colors just as the Xiaomi Mi notebook pro has adopted. The previous leak suggests that this gaming laptop has a black variant, but this variant fails to be sold in the market owing to some reasons.

four vents
To provide excellent heat dissipation, the laptop comes with two fans and four vents.

screen
This gaming laptop features a 15.6-inch IPS screen with the resolution of 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. The Xiaomi official party has claimed that this screen’s NTSC color gamut covers 72% and its maximum brightness reaches 300nit.

screen
The thickness of this laptop’s screen bezels on the left and right reaches 9.9mm. Such bezel width belongs to narrow bezel among gaming laptops.

screen test
We use the Spyder 5 Elite to test this IPS screen. The results show that the screen’s NTSC color gamut covers around 70% and its brightness reaches approximately 296nit, which indicates that this screen has excellent performance. By the way, if this screen has the high refresh rate, then this gaming laptop will be more competitive in the market.

keyboard
The surface with a keyboard also has a simple design.

NVIDIA
We can see a significant NVIDIA sticker is placed in the right bottom corner. Besides, the NVIDIA logo is printed on the package of the laptop. From that, we can see that Xiaomi and NVIDIA have close cooperation relationship.

touchpad
The touchpad with a super large size brings an excellent user experience. Of course, as a gaming laptop, the touchpad still has relatively low utilization.

hinge
The hidden hinge saves space. But it depends on personal preference to judge whether such a hinge is good or not.

keyboard
The laptop’s body and this part use engineering plastics. It doesn’t feature the numeric keyboard. 1.8mm key travel and good rebound bring the user-pleasant experience, which reaches an excellent level even among the traditional gaming laptops. One disadvantage of this laptop is that it doesn’t come with a keyboard that supports RGB backlit.

keys
The left top corner of the keyboard comes with a key with a fan image. Once the user presses the key, the fan will work at full speed immediately, which can improve heat dissipation efficiency to some extent. The rest keys on the left side can be set up with different functions by the user. Such key design has been applied to some gaming laptops before, but it fails to have received excellent feedback from the user.

port design
As the port layout, this laptop provides four USB 3.0 Type-A ports in total. Two USB Type-A ports are placed on the left, one is on the right, and one is on the back. It provides a two-in-one earphone port, but it still reserves a microphone port for games.

ports on the right
The right of the laptop provides an SD and a USB 3.0 port.

ports on the back
Some ports which the user will not often use are placed on the back of the laptop, including an RJ45 port, a USB 3.0 Type-A port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a round port for charging.

grille
The inlet grille occupies the half area of the whole back cover.

grille
To provide high ventilation efficiency, no dust mesh has been designed in the grille area, which is hard to prevent dust from entering. But the grille is easy to be taken out, so it is convenient to clean dust.

system
This laptop will run on official Windows 10 and Office 2016.

Dolby Atmos
The laptop adopts the Dolby Atmos sound system, and it has two 2w loudspeakers, which enable the laptop to bring excellent volume and sound effects.

CPU benchmark

i7-7700HQ
The Mi Gaming laptop is now powered by the Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor based on Kaby Lake architecture. This chip adopts four-core and four-thread design, and its main frequency is 2.8GHz, which can reach up to 3.8GHz. Although this quad-core processor doesn’t boast of performance as excellent as Intel’s eighth-generation Core processor, its performance in gaming will not be much poorer than eight-generation processors.

CPU score
On the CineBench R15, this laptop’s multi-core score is 730cb, and its single-core score is 150cb. This result shows that i7-7700HQ has excellent performance.

Graphics Card benchmark

GTX 1060
This gaming laptop features NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics card, which boasts of 1280 CUDA cores and 6GB GDDR5 memory.

GTX 1060 score
The GTX 1060 has got 11859 points on the 3DMark Firestrike. This graphics card that Xiaomi’s gaming laptop comes with has good performance.

SSD benchmark

SSD test
This laptop comes with Samsung’s PM961 M.2 SSD. We use CrystalDeskMark to test this SSD. The result shows that SSD’s sequential read speed reaches 2987.9MB/s, and its sequential write speed reaches 1257.5MB/s. From the result, we can see that PM961 has excellent read and write performance.

Game Performance

We choose three games to test this laptop’s game performance, including Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Call for Duty 14, and Tomb Raider.
frame rate
Under the high definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds reaches 71.2FPS. The whole game goes quite smoothly.

frame rate
Under the higher definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Call for Duty 14 reaches up to 103.4FPS. It means that this laptop can easily handle this game.

frame rate
Under the high definition of the game, the average frame rate of the Tomb Raider reaches 79.86FPS on BenchMark.

Generally speaking, this version can guarantee that mainstream games under high definition can run smoothly and bring a satisfying gaming experience.

Heat Dissipation

We use AIDA 64 FPU and Furmark to test this gaming laptop.
temperature
Under normal mode, the keyboard’s highest temperature reaches 54 degrees and the high-temperature area is in the middle of the keyboard. The laptop’s whole heat dissipation reaches the middle level.

temperature
After pressing the key with a fan, the laptop’s heat dissipation condition has been greatly improved. But in the meantime, the noise becomes louder. As a whole, the laptop has excellent heat dissipation, but the keyboard’s heat insulation should be improved.

CPU frequency
During the test, the CPU’s frequency keeps around 2.85GHz, which means it has good performance.

Hardware Upgrade

internal structure
It is easy to disassemble this Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop. All you need to do is to remove screws and then the back cover can be removed. The laptop comes with two metal fans and four vents. As for hardware expansion, it provides two M.2 ports, two memory slots, and a 2.5-inch HDD.
M.2 port
But one thing needs to mention: the second M.2 port can be utilized only when the reservation for a 2.5-inch HDD is removed.

Summary

Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop
As a new gaming laptop brand, Xiaomi has done a good job. After all kind of tests on it, we find that this Xiaomi Mi gaming laptop does have good performance. This laptop has good craftsmanship and considerate internal design. The gaming laptop has excellent gaming performance and satisfying heat dissipation effect. Besides, the brief appearance design makes this laptop highly distinguished from other gaming laptops. The only disadvantage is that it isn’t powered by Intel’s eighth-generation Core processor. But in fact, this doesn’t influence user’s gaming experience since the seventh-generation Core processor can fully meet user’s requirement on the game.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Too bad i still dont see any reviews on youtube yet.
    Have you used the laptop, can i get a user review. 😀

    Thanks

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