Xiaomi's Mi Notebook Air 13 gets another revision this is the second revision and
the third model now 2018 sees the introduction of the Kaby Lake R CPUs
in this line so we now have the Core i5 8250 you the I 78550 you eight gigabytes
of RAM and there is a 16 gigabyte model that's in the works that's apparently
coming out within a month or so or after the Chinese Spring Festival now this
model here you can see has another couple of changes to the obvious being
the fact that it's now in this deep gray color which is a good move if you ask me
because the paint job on the mean notebook Pro does look really good and
this here to me makes it look a little bit more professional I do like the
darker color on here versus the silver now it will show up fingerprints a
little more because of that darker color on the lid you see I'm a few little
smudges and things once you start handling it and using it for a few days
now the lid has no logos on it whatsoever so very plain minimalistic
design which I really do like the build quality is excellent this is really well
put together the fit and finish there's no rough edges or anything like that
the edges on the bottom could be perhaps a little less sharp than what they are
but they're not too bad overall and really no complaints with that now you
will notice there was another change to that's to the internals so we still have
the MX 150 GPU from Nvidia which is basically a 1030 it's got 2 gigabytes of
RAM double data rate 5 spec now this has 384 cuda cores in it now speaking of
thermals if we have a look you can see that we do have now these new cooling
fins on the two coolers there so we still have the same setup unfortunately
as the previous model so it's a smaller fan paired up with a larger fan they've
put more fins on those fans though so it's moving a lot more air through it
and and you can see also that the copper heat transfer pipe this is a little bit
wider now dermals have improved now when I reviewed the previous models they got
up to 50 degrees Celsius to the touch which I would classify as quite hot for
one of these notebooks and now gets up to about 46 so yes it has definitely
improved their cooling for to touch it it's not as hot as it
normally gets while in the previous models there but it also internally it
only maxes out at 82 degrees because of the improved cooling so there's handling
at two two more cause now compared to the previous models which are only dual
cause this of course is now quad so performance is up about thirty percent
but I'll get into that later on but just to let you know here at the start that
that Xiaomi has limited a little bit the potential of the CPU due to setting a
thermal throttling limit quite low to stop it going above 82 degrees so
there's some limitation there on the performance of this particular notebook
now the keyboard is the same layout the same key travel so one point two six
millimeters of key travel that I measured a comfortable keyboard to type
on it's not as good as the mean notebook pros keyboard however those keys are
just slightly higher quality it gives you a little bit better feedback on it
but overall a very decent keyboard now it is better than the previous year's
keyboard because they've used the black plastic meaning that you can actually
see the backlit keyboard better than the silver keys on the earlier versions and
they've also used a slightly better quality plastic on here and the keys
don't feel as sharp on the edges as they did on the previous two generations of
this particular model you also know that the power button is probably where the
Delete key should be but it does have a higher resistance to it so if you
accidentally tap that hopefully it won't pull it into sleep but of course you can
see it in Windows this button to do nothing when you touch it and that
solves that minor little issue there now the touchpad the same size but it's no
longer with some nap Tech's drivers like the first two models this is now Windows
precision drivers full control over gestures and overall it's a step up from
the trackpad from last year's quite accurate very good to use and the
fingerprint reader also works when you touch it using the touchpad so sometimes
on some models when you put your finger over the fingerprint readers it doesn't
register when you're moving the cursor around but this one here it does now
that fingerprint reader works flawlessly very
using Windows hello to log into Windows just to point out that the intake is
here for the fans so if you happen to use this on your lap you will end up
blocking that and then the fan noise will increase and it will start to heat
up so not a laptop to be using on your lap so on the right hand side we have a
status LED now this will light up red when charging turn green once it's fully
charged to let you know now charging time is blazing fast on this notebook it
only takes one hour and 38 minutes to fully charge this it's really good so it
charges at really high rates and probably the fastest in fact the fastest
I have tested out here on the channel now we have a USB type-c port here so
this support supports resolutions up to 4k 60 Hertz
we've got charging data at the same time as well with this port and then a USB 3
port there now on the left side here we have HDMI out now it is not HDMI to
speak which I feel it should be so this does not support 4k 60 Hertz it maxes
out at 4k 30 Hertz the output from this and then we have another USB 3 port by
the way the USB 3 ports will power external hard drives up to 2 terabytes
tested without any issues a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack which supports
microphones very clear audio out of this no static no interference so the screen
is a 13.3 inch IPS panel it's fully laminated with scratch resistant glass
blacks are deep colors look great no complaints with the screen I feel it is
fine the maximum brightness tops out at 291 Lux which isn't super bright but
it's perfectly fine for indoors even in brightly lit environments right now with
two powerful studio lights on the screen is set to 50% and you can make it out
perfectly fine normally I just run with about 30% most of the time in the studio
and at home without any problems now the screen to me looks better than they mean
up pro screen that's 15.6 inches and still 1080p and you can see the pixels
on that one here you can see the pixels if you look at it really really close
but it's not as bad as the pros now up the top you'll see
we've got a webcam now this is 720p 30 frames per second max so you can record
on it Skype calls look great you've got jewelry microphones that pick
up sound really well now this webcam is to point out does not support Windows
hello one thing to know that when you first get it depending on where you buy
it from that it should come with Windows 10 home in Chinese only now you cannot
just go and add an English language pack to that it doesn't seem to work the
easiest way that I found and it retains the recovery image and keeps that all
intact and the default software configuration and all that software from
Xiaomi is just to upgrade it from Windows 10 home to pro you can pick up
CD keys very cheap for that and this is what I did with my unis I upgraded and
that way if I go to reset this PC later on it will just actually add that
language so I added us and now that's part of the image and when you do the
recovery and everything like that it'll pull through so it's good for resale
value you can of course go ahead and just do a complete clean and new install
of Windows 10 home and the CD key and the BIOS that will pull through so you
don't need to spend any extra cash on that if that is your preference there so
having a look now just at what we have under the device manager so we've got
the Intel Core i5 8250 you now this is a quad core
processor it's multi-threaded so that's why it shows up in there
8 times wireless as Intel's dual-band wireless AC 80 to 65 a very good chipset
they're very fast that also handles our Bluetooth as well on that bluetooth 4.1
then we have a Samsung pn9 6-1 that's an nvme drive very fast I'll show you that
later on and the graphics so you can see true graphics here that's because we
have the integrated graphics that it uses when it's not doing anything
demanding and if you happen to be video editing or gaming or something like that
and then it'll switch over and use the g-force which is that MX 150 from Nvidia
and lastly here the fingerprint reader is an eland one that works perfectly
fine now if we look at the memory spec here we've got 8 gigabytes of doubled
right for RAM running in two thousand four hundred megahertz that is perfectly
fine but what isn't so great is this right here it's only running and
single-channel so we are missing out on some memory bandwidth and performance
they're still on the topic of performance here we have the Geekbench
for scores so this to me is not the best of course from this chipset and the
reason why that is is either two things it's either the early thermal throttling
that this CPU has that Charmy have configured it to do quite early on I'll
get onto that later on in this review or it's just the fact that it doesn't have
dual channel RAM so that's why it's a little bit lower because I've seen
before around 4000 for the single core score and about another thousand ports
is so high as well here on the multi-core score but still this score
right here that is up around thirty to thirty five percent over the previous
generation so it's quite a step up in terms of just raw CPU performance there
here is the OpenCL score now this score here I did run the GPU slightly
overclocked wood if you want more details on that check out my gaming
review of this particular laptop and we have a look at the fire strike 1.1 score
so this is the stock score here so two thousand six hundred and forty keep an
eye on that graphics school there so that's two thousand eight hundred ninety
nine because later on I went in overclocked and you can't boost that
screw up a little bit there you can see I'm taking a quick look at their
dedicated GPU so it has two gigabytes of dedicated double data rate five RAM
which is not a lot but considering it's only a 1080p display we're not going to
really run into many problems with the vram the amount we have on there unless
of course you decide to try and run 4k or 1440p which really I would not be
doing any way with this GPU because it's simply not powerful enough to really be
able to do that well with games and this of course it's a really old title you're
running it has a 384 tutor cause I'm taking a look at a few other benchmarks
that I ran you can compare these to my reviews of the previous generation model
if you'd like so here we have Cinebench now the score is up quite a bit this is
up around about almost 200 points on the CPU thanks to of course they're faster
see we've got on the air with two extra
cause it makes a big difference in multi-threaded benchmarks and here we
have the heaven school so this is a little bit lower than the mean notebook
pro mean notebook Pro and got seven thousand four hundred and seven so the
difference of this is because of those lower GPU clocks that I just mentioned
and showed you before without gpu-z they're passed Mike reading so 3702 is
not a bad rating at all considering that this is really an ultrabook how thin and
light that says it's got some decent powers it's packin a bit of performance
here too and here are the speeds of that samsung PM 961 SSD so 256 gigabytes it
is really blazing fast look at those read speeds so no bottlenecks whatsoever
here with the storage performance now this is the wireless here so I was
transferring some files over my own network at home wireless AC and it was
up to around about 75 megabytes per second which translates into 600
megabits per second so very fast the Intel wireless AC 80 to 65 chipset has
on here now not the fastest results have actually seen out of this chipset I've
seen almost as high as 700 megabits per second so it's only just marginally
slower there so just like their two previous models to this one we've got
down with firing speakers they are tuned by AKG and this no changes to them
whatsoever they're decent sounding speakers for an ultra balke laptop of
this size there's no sub so it's just the two speakers and it does also come
with Dolby audio software now the software is basically just like an
equalizer and lets you tweak and adjust the sound to your own personal
preference there I'll give you a sample of them now at 100% volume
on to battery life now so really no improvements here over the previous
generation as expected because we've got two more cause to feed and the other
thing is the battery capacity has not increased from the relatively small 39
what our battery because considering the hardware this has got on here it should
be larger this battery about of course they've made no changes internally to
cater for a larger battery size there now in my test I ran the brightness at
30% I had wireless on the whole time I was using Chrome with about 8 tabs and
you can see here that I after four hours and 38 minutes
lost about 65 percent battery there so you're looking like the estimate here
around 6 hours 6 hours 30 minutes if you are using the dedicated GPU your gaming
or doing something else you can only expect around 2 hours two and a half
hours a better life when you're doing something super demanding a hundred
percent brightness if you're watching videos it's different so if you were
just cycling and watching a video in 1080p then you can probably expect about
seven to eight hours it's a lot more there but overall battery life is for me
disappointing moving on now to have a look at encoding 4k video so I have a
DOE Premiere Pro here and as long as you don't have a huge amount of different
videos in here like you're not trying to put 100 clips and here with the 8
gigabytes of RAM I found that editing 4k video is perfectly fine with this
hardware that the preview screen here you can see that's in real time it
doesn't have any slowdown you can pry your filters and whatnot and other
things as long as you keep things basic I mean what to baby but don't just start
to pile on things because it will start to bog down a little bit there and I
think some of the problem really comes down to the RAM but again I would that
thermal throttling that you can see has been happening quite a bit it's been
bouncing off that all the time and then of course is lowing the CPU turbo the
speeds of the turbo there at times now I'm going to do the same encoding test
I've done on the previous models and the pro model and it managed to encode one
minute of 4k footage and do it in five minutes and one second on the pro
version so let's have a look with the same hardware by the way let's have a
look and see how long it's going to take on this particular model so going with
the same priest it's the YouTube 4k preset here and it's
one minute of footage let's get this exported now so as soon as I click this
export I'll start the timer as well okay so that's about to finish up but I won't
stop the timer until it actually closes this little bar here the encode time I
was looking like it's actually going to be about the same as the pro model with
the same exact hardware which has surprised me a little bit that was five
minutes and one second and there we go pretty much exactly the same there so I
did not expect that result which is good in a way to see so now to show you where
this notebook is really quite bad is that thermal throttling that happens so
when you're pushing both the GPU and the CPU while the CPU is not actually being
pushed too hard when you have a look at the utilization here it's only at about
30% but look at this the whole time it is thermal throttling you can see the
history here it's been thermal throttling continuously because of the
GPU so the GPU is being pushed quite hard at the moment with this benchmark
they're running in the background and if we just show you the clocks as well on
the GPU you can see here that yes it's been going up and down a little bit it's
not too bad those clocks but I have noticed that it does tend to clock down
a little bit lower than the me notebook pro with the exact same configuration
here so not great at all to see if you play another game for example something
that's using the CPU a lot more calculating physics and things then
you're gonna see just continual thermal throttling and the clocks they will not
clock up that high those turbos affecting of course that CPU performance
so for me this is not great to see because the Mino Book Pro that model I
didn't have any problems with thermal throttling the cooling could keep up
with everything but here Xiaomi has to limit the CPU they have to put on that
early thermal throttling just to stop it from overheating because if they did not
do this if it did not trigger thermal throttling I can see this getting up to
90 degrees if not even more if you're taxing both GPU and CPU so not at all
good when it comes to fan noise on the me
notebook f13 I find that it could actually be sometimes a little louder
than the previous generation because it's having to deal with that extra heat
being generated from the CPU now light tasks like web browsing you don't hear
the fans they do not come on or it might just come on low and then it later turns
off but when you do anything moderately demanding so if it's just a little bit
of photo editing or even when you start to run quite a few tabs in chrome you
will hear the fans come on now I'll give you a sample now I've 100% load and the
fans at 100 send that it is reasonably loud
so what does it like at gaming well it's actually not too bad considering the
hardware considering we've only got 2 gigabytes of dedicated double data rate
5 RAM on this and it's a an entry-level GPU here but it's so much better than
the integrated graphics solution so you can play a lot of the modern titles in
fact everything is playable out there you just need to lower down the settings
so often you have to lower the visuals to perhaps medium or low setting and on
very demanding games you have to also lower down the resolution from say 1080p
down to 720p and then games are gonna have playable frame rates that's not too
bad now if you want to see more gaming then please check out my full detailed
gaming review of the me notebook air 13 the 2018 model now if you're looking to
run Linux if you've seen my unboxing I tested that out and my touchpad was not
working I was running Mandara 17 point 1.3 now the recently released 17 point
1.4 update I have now burned that ISO to my USB pendrive here running a live
image and as you can see the mouse cursor is working so the touchpad now
works brightness control works Wireless the sound everything so far is working
on here so this is really good news for anyone that wants to run Linux on this
machine you won't have any problems it runs it really well and very quick so
streaming in 4k is perfectly smooth and fine no drop frames well I need three
drop frames out of 3500 here the connection keeps up as long as of course
you've got a fast enough connection to maintain that link and keep it buffering
really well but no problems it will natively play your a TVC codecs as well
ten bit and very fast performance overall multitasking getting in around
Windows not an issue at all with the core i5
8250 and finally a sample here from the webcam so it's 720p 30 frames per second
maximum and it can record the quality is pretty average now you hear a lot of
echo that's because I'm in a room that's almost empty
it's the reason for that but overall the my quality is good but we can it's
pretty average movie but it's decent enough for Skype calls at the moment I'm
in low light so it's not exactly performing wonderful ok guys so this is
a step up clearly over the 2017 model it's about 30% faster comes with a
better keyboard because of the new key caps it's black so easy to see with the
backlight versus the silver keys and the backlight can sometimes be a little bit
hard to make out touchpad more or less is kind of the same but slightly better
because of the precision drivers our fingerprint reader works great the
screen looks great as well it's very nice fully laminated it could have made
it touch but that's just my personal preference their build quality is
excellent it is a premium laptop now it falls short with battery life you get
around 6 hours max 5 6 hours it's not really that much more than the 2017
model now cooling has improved but not by much it's only 4 degrees to the touch
cooler after a couple of hours of gaming on this now one thing that bothers me in
this is I've limited the performance so they put single channel RAM and it also
starts to thermal throttle the CPU way earlier than the pro model and that
limits the performance there as well the GPU then has also been clocked a little
lower than the 15.6 inch model so that's about three areas there when they're
limiting their performance but the crazy thing is this is priced exactly the same
or even a little bit higher at the time of this review then the me notebook pro
model so I see absolutely no reason to go for this so in my mind skip this
model go for the meet notebook Pro because it has fader cooling it's got
separate thermal heat pipes and fans for the GPU for the CPU I've been a keyboard
it's much better than this one I do like typing on it a lot better we
also have a larger touch pair which is just a little bit more comfortable to
use and then we have better battery life as well as one other thing now one area
works not better the 15.6 inch model is the screen the screen because it's not
as sharp that's really about it and I feel that this one's got slightly better
colors on it so I preferred the screen in this model that really is about the
only thing and reason to go for it so there's a lot of reasons to
go for the 15.6 inch model because of that better performance you can also
increase the power limit on that one to get it to perform close to an i7 seven
thousand seven hundred HQ when you increase the power limit on this
particular model because of the early thermal throttling you get zero benefit
out of it so you can't boost the performance so that again just adds the
reason skip this if you can put up with a 15.6 inch extra size and the 1 kilo
more of weight get the 15.6 inch model so with that said check out my review up
here of the me notebook Pro 15.6 inch model the i5 model and then the i7
models where I have a review of that and thank you so much for watching this
review here and if you're new why not subscribe to the channel I'll have
plenty more up and coming including reviews of more laptops in the near
future bye for now
No comments:
Post a Comment