Xiaomi launched the Mi Gaming Laptop earlier this year in March, much to the surprise of Xiaomi fans worldwide who weren’t expecting a gaming laptop from the company. At first glance, the Mi Gaming Laptop doesn’t even look like a gaming laptop at all, due to its clean MacBook-esque looks and lack of any “gaming” branding. However, as soon as you power on the device, you’re greeted by a four-zone RGB keyboard and ambient RGB light strips on the sides which give the laptop its gaming aesthetic. Honestly, the moment I laid my eyes on the laptop, I fell in love with the overall design and build quality.
For the purpose of the review, I tested the base model of the Mi Gaming Laptop which ships with a 7th Gen Intel Core i5-7300HQ processor coupled with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti graphics card and 8GB of RAM. This variant of the Mi Gaming Laptop fits perfectly in the budget segment, offering a great budget GPU, a CPU which is powerful enough for gaming and a decent amount of RAM. Here’s a quick rundown of all the hardware packed in this compact laptop:
Design & Build Quality
As I mentioned earlier, the Mi Gaming Laptop has a very understated design, with clean edges and no “gaming” branding whatsoever. The laptop looks a lot like a bigger version of a MacBook Pro and also resembles the Razer Blade gaming laptop. The laptop has a metal lid and frame, but the bezels around the screen, the palm rest and the bottom are made out of plastic, presumably to reduce the laptop’s overall weight. There’s absolutely no branding on the outside and the laptop only has a small ‘Mi’ logo in the center of the bottom bezel. Even though the logo is made up of a glossy material, it’s hardly visible and I really like Xiaomi’s decision to keep it simple.
The laptop’s screen and chassis feel very rigid and premium, with no flexing or wobble at all. The hinges connecting the display to the bottom half of the laptop look amazing and it’s fairly easy to lift the display with just a finger. The laptop has very thin top and side bezels, which has allowed Xiaomi to include a 15.6-inch display in such a small form factor. Another thing I really liked about the laptop is that the matte finish on the metal and plastic parts barely ever smudges and even if it does, it’s very easy to clean it with a microfiber cloth. When it comes to the design and build quality, the Mi Gaming Laptop far surpasses any other gaming laptop in this price range and it’s one of the most premium feeling laptop I’ve used to date.
The Mi Gaming Laptop doesn’t disappoint when it comes to I/O. The laptop has everything you’d look for in a gaming laptop of this caliber, including a USB Type-C port, four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, an HDMI (v2.0) port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 3.5mm mic-in jack, and an SD card reader. It’s great to see that Xiaomi hasn’t included any slow USB 2.0 ports, which are still found on a number of budget gaming laptops today.
I’m also quite impressed by the inclusion of a dedicated 3.5mm mic-in jack, as most laptops in this price segment include a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack.
The 15.6-inch full-HD 1080p display on the Mi Gaming Laptop is pretty great for the price – it gets reasonably bright (up to 300nits). it covers 72 percent of the NTSC color gamut, so color reproduction is pretty accurate, and the display also has great viewing angles. The matte finish on the display serves well to reduce any screen glare and outdoor visibility at max brightness is pretty decent.
Even though the display doesn’t boast of high refresh rates or exceptional pixel response times, it’s brilliant for the price and it’s perfectly suited for both gamers and casual users. I couldn’t help but notice that the display panel has a slight blue tint when it’s powered on for the first time, but that’s something which can be easily fixed by some post-purchase calibration. While you’ll easily find other laptops with better displays in the market, if you factor in the price, there’s no other budget gaming notebook that can compete with the display on the Mi Gaming Laptop.
Despite the budget price, the Mi Gaming Laptop packs in one of the best speaker system on a laptop I’ve come across until now. The laptop has dual downward firing 3 watt speakers placed on the bottom panel towards the front edge of the display. The speakers, which come with Dolby Atmos certification, can get fairly loud and the sound output is crisp, with clear highs and punchy lows. If you’re worried that the speakers might get muffled if you place the notebook on your lap, then you can rest assured, as the notebook gets so loud that you’ll be able to hear everything clearly even if you accidentally cover the speaker grills.
The Mi Gaming Laptop has a fairly decent membrane keyboard with four-zone customizable RGB lighting, which can be customized using the bundled Mi Gaming Box software. The keys are well spaced out and have substantial key travel, making typing an enjoyable experience.
This took a fair bit of getting used to, as I kept on pressing the wrong keys while typing. It would’ve been better had Xiaomi had included a discernable marker to separate the main keyboard and the macro keys, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. The macro key placement is only annoying when you first start typing on the Mi Gaming Laptop and it just took me a couple of hours to get used to the design.
Coming to my favorite component on the Mi Gaming Laptop – the trackpad. The device has a large glass trackpad which easily compares with the ones found on Apple’s MacBooks. Tracking is smooth and precise, the trackpad recognizes gestures accurately and the overall tracking experience is quite fluid. The trackpad is so good that I can safely say that I haven’t used a better trackpad on a Windows device till date.
Coming to the part of the review that you’ve probably been waiting for. How does the Mi Gaming Laptop perform? Is it worth the hype or is it just another glorified Xiaomi product? In order to answer these questions I tested the laptop intensively by running synthetic benchmarks and a few popular games.
Benchmarks
The Mi Gaming Laptop performs just as you’d expect a budget laptop to perform while running synthetic benchmarks. The laptop posts decent results, getting 87.2 fps in Cinebench R15’s OpenGL test, 2,353 in 3DMark Time Spy, and 3,834 in PCMark 10. Cinebench R15 OpenGL 3DMark Time Spy PCMark 10
Coming to the gaming performance, the Mi Gaming Laptop performs as expected and powers through most game without a hitch. The laptop was able to run all popular games at maximum settings, without any stutters or frame drops. It’s worth noting that games usually pick the lowest possible setting when you run them for the first time, possibly to ensure the best performance, but you can crank up with graphics settings and still manage to achieve a comfortable 60 fps even in the most demanding titles.
The Mi Gaming Laptop features a great thermal solution with two fans and a five heat pipes that easily manage to keep the device cool, even during long term use. The laptop didn’t get hot to the touch even after gaming for over an hour and I could barely feel any heating unless I placed it on my lap. The efficient cooling is a result of the massive intake grill on the back of the laptop, which allow the fans to pull in air to keep the CPU and GPU cool.
The 55Whr battery on the Mi Gaming Laptop is just about average and can power the laptop for quite a while, provided you don’t play any games. At 50 percent brightness and a light workload, the Mi Gaming Laptop lasted me well over 4 and a half hours, which is decent, considering most other laptops in this price range are barely able to make it to the four hour mark.
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See Also: Alienware 15 R3 (2017) Review: Hits the G-Spot for Gaming
Mi Gaming Laptop Review: Definitely Worth the Money
Priced starting at 5,999 Yuan (approximately Rs. 62,570), the Mi Gaming Laptop is undoubtedly the best budget gaming laptop in the market right now. It has a great minimal design, the best trackpad on any Windows device out there, decent performance and a brilliant display. However, since it isn’t available anywhere outside China, you’ll probably have to pay a premium in shipping and import duties, while also forgoing the warranty, in order to get your hands on the Mi Gaming Laptop. If you can live with that, then all variants of the Xiaomi Mi Gaming Laptop are already available on Gearbest, with the base model priced at $1,099.
