Xiaomi launches Mi Notebook 14 series in India; inaugural price starts at Rs 41,999

Xiaomi launches Mi Notebook 14 series in India; inaugural price starts at Rs 41,999

 So a lot of you probably don't even know that Xiaomi has released another notebook now.
This one here that I'm going to be unboxing and checking out today is called the me notebook that's it there's no pro so we have the pro model which I've got right here fantastic lab really do like it but what we have here that I'll be checking out today is the you could say the budget version of it so this one is plastic but it does have a numerical keyboard and it has two main Kean reasons to go for it not probably the spec because it's not super specked out

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I was hoping they're gonna have the 8300 H or the 87 58 CPUs in here those 8th generation ones but no they went for the cable 8 ones so full specs are right up here if you want to check that out but there isn't to go for this model is the price.

So the model I have here is the base one so it's the i-5 8250 you and it has only 4 gigabytes of RAM which you probably thinking like whoa hang on four gigabytes of RAM why would you buy that well because this in China sells for about 580 US only so it's a lot cheaper than this model right here but the key thing is not only is it cheaper you can actually upgrade the RAM on this so this one.

I picked up from trading kings and it comes on this plain brown box so it looks like it doesn't actually have an inner box at all they're kind of cheap tout as well on the packaging but it should be well packaged and I don't think there should be any damage to this whatsoever so I've actually just broken the seal on this and we'll check out what we got inside.
okay so relatively well packed up there with this padding around it in this box here obviously we will have the power supply so it has for some reason the Australian NZ plug there don't know why they seem to use different plugs there in China of course there is an adapter that trading chins in have included and here we have the power supply, the output is nineteen point five volts, three point three three amps so it comes with a Mickey Mouse style plug on the end now these are very easy to source any electronic shop computer shock will have these cables you can pick up one without having to use power plug adapter so just under the laptop we have a leaflet here now this is just going to be all in Chinese as you can imagine with a Chinese laptop so no point me going over that it's just some sort of Quick Start Guide warranty card or something all right and time to check the weight of it first it feels definitely heavier than the me not Book Pro and yes it is so it comes in at 2.18 kilos and that's about 180 grams heavier. 

So if we add the rather small power supply that brings it up now to two point three nine kilos and then with the plug so everything you need total carry weight is 2.5 4 kilos so that actually is not too bad for a 15.6 inch laptop and its thickness tops out to be about 20 millimeters. 
There so that is definitely thicker than the Mino but pro as expected Tommy's gone with a simplistic look here so there's no logos on the top of the lid now this is metal so we're going to alloy here on the top and the finish of it the color the gray they have used it's very similar to the mi notebook pro but you can see that one actually is a different shade it's a lighter shade of grey but the same kind of paint finish to them so let's see if the keyboard can be opened one-handed for you one-handed openers out there so yes it can as you can see just and oh yes that actually looks pretty good so we've got matte plastic here it feels like a quality plastic they have used like a hard ABS style plastic a large touchpad that looks to be exactly the same size as the other me notebook pros it has a smooth finish to it and the keys they actually don't feel too bad at all very little flex I'm pressing down hard on that keyboard so that is good your miracle keyboard there you can see we have got print screen buttons page up-and-down seems to be missing oh no that's right here the shortcuts you can see with the unnumbered keyboard there and the power key isn't separated from the keyboard but it's it's in a good location is that doesn't actually look to be too bad the laptop has two exhaust vents they are located here and here so that's where you get all the hot air coming out and as for palm rest flex no that is very firm it feels good and I can see that this matte plastic they have used is going to end up picking up fingerprints and smudges but not as bad as the MSI laptop soft reviewed and we have met anti-glare coating on the screen here you can see and then the bezels around the outside yes they are rather large of course they're larger than the Mino pros which has slimmer missiles left and right we've got jewellery microphones here status LED for the webcam this is a 720p our webcam and you can barely make out the Xiaomi logo which is right there in black so very discreet which is great Xiaomi also went with a rubber all around the outside so there's little lip here that sits against the palm rest that's not going to get scratched up it's not going to rub and using rubber there just gives it more of a quality feel so good move there this is as far as the screen will recline back it doesn't go and lay right right back but this for most people should be fine I feel now the screen has a little bit of flex there as expected and when I close it down and pressing hard on the lid push us in a little bit but I don't think it's going to be a case of that screen pressing up against the keyboard and marking it for ports on the left we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack 2 USB 3 ports HDMI a 1.4 and then a Gigabit LAN port and then on the right decian for charging status LED USB 2 port and then a SD card reader now this is not your ultra high speed spec reader unfortunately only the me noble Pro GTX model has that looking at the rear now we've got two solid rubber feet that it sits upon this is the intake vent here to downward firing speakers now these are three white ones with Dolby audio tuning so they should sound really good if they're anything like the me notebook pros gaining access to the internals is not too difficult you just have to remove all the screws there and pry off the rear I just use my fingernails and pulled it up and it is very good the build quality overall I wanted to comment on that that the Palmer is the finish of everything plastics used feel great so you can see the two speakers right there we have our one terabyte hard drive now there's a couple of positives over this model in fact things that are better than the meaning of a pro we've got upgradable wireless if you're not happy the one that they use you can replace this very easy to do and here of course we have our upgradable RAM the SSD can be upgraded as well and the battery capacity is really only one area they're cheap down here that I can see so 40 watt hours only when we get 60 watt hours in the mean upper Pro so if you want a bit of battery life that is of course as the model to go for but overall they're calling the layout of it looks good at course I will need to test that out and see if it runs into thermal throttling or any other problems and this is something I wish all notebooks had and they didn't always sold a ram onto the motherboard like they do with the mean up a pro so we've got four gigabytes right here in this particular model so you can add another four give yourself a total of eight and I assume that when you buy the eight gigabyte model which is slightly more expensive they probably just have an 8 gigabyte stick here and you can add another eight giving you 16 but I'm going to upgrade this now so I have added two sticks of a two gigabytes double data rate for two thousand four hundred megahertz HyperX Ram and then you just need to place that shielding back on there so I did have to set it up in English and actually took quite a while what I did was the method to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro and that involves adding Windows 10 Pro Kia but one off eBay and then I upgraded it I added English - so you upgrade to pro and English I do have a video on how to do that it's within one of my videos says I'll link in the description if you want to know how to upgrade that otherwise the free method but it involves a lot more as to do a complete clean install install Windows 10 the CD key that's inside the BIOS will pull through windows will then activate as long as you install Windows 10 home so the version it does come with and ships where there's more recent as you'd expect so it is shipping with version of a Windows 10 which is 1803 now the displays default scaling is 125 percent I'll put it on to 150 for the purposes of my video so you can see things a little clearer but I wanted to just go over quickly the screen so right now I have it on full brightness and I mean it said it's an OK screen it's definitely perfectly fine acceptable but the brightness tops out at only 200 lux ideally I'd like to see about 250 or over so it's not the brightest of screens out there I wouldn't go as far to say it as dull now it will dim down very dim and because it is a matte coated screen anti glare I feel it's okay at this maximum brightness I mean it's alright so this laptop has real tech components in it real tech audio and real tank wireless and the gigabits ethernet as well is real tag so real tag it's the 88 21 is C II card sorry and I tested this in the azuz FX 504 and it's not a very fast card on this model here as well it's gonna max out at about 150 megabits per second whereas other Wireless cards for example in the me notebook Pro they will get well over 450 or around 400 but you can upgrade it so that's one great thing about this now the CPU is on this particular model the Core i5 8250 you this is eight generation the kb lake are it's called or the kb lake you so it is 4 cos 8 threads maximum turbo of 3.4 gigahertz and our SSD is a samsung but unfortunately it's only set at 3 however you can upgrade and put a faster nvme drive in there if you wanted to do that in the future you could add for example a 970 Evo from samsung 256 gigabytes and it would be very fast so just benchmarking the drive in fact that has finished there and you can see for a set of 3 SSD from samsung that the speeds aren't good now the cpu with the 16 gigabytes of ram that i added as you saw in the start of the video it gets this result here in Geekbench 4 so it's not a bad score considering the chipset multi-core performance i know that they new six core the eighth gens the coffee like once they can get right up to 20,000 multi-core score but for what this is that is actually quite good very decent performance now we do have the MX 110 and the OpenCL score here shows that it's about a good about half the speed actually of the MX 150 that gets about it's about 43,000 and the score so yeah it's well about 40% slower you could say that's just a rough estimate and if we take a look at that NVIDIA GPU in greater detail here this is an old GPU look at that release state so it's a while ago now because of its actually before that because what happens is they have cleverly relabeled this so this is really a 920 MX so we have the 256 shaders only the q2 cause and if you have a look at the memory double data rate five Samsung now this is good because there is a model well east of the 920 MX that has double data rate three completely crippling it Cinebench r15 the counter configuration posted 671 C B at about 56 frames per second now if I recall correctly I think it's the nvidia MX 150 can do about 72 or 73 frames per second so you can see how much faster it really is there now there is one good thing and that as those power limits are completely unlocked to us now on the other models that I have reviewed it really depended on the biased version with it or not Shami was actually going to let us play around with the voltage now why do we want to do this well we can go along here we can under volt a little so normally the under volt I do on this particular CPUs is about this so it is a point zero nine oh and then we can also increase the power limits to this is gonna boost their performance and then on Chris owl CPU score I'll hold the turbos then at three point four cross all cause without any power limiting it won't run into that maxes so if I set this now and uh normally this could actually be a little bit too high perhaps forty I'll try that and now we'll check Cinebench r15 and with that increase Parliament and the under volt I managed to get it up to 709 CB this is just the first run so it's supposed to their performance a little but not quite as high as expected for some reason here if we take a look at my little graph here now you'll see that this is stock when I did the test and he could see it holds a 3.4 gigahertz and then about there a power limit throttles down and that drops the top turbos on all those cores and this time around you can see that does not happen and I've done really long tests with this same exact seating on my me notebook Pro and it'll just hold that 3.4 units on all four cores as long as you want and you can see the thermals here seem to be alright now I haven't tested this for hours on end but the max temps so far that I have seen is 83 s and that was actually stock so it's getting up there but I don't believe at this point we're gonna reach thermal throttling I have full details of this in a future up and coming videos and the full review of course time for a little speakers showdown here against the Meno Book Pro so the pro you'd expect to have slightly better sounding speakers right you're correct it does it does sound a little bit better better bass definitely better trebles but the loudness is about the same overall I feel that the me notebook the speakers aren't bad but I'll give you a sample of both of them now you just can't beat those speakers in the Meno Book Pro it has really impressive speakers for a 15.6 inch laptop the sells for around about 800 us Here I am now on the bias there's not a lot to show you so originally it was in Chinese as expected so I changed it over to English we've only got basic settings here and no Advanced Settings and what I'm about to do now is just to boot over to Linux test that out and all you have to do is just go into the boot order and I've selected my Linux pin drive there okay so screen brightness controls are working the volume controls are working touchpad is also working but what is not working it does not like that real tick wireless card for some reason so that's just a problem to do with drivers at least we can swap out that card you could put an inter one or another one in there I've had some time to do a little bit typing on this keyboard and overall it is very decent this keyboard good travel on here the key quality is good they have a slight very ever-so-slight little tiny curve into them a little bit like the mean of a pro's keyboard but I do like the spacing of the Mino notebook pros touchpad as well very similar it's almost identical it uses Windows precision drivers so no real difference there because we don't have the fingerprint reader so this is the me notebook pros keyboard of course I prefer the spacing of this one because it's just spaced out a little bit better and I'm of course used to it now using it for so long and the fingerprint reader right there is another additional thing you get from the pro model but then I can see that the me notebook the budget version is actually I think gonna wear better than this one here because there's like a little bit of a stain to the finish of the paint job on the middle on this with the palm rest it's very easy to chip the plastic is definitely suited more to I feel office and students and things like this because it's going to be a much more durable be able to take more of a beating and it probably won't show those marks or any stains or anything like that being a black plastic and even fingerprints it's more resistant than most to it's holding up quite well after using it now for quite a few hours so taking a look at gaming performance just very briefly I may have a separate video where complete gaming review on this so what I've done I have overclock the GPU just to give it a helping hand because we know that this GPU is very weak and my overclock I can max out the core clock without any problems memory clock I can probably push this even a little bit higher so 750 is very good but even so with a title like Wolfenstein here it is struggling in 720p on the last settings as you'll see it's semi playable it gets some really bad frame dips as you can see so the framerate is really all over the place because it has actually run out and it did warn me that ran out of VRAM so no more video memory because with the 2 gigabytes this game really needs a little bit over than that I think it needs like four three or four at least so quite choppy this one but one thing that is impressing me so far is the fan noise it's it's like barely even on it's incredible more demanding total here this is Call of Duty World War 2 and you can see that we're getting playable framerate with this one this is on the recommended settings which is 720p so this is good to see depends on the title but I think most games you will have to play on low setting 720p with this and remember I have overclocked that GPU so fair noise has been quite good so far it's just on a low rpm at the moment continuous temperatures reaching around about 75 with the current conditions on the CPU about 65 on the GPU but I have seen this if you get up to 83 when we're really pushing it hard benchmarking but I wanted to check now just the temperatures which seem to be really quite good on the top here see it's getting up to 32 so they've done a very good job here with the cooling okay 38 sings about the maximum remember that the me notebook Pro gets up to about 48 49 degrees here at the top it does get really hot even up to 50 and this is a lot cooler that palm rest always seems to stay cool around about 26 degrees there so so far in my initial afternoon with this laptop the thermals are looking very positive so I do think that show me here has a very interesting laptop there's a lot of things I like about this so for me the screen okay it could be brighter but it's for indoor use it's perfectly fine I like the fact that it's a anti-glare matte coated screen they one of my me my notebook pro is of course quite reflective it's covered with Gorilla Glass a type of gorilla notebook glass they have on that one here so the build of it is very good it's very solid okay yes it is plastic but we do have yes some metal on the lid here that's going to be prone to scratches and damage there but the hinges is very stiff there's very little flicks and moving things and overall the balance are there's the weight distribution the weight of it 2 point 2 kilos is good typing on that keyboard I do like it it's not quite as good as the mean of a prose keyboard but it is very solid there's not that much flex on it and a little bit more Crampton of course because they have decided that this time around they would include that numerical keypad there so you've got all your number keys and things on there that a lot of people do like the look of it being minimalistic is great as well I like the fact that you can hardly see any logos on it you just see them me one down here that's it don't he show me like on this speakers are all so loud the touch pad has a nice smooth finish to it and it does work really well of course using Windows precision drivers it is basically the same exact touch pad just without the fingerprint reader in it so you obviously miss out on a few things compared to the pro model you don't have quite as good speakers the same loudness but not the same quality of sound don't have the finger in reader you've got a slower GPU and this one of course and the main thing is you have a smaller battery compared to the pro model the pro model has 60 watt hours this one has only 40 and in my tears thing so far my estimates remember just estimates I'll have the full details in the full review of this laptop and looking around about 6 hours because 41 hours for this kind of hardware is quite slim pickings really depends on what you are doing too as well so it could be four to six hour five to six hours there so it's not gonna have the greatest battery life out there there'll be other options out there so the big con 2 is of course that this comes with Windows 10 in Chinese but it's very easy to fix you can either take a drivers dump get all the drivers for it and then you can install Windows it'll pull through the CD key the license that is in the BIOS and then you won't have any trouble if you install Windows 10 home or we can do what I did that is upgrade to Windows 10 Pro and you keep the factory recovery partition if you ever want to reset it and resell it later on it's very important to keep that for resale value most people just wipe the whole thing right out and you lose all of that when you do a clean install so it does look very promising indeed there's not much to really dislike about it but I love the fact that we can upgrade the RAM I mean this thing sells for about 580 u.s. and that's only 4 gigabytes of RAM but if you add another 4 gigabyte RAM stick that's not a lot of money additionally then you have 8 it's running a dual channel you get very decent performance power limits and the under vaulting is ain't available to us it's it's an option that we can do this you can tweak that undervolt a little bit you can overclock the GPU quite a lot actually surprisingly the Maxwell always did overclock quite well so you can boost that right up and max that out so gaming performance as a weakness of this one if you want a game or get better performance at least game in 1080p on low settings then you go for the me notebook pro there as well that's another reason to go for that model so if you can't spend that additional then this I feel is a good option now of course 580 us in China means that when you get it from shops and retailers they have their markup on top of that because they buy it from dealers and you've got expenses as well to import it and things like that that's something else you need to factor and so ideally you're probably going to be paying realistically I would say about 650 but even so 650 for this laptop to me is a really good deal especially in Europe when you look at the spec the build quality of this what you're getting here in Spain at least for around that price there is absolutely nothing really that I can think all that could compare to this so they do have a one or I feel show me on their hands here so far really liking it oh and another thing is the fan profiles and fan noise on this really really good right now the fans not even on and if I was using my mean up a pro if it was connected to power the fan would be on right now probably very low setting but it goes on and off fan profiles and that model aren't so great but on this one here the thermals seem really good fan profiles excellent so far that most of the time like work and even some demanding work at times you don't hear the fan at all so they wait the the sitter sitting on there to get it up to about five fifty five degrees Celsius before the fan kicks in on a low rpm sitting to help cool things down a little bit we're it really good but overall looking like a decent laptop I hope to catch you back with the final review this one and perhaps maybe even a look at gaming on this if we can play some newer titles or older less demanding titles on this here and what kind of settings we need to go with and if you haven't check out my review of the meet notebook Pro right up here and the Meno Book Pro GTX model 2 that's here that has the Nvidia 1050 and that one with 4 gigabytes of RAM bye for now