Xiaomi has just posted on their Weibo and forums that the Mi Gaming laptop and Mi Notebook Pro 15.6″ laptops are in for an upgrade. Two of which are an upgrade to the GPU for the Mi Notebook Pro I predicted (But it was obvious) And the CPU for the Mi Gaming laptop, again obvious.
The Mi Notebook Pro now gets an upgrade in three key areas the GPU is now a GTX 1050 Max-Q with 4GB of DDR5 RAM. A welcomed GPU upgrade to give this laptop an FPS boost in games.
The cooling has also improved, new blades to help with the added heat. The CPU remains the same, the Intel i7 8550U. Since there is no new 9th Gen U i7 CPU we will have to wait for the end of the rear or begging of next for that. And lastly, the SD card slow is UHS-II spec with 312MB/s reads max. A nice upgrade for sure, but I would have loved to have seen a touchscreen and thunderbolt 3 added. Then it would be almost perfect. No word if it got the gigabit Intel Wireless AC? I hope so. The rest of the spec is the same Samsung NVMe 256GB PM961 and spare M.2 2280 NVMe or SATA 3 slot.
The power supply is now 90W to handle the extra draw of the Nvidia 1050 4GB MAX-Q but remains Type-C.
It’s available on the 16th and sells for $921 USD in China for the i5 8250U, 8GB RAM, 256GB NVMe and GXT 1050 Max-Q. And $1,111 for the i7 8550U, 8GB, 256GB and GTX 1050 MAX-Q 4GB model. I’m 90% sure I’ll review this model to check the thermals and performance etc vs my current i5 8250U + Nvidia MX150 model.
The Mi Gaming Laptop gets the six core, 8th gen i7 8750H. This is what I should have shipped within in the first place. The memory card reader is now UHS-I spec. So no more USB 2.0 24Mb/s crappy limit (yay!) But now over 100MB/s reads and writes. And Intel wireless AC gigabit 2×2 speed card. My guess is the Intel Wireless 9260 with BT 5.0?
The move to the six-core 8th Gen Intel i7 means you can expect up to around 35%+ multicore performance gain over the i7 7700HQ, games will not really benefit from this apart from the 4.1Ghz higher turbo but for media creators out there this will really speed things up.
The other improvement is the RAM speeds has increased to 2666Mhz DDR4 up to 16GB, slightly more memory bandwidth. This, of course, is from the move to the new 8th gen chip.
The last change is the bios now has gaming features, a visual bios with GPU, CPU clocks, fan profiles maybe? And other tweaks.
The Mi Gaming laptop first model I review was a good laptop, but far from perfect. It’s loud but runs cool and my biggest complaint was the location of the macro keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard rather than above it. Sadly, Xiaomi hasn’t redesigned the keyboard, or Thunderbolt 3 or added a 120hz low refresh screen option. I think they should have, but I guess that would add a huge additional cost. My review of this first-gen model is below. And I’m really on the fence as to whether or not I should review it considering the GPU options are the same, the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB or GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. The rest of the configuration is the same.
It’s on sale on now taking orders and deliveries start on the 16th of this month. The based model with a Core i5-8300H (4 cores, 4.0Ghz max) version with Nvidia 1050 TI is $969 USD in China. And the top spec Intel Core i7 8750H (6 cores, 4.1Ghz max), 16GB DDR4 2666Mhz, 256GB + 1 TB HDD and Nvidia GXT 1060 6GB model sells for 1316 USD.
Source: Xiaomi Forums (Chinese)
Press material on the Mi Gaming Laptop upgrade in August 2018.
Offical website: Mi Notebook Pro GTX & Mi Gaming Laptop