Xiaomi RedmiBook Pro 14 Review

The new Xiaomi RedmiBook Pro 14 looks like a serious work on bugs: they fixed the keyboard, improved the case, added a webcam and an unusual 2.5K screen for a Windows laptop. The configuration with the latest Intel processor should, in theory, provide excellent performance. How it actually happened, read the new review.

Xiaomi RedmiBook Pro 14 specifications:

Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor (4 cores, 8 threads).
Memory 16 GB.
512GB SSD (NVMe PCIe 3.0 × 4).
NVIDIA MX450 2GB GDDR5 Graphics.
Wi-Fi 802.11ax, BT 5.0.

New design and keyboard

Subjectively, the laptop looks better. The body feels solid and solid, with rounded corners and sharp edges. It turned out great, no creaks or backlashes. The lid can be opened with one hand. Redmi is light and compact, as befits an ultrabook.

It is noteworthy that the laptop itself does not have the word Pro. It is found only in system information and on the box. Earlier on the cover it was written Designed by Xiaomi, now Power Your Creativity. This is a reference to the alleged focus on professionals. Otherwise, the design of the laptop is still minimalistic, without patterns and unnecessary elements.

The keyboard has been seriously improved. Now typing on RedmiBook is much more enjoyable. There is a firm tactile response, and the sound of the keys has become quieter. But for some reason the touchpad rattles. Feels like it was left exactly the same as in the old Redmi.

For the first time in the RedmiBook line, a webcam has appeared, except for the gaming Redmi G. For the paranoid it is a nightmare, but for the era of video calls – the right solution. True, the quality of the shooting itself is low.

The laptop turned out to be rich in a variety of connectors: one USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, one USB C with charging support and one Thunderbolt 4. There is a full-fledged HDMI connector to output video to an external monitor. The result is a good selection of ports, which not every Ultrabook has for the same price.

Display

Large screen resolutions are rare for Windows laptops. In most cases, you have to be content with Full HD. Only expensive models come across a higher resolution. RedmiBook Pro received a 2560 × 1600 pixel panel with a diagonal of 14 inches (model Panda LM140GF1L02). Matrix – IPS with wide viewing angles, normal color rendition and high contrast.

Thin bezels and a good display leave only positive impressions. I would like more such screens in laptops.

Performance

As expected, the laptop performed well in synthetic tests. Still, the configuration is powerful here, even on paper. In practical work, the laptop also performed well. The real workload was running 30 tabs simultaneously in Chrome browser, including Full HD YouTube videos, operations on a huge Excel spreadsheet, batch processing of TIFF photos in Adobe Photoshop, and rendering the Classroom demo scene in Blender. There were no delays in switching between applications. Everything worked quickly.

In tasks with a high load on the processor, the laptop became very hot. For example, only when rendering in Blender, the average temperature was 85 °, and the consumption was 28 watts. Like many processors, the Intel Core i7-1165G7 throttles. There is nothing surprising. When working in Blender, the frequency stabilized at 3200 MHz on mains power and 2900 MHz on battery. AIDA64 in the stress test of the system recorded throttling at 22%. High heating was repeated in batch processing of photos in Adobe Photoshop. The average temperature is 81°. The hot case was felt both on the underside of the laptop and on the keyboard. At the same time, the only fan is almost inaudible in the office noise.

With simple operation, there are no such problems. Surfing the web, working with text, watching videos, streaming movies to TV, and editing a couple of photos in Photoshop do not cause much heat and anxiety.

RedmiBook Pro 14 is equipped with discrete graphics NVIDIA GeForce MX450. Today we know about three variants of this chip in laptops. Redmi received not the worst – 2 GB GDDR5, frequency 1395-1575 MHz. Someone may think that playing on ultrabooks is an ignoble business. Nevertheless, there is such an opportunity on Redmi. Favorite “The Witcher 3” at low settings gave out 51 frames per second. The heating problem is still there.

What can be improved?

In general, nothing. Ultrabooks as a class are not designed for upgrades, unfortunately. There are exceptions here, but Redmi is not one of them.

Autonomy

*Xiaomi RedmiBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 14*

The laptop lasted 6 hours and 48 minutes from a single charge. Without keyboard backlighting, at 70% screen brightness, with improved battery mode and especially when working with text in a browser. For the price of a laptop, the result is very average. With the same settings when watching movies – 6 hours 9 minutes. The laptop is charged up to 100% in almost 2 hours, and up to 50% in 45 minutes.

Includes a 65W USB-C power supply. This charging format is very useful today and eliminates the need to carry a lot of wires for all devices. For example, it turned out to be easy to charge an Android smartphone with a bundled cable from a laptop.

Allusions to the MacBook are striking: similar appearance, almost the same keyboard shape, large touchpad, the same screen resolution. It was not possible to closely compare the performance this time, so we will not draw conclusions about which is better. We only note that the RedmiBook Pro in the Catalog cost almost the same as the MacBook Air 13” on the M1 processor.

What’s Pro here?

Positioning a laptop as a “pro” should imply its use by professionals in order to make money. The bottom line here for such people is only a 2.5K screen and a lot of ports. The cooling system cannot cope with the load, and the computer heats up a lot in difficult tasks. However, it cannot be called a weak laptop. Still, his configuration is serious. Yes, it warms up, but it does its job. In all tests, the laptop performed well.

The RedmiBook Pro lasted about 7 hours of battery life in light use. Formally, this is not even a full-time job. And if the load is greater, then the operating time will decrease. For its price, a weak indicator.

In RedmiBook Pro, although they fixed the mistakes of previous laptops in the series, they made new ones. Although a quad-core Intel processor “drags” in difficult tasks, but at the cost of high heating and power consumption. What alternative could there be? With the same screen and the same price, most likely only a MacBook on the M1. At the end of last year, information appeared about the RedmiBook Pro 14S on the new AMD Ryzen 5000 series, but they are not on sale yet, as well as their full characteristics are not available.