Xiaomi’s previous notebooks have received a lot of praise, and thus have established a firm foothold in the notebook market. Xiaomi recently launched a Xiaomi Book Pro 14 Ryzen Edition notebook, which is still very attractive to many users. But whether its actual performance can reassure users to use it as a productivity tool, we will have an in-depth experience with it.

• $758 – Check latest price on AliExpress (Ryzen Edition), AliExpress (Intel Edition)

01/ Appearance Design & Battery Life

Xiaomi Book Pro 14 still continues the simple style design of previous generations of products. There is no other embellishment on the A side except the centered XIAOMI logo design. The fuselage is made of aviation-grade aluminum alloy as a whole. Both the A and C sides have CNC cutting technology, and the notebook surface also adopts ceramic sandblasting technology, which is not easy to leave obvious fingerprint marks when carrying and using. The metallic texture also gives this notebook an obvious business temperament.

Although Xiaomi Book Pro 14 Ryzen Edition is a notebook made of metal material, its thickness is only 14.9mm and its weight is 1.4kg. Portability is also taken into account without compromising the quality of workmanship. Of course, there is a price to make the body thinner, and the notebook only has 4 ports. They are 3 USB Type-C ports and 1 3.5mm headphone microphone port. The 3 Type-C interfaces all support the USB3.2 Gen2 standard and PD fast charging protocol, 2 of which are full-featured Type-C and support the DP1.4 protocol. However, it is not very friendly for users who have USB Type-A interface requirements, but Xiaomi provides a Type-C to Type-A adapter.

The notebook has a built-in 65Wh battery and comes standard with a 100W GaN charger, so it will not feel cumbersome to bring a data cable and a charger. The laptop can be charged to 50% in about 30 minutes. During use, I found that some 65W gallium nitride chargers can also charge the notebook in emergency. In terms of battery life, it can ensure some simple typing tasks or video and audio playback.

02/ Display & Keyboard

The Xiaomi Book Pro 14 Ryzen Edition has a 14-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 2800*1800 and supports a 90Hz refresh rate. And because the screen is made of OLED material, the color performance is gorgeous. Of course, everyone should also pay attention to the burn-in problem caused by long-term use, and try not to let the notebook display a screen for too long in the standby state. It is also a good practice to set a dynamic screensaver, and there is also a perceptually noticeable dispersion of the edges of the font outline. In addition, the screen also supports a peak brightness of 600nit. However, it is a pity that compared to the Intel processor edition, this Ryzen edition notebook cancels the touch design. But from a personal point of view, the touch function of the notebook is not just needed, and it does not matter if this function is cancelled.

Because many designers and photography workers have higher requirements for the color accuracy of notebooks. Although it is officially stated that this OLED screen supports 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and Delta E is less than 1, we still need to test and verify it. From the results, this notebook supports 100% sRGB, 88% Adobe RGB and 98% P3 color gamut, and the color gamut is still very wide. In terms of color accuracy, the maximum value of Delta E is 2.65, the minimum value is 0.78, and the average value is 1.5. Although the actual test average Delta E is still greater than 1, in fact, as long as the average value is less than 2, there is no need to worry too much about color accuracy. Image post-processing with this notebook is also no problem.

There is a 720p resolution camera at the top of the notebook. Although the image quality of 720p is relatively average, it can still play a significant role in online classes and remote conferences. When the camera is turned on, the white indicator light on the right also lights up at the same time. However, this camera does not have a physical anti-snooping design. If you want to protect private information, you may have to put stickers on the camera yourself when you don’t use the camera.

The keyboard on the C side is equipped with a full-size backlit keyboard with a key travel of 1.3mm, and the tapping feedback experience is good. The touchpad has a large range, and the operation of pressing and multi-finger gestures is smooth. It should be noted that the row of keys where the ESC key is located and the up and down keys of the arrow keys are all half-size specifications, so you need to get used to it when typing blindly. If you are typing in a dark environment, you can also turn on the keyboard backlight function to see each key clearly, and the backlight brightness of the keys can also be adjusted by yourself, but turning on the backlight function will have a certain impact on the battery life of the notebook.

There is a “Xiaoai” icon button in the upper right corner of the keyboard, click to quickly call out the voice assistant on the notebook. In usage scenarios such as querying the weather and language translation, the voice assistant can give the answer. In the upper right corner of the “Xiaoai” button is a circular switch key, which integrates the Windows Hello fingerprint unlocking function.

03/ Performance

Next we take a look at the performance specifications of the Xiaomi Book Pro 14 Ryzen Edition. The CPU is AMD Ryzen 7 6800H, 8 cores and 16 threads, 6nm process technology. The single-core score of Cinebench 23 is 1506pts, and the multi-core score is 12070pts. In the camp of notebooks, this performance is still relatively good.

Although this notebook does not provide a discrete graphics version, the AMD Radeon 680M it is equipped with is also the top core graphics card in the AMD camp. The performance of this core graphics card has a Fire Strike score of 6910 in 3D Mark, which is a good performance in the product category of core graphics cards.

Storage specifications are dual-channel 16GB LPDDR5-6400 memory and 512GB SSD. Using AIDA64 to test the performance of the memory stick, the memory read speed of single-channel 8GB memory reaches 45126MB/s, the write speed is 51193MB/s, and the memory copy speed reaches 52106MB/s.

The notebook’s 512GB SSD is divided into a 146GB system C drive and a 329GB D drive. Since the SSD supports the PCIe 4.0 protocol, it performs well in the CrystalDiskMark running score. The read speed of the C drive is 3489.31MB/s, and the write speed is 3174.70MB/s. The read speed of the D disk is 3521.80MB/s, and the write speed is 3166.52MB/s. Combining the read and write of the two hard drives, the read speed is basically around 3500MB/s, and the write speed is close to 3200MB/s. Taking into account the upper limit of the flash memory bandwidth of SSD, this read and write performance is still in line with the normal performance of the current PCIe 4.0 hard disk.

Next, we conduct a comprehensive performance test of the notebook through PCMark 10. The test results show that the basic score is 7359 points, the productivity score is 4840 points, the digital content creation score is 6160 points, and the total score is 4324 points. In the endurance test, when the backlit keyboard is turned off and the volume is at 20%, the continuous work lasted for 9 hours and 4 minutes. Therefore, it can still meet the needs of high-intensity office work in a day.

During the 30-minute single roast (FPU running at full load), the maximum temperature on the C side of the notebook was 53.9.°C. Located in the F4 key area of ​​the keyboard, the area in the middle of the C surface also heats up significantly, reaching 50.3 ℃. Other key areas are basically below 45 ℃. During a single roast, the CPU temperature touched the upper limit of 100°C, and the power remained around 50W.

In addition, considering that this is a Xiaomi notebook, and Xiaomi is also working on creating an ecological chain of multi-screen collaboration, it is time to take a look at the MIUI+ multi-screen collaboration performance of this notebook. The actual experience found that the pairing process of the notebook and the mobile phone is very simple, and the cross-platform file transfer has become more convenient, and the practicability is quite high. If you are a Xiaomi mobile phone user, this function can indeed bring some additional advantages to the experience.

From the comprehensive experience, Xiaomi Xiaomi Book Pro 14 Ryzen Edition is indeed a lightweight and easy-to-use notebook. If it is a Xiaomi mobile phone user, the office efficiency will be further improved. Coupled with the high-quality display performance of the OLED screen, this product is indeed a portable notebook for mobile office.

• $758 – Check latest price on AliExpress (Ryzen Edition), AliExpress (Intel Edition)