Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2023 Review

About 20 years ago, "computer" was still an extremely expensive luxury item. As one of the most stylish appliances in the home, it often took several months of salary to buy one carefully. I don't know what it can be used for... ...However, I don’t know since when, everyone’s attitude towards the “computer”, a once high-ranking “big appliance”, has turned 180 degrees, and its status at home is getting lower and lower—even though computers are becoming more and more capable. More and more, the price is getting cheaper, but its status is not even as good as a mobile phone now! But it's true, it's hard to go out without a mobile phone now; without a computer, a mobile phone can do just about anything.

But if you really want to talk about productivity and home entertainment, including emerging needs such as online classes and online meetings, computers can do this kind of thing neatly, but you really don’t need those full-tower chassis and five-figure “desktops”: Takes up space and wastes money! So what form of home computer is most suitable? Xiaomi, which has been cultivating the "family bucket" for many years, has brought us the answer: Mi Mini PC 2022! Home appliances should return to their origins, cheap, flexible, compact, simple, and just enough!

Although Xiaomi has only entered the PC market for about six years, it has grown into an indispensable force in the PC market. In the past six years, the members of the Xiaomi PC family have been continuously improved, covering many categories such as thin and light notebooks, game notebooks, etc., but desktop hosts are a field that Xiaomi has never set foot in. However, at the Xiaomi 13 & MIUI 14 new product launch conference held a few days ago, Xiaomi also brought its first desktop PC, the Mi Mini PC, marking Xiaomi's full entry into the console field.

So, compared with notebook and desktop hosts, what kind of experience does this Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 bring to your users? How does it actually perform? Who is it more suitable for? This article will focus on analysis.

Specifications

Unboxing

The packaging of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 is very distinctive. On the front is a piece of C code, "Hello Xiaomi Mini PC!" Maybe it gives people a Geek feeling? In fact, after the experience, I feel that the Mi Mini PC is more suitable for ordinary households. The packaging is very simple. When you open the box, the main body of the Mini PC is directly exposed, which is only the size of a TV box!

The main accessory is the power adapter, which is a small 100W 20V-5A power adapter, but replaced with a 5.5×2.5mm DC interface, which is the same as the Intel NUC, but the power supply is much smaller!

Regarding why the DC interface is not used instead of the C port, the general statement is that the Type-C PD interface has a protocol handshake process, and the handshake may fail, and the power supply will be output at the lowest power. For laptops with battery support It doesn't matter, just shake hands again, but for a desktop PC, a handshake failure will cause a restart or a flash, and the safety certification will not pass. It is no problem as a "charger", but it is definitely not good as a "power adapter".

For security and stability, the traditional DC interface must be used-who remembers how many protocols are hung on USB Type-C? Look at this complicated table, which is the power supply and power status corresponding to PD 3.0. It needs to be adapted one by one by handshake. It is okay for emergency use, but the reliability of long-term operation is far inferior to that of DC.

Design and Appearance

The most striking part of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 is of course its shape. It is a relatively flat cuboid. If you don’t pay special attention, most people may think it is a router or a set-top box. Indeed, the portability of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 is really amazing. Its volume is only 0.44L, body measurements are 112 × 112 × 38mm, and the bare metal weight is only 437g, which is about the weight of two mobile phones. It is quite small , has even reached the limit of the Mini PC, this design saves the desktop space to the greatest extent, and at the same time it can be moved to different work scenes very conveniently.

Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 is not only small but also exquisite. The color of the fuselage is traditional business gray, which matches well with any scene. The word "Xiaomi" is printed on the top of the fuselage, and the edge of the fuselage is chamfered, which is very business-like. Bring users an extremely delicate and soft touch. The rest of the two sides are dense air intake and dust-proof ports. The entire host is machined from a whole piece of aluminum alloy CNC, with fine sandblasting treatment. The appearance is much better than Intel NUC, and the workmanship is definitely the best in the market. The first echelon of all Mini PCs!

Due to its special body design, the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 does not need to make too many choices in terms of body expand-ability like a notebook. It has a very rich variety of Grand Slam interfaces. There are two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and one 3.5mm port on the front of the fuselage. The bigger highlight is on the back of the fuselage, which has 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2 HDMI 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, 1 USB 2.0 port and 1 2.5G network port. Among them, the addition of the Thunderbolt 4 interface can not only bring an efficient data transmission experience to the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022, but also connect the expansion dock, external graphics card, etc. through this interface to further improve the performance of the whole machine, and the two HDMI 2.0 interfaces can be connected at most 4 monitors at 4K 60Hz.

Since the WIFI antenna is placed at the bottom, plastic material is used to ensure that the signal passes through. The power supply and the host together are about the size of a bottle of soda can, but a 4+8 core CPU is stuffed inside! I have to lament the rapidity of PC discovery in recent years.

Putting it together with an integrated display notebook with a similar configuration, many people (including me) will have this question before actually using a Mini PC: this thing has a configuration similar to that of a notebook, and the price is not much cheaper. Why don’t I buy a notebook? However, after actually using the Mini PC, you will find that the two are not in a competitive relationship, but complement each other and are irreplaceable. First of all, with the development of PCs becoming more and more powerful, machines like Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 are enough to meet almost all the needs of daily home PCs, except for AAA game but if you want to play AAA game, it is not a few.

Things that can be done with a thousand dollars are better than buying a game console, so the concept of "a computer should be a big box" is outdated; secondly, the essence of a laptop is mobile use, if you want to sit there for a long time , the small screen + limited keyboard experience is far inferior to the large screen + full-size keyboard, and if you use a notebook as a desktop - then it is better to use a Mini PC, at least the footprint is still small! I really want to say that I only move the machine occasionally, or take it from home to the office.

I even think that the Mini PC is more convenient to carry. Anyway, keyboards, mice, and monitors are everywhere now. The real Mini PC "may" be irreplaceable, probably I need to adjust a program on the side of the road or in the car for a temporary urgent job, but that kind of scene can be encountered several times a year, and there is not no temporary alternative...not to mention the thin and light notebook Experiences such as performance release and noise temperature are definitely not comparable to Mini PCs.

As for the comparison with the high-performance desktop at home, I personally feel that there is no comparison. Now high-performance DIY PCs have been completely reduced to a niche plaything. Take a look at the RTX4090 FE graphics card, which is already the smallest graphics card. It is about the size of 5 or 6 Mini PCs, not to mention the price of 1500 USD. 99% of the performance requirements of computers can be covered by Mini PCs, and the remaining 1% are basically students and professional users who play games. For the "silent majority", the performance of this host is also overflowing. Yes - has Xiaomi considered going back and releasing a cheaper Redmi PC?

Even in terms of game performance, the 12th generation i5 plus dual-channel memory is not a big problem to cope with the AAA masterpieces of the past few years, such as Red Alert 3 or LOL, which can even run at full capacity at 1080P, and connect an XBOX controller to play simulation Devices and the like are also very comfortable, the host is not even as big as a handle!

Disassembly

As for the disassembly, it is also very simple. After all, Xiaomi also specially provides a barebone version without a memory hard drive. Simple dismantling will not affect the warranty of the factory product. There are four screws hidden under the four foot pads at the bottom, and it will be exposed when the foot pads are removed, without any hindrance such as glue.

After opening, the first thing you see is the shielding/reinforcement case, and the WIFI antenna on the bottom cover. Below the shielding case is the motherboard of the Xiaomi Mini PC, which has been pre-installed with 2 memory sticks and 1 M.2 SSD. The SSD has a thermal pad connected to the shielding case to help dissipate heat.

Remove the pre-installed memory and SSD to expose the motherboard, and you can see the words Intel NUC, which also confirms Xiaomi’s official statement that the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022is a consumer-grade product based on Intel NUC 12 ProWall Street Canyon, which is deeply customized and transformed , its prototype Wall Street Canyon belongs to the Pro commercial product line in Intel NUC, the corresponding previous generation is Tiger Lake Tiger Canyon, and the previous generation of consumer-grade NUC Performance is Panther Canyon Cheetah Canyon, which was directly cut off when it reached the 12th generation. Still wondering if Intel doesn’t plan to make consumer-grade products, but the truth came to light after seeing Xiaomi’s Mini PC: So it’s here!

Because it is customized from a commercial Pro professional product, the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022still retains a bit of a commercial product shadow, for example, there is a cable interface next to the AX211 wireless network card, this interface is reserved for the SATA interface of Wall Street Canyon, and there are A 2242 size M.2 NGFF SATA interface, which can expand the M.2 hard disk of SATA protocol.

The pre-installed memory of the machine at hand is two original Samsung DDR4 3200 8G, forming a 16GB dual-channel specification, which can be regarded as a high-standard product in the memory.

The SSD is the domestic YMTC PC300, which is a popular PCIE 4.0 4X SSD.

Hardware and Performance

Although the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC has a unique shape, its performance should not be underestimated. It can be seen from Master Lu’s hardware testing report that the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC uses the brand new Intel 12th generation Core processor – Intel Core i5-1240P, and is also equipped with 16GB DDR4 3200MHz memory and 512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Overall, this set of hardware is more than enough for daily office work. So what is the actual performance of this set of hardware? Let’s enter the running score test to reveal the answer for you.

CPU-Z

Judging from the basic information of the processor scanned by CPU-Z, this Intel Core i5-1240P processor adopts the Alder Lake architecture and 10nm process, with a TDP of 28W, 4 performance cores and 8 energy efficiency cores. The frequency can reach 4.4GHz, and the L3 cache capacity can reach 12MB. Compared with the 11th-generation Core processor, the biggest difference of this processor is that it adopts a new heterogeneous design of large and small cores and a 10nm process technology, and the performance of both multi-core and single-core has been greatly improved.

The paper parameters of Intel Core i5-1240P are bright enough, so the actual performance did not disappoint everyone. In the CPU-Z benchmark test, the Intel Core i5-1240P has a multi-core score of 5670 points and a single-core score of 700 points.

Cinebench R15 Test Scores

Cinebench R23 Test Scores

Intel Core i5-1240P’s other CPU performance test software also performed well. In Cinebench R15, the multi-core score was 1735cb, and the single-core score was 200cb; in Cinebench R23, the multi-core score was 10228pts, and the single-core score was 1679pts.

CPU Profile Test Results

In the 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme test, the graphics score of the Iris Xe GPU is 1851 points, which is comparable to the full-blooded MX 250 discrete graphics card. The score of 3DMark Time Spy is 1285, the maximum frequency of Iris Xe GPU can reach 1297MHz, the maximum temperature is 74 degrees, and the maximum power consumption is 14.8W.

Overall, due to the special body design of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022, the test results of the Intel Core i5-1240 are better than those of the desktop, indicating that the CPU performance of the Mi Mini host is better.

Intel XE Core Graphics Parameters

At the same time, the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 integrates an Intel Xe core display. This core display has 96 stream processors and a working frequency of 1300MHz. It has excellent graphics processing capabilities, which can meet the needs of daily office use, and can also run some Entry-level online games.

CrystalDiskMark 8.0 Test Score

The performance of the hard disk and memory of the Mi mini host is also extremely good. It is equipped with a PCIe 4.0 SSD with a capacity of 512GB. In the special test of CrystalDiskMark 8.0 hard disk performance, the sequential reading speed of the Mi mini host is 3925.99MB/s, the sequential writing speed is 2859.63MB/s, and the 4k random reading speed It is 64.04MB/s, and the 4k random write speed is 161.40MB/s. Generally speaking, such performance has reached the cutting-edge level of PCIe 4.0 SSD, indicating that it has a very powerful data transmission capability.

Memory Test Scores

In terms of memory, the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 uses 16GB DDR4 3200MHz memory, the maximum read speed of this memory is 47157MB/s, the maximum write speed is 46796MB/s, the maximum copy speed is 43628MB/s, and the delay time is 97.2ns. This kind of performance has reached the mainstream level of DDR4 memory, which can effectively improve the multi-tasking ability and system responsiveness of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022.

H264 Benchmark test results

The powerful hardware configuration makes the Mi Mini host have more excellent office performance. We conducted a video encoding test and a file decompression test on this host. In the H264 Benchmark encoding performance test, it took only 46 seconds for the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 to complete the video encoding, and the frame rate reac hed 54.63 frames, which shows that it does not have too much pressure to perform some high-load video encoding.

7-Zip Test Scores

The compression and decompression of files also consumes a lot of CPU resources, which is also a great test for the performance of the CPU. We used 7-Zip software to conduct 5 rounds of compression performance tests. The compression speed reached 43766KB/s, and the decompression speed reached 547542KB/s. The overall task took 1 minute and 20 seconds, and the overall score was 49355MIPS. It shows that the Mi Mini host has very powerful file compression and decompression capabilities.

PCMark 8 Test Scores

In addition, we also conducted a performance test on the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022. In the office mode of PCMark 8, the final test score of the Mi Mini host was 3533 points, indicating that it has excellent overall performance and can execute smoothly. Various complex tasks.

In terms of overall test, the personal evaluation of the performance of this Mini PC is-enough!

Since single-core performance is not affected by power consumption constraints, the 12th generation single-core 4.4GHz level has surpassed the 11th generation i7. In terms of multi-core, 4P+8E has a total of 16 threads, and it can even be flat when the power consumption is only one-third. The 10th generation 10700K is still the "high-end configuration" in the eyes of most users! Before questioning "performance is not enough", let's see what level 10700K is!

In the daily home environment, commonly used productivity software and tool software, etc., can be effectively accelerated by the Iris Xe integrated graphics card. Even in video editing, the powerful trans-coding capability brought by Quick-sync is completely sufficient for 1080P video editing and processing. In terms of capacity, even 8K video is not a problem, which is quite enough for ordinary families.

Even if the integrated graphics card is reluctant to talk about the game, in fact, there is no big problem when you go deeper. Although my own steam game library has more than 500 games, there are only a few games that last a long time, especially in recent years. I really don't even have the desire to buy a AAA masterpiece, and the money to buy a few more AAA masterpieces can buy this mini console! On the contrary, I still play some older games and some online games occasionally. These games can run smoothly on the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 at 1080P resolution, and there is no pressure on entertainment needs.

It is also worth mentioning that the system of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 is really pure. Except for the Windows system itself, there is no software attached to it, not even its own signature MIUI+... But it is said that the follow-up The shipped machine will be pre-installed with MIUI+. With the powerful MIUI+, the Mini PC can be seamlessly connected with the mobile phone (currently recognized as a Xiaomi notebook in the software)

Power Consumption and Temperature

As for temperature and noise, due to the conservative 33W power consumption limit, the default power consumption strategy is to run PL1 64W for about 28 seconds, and then fall back to PL2. The continuous full-load fan speed is about 3200 rpm, and the noise performance is excellent It’s okay, the full load is about 40db, which is better than the thin and light notebooks with the same power consumption level, and the temperature is also kept at about 80 degrees; if you need higher performance, you can adjust the power consumption wall in the BIOS to the Cool strategy, which becomes 40W, although the power consumption is higher in this state.

The temperature will be lower instead, because the fan is also accelerated at this time, and the noise is more obvious, about 43-44db, but the multi-core performance has also increased by about 10% - personal I don’t think it’s meaningful. The multi-core performance is enough. If 33W is not enough, 40W or even 80W will not make any big improvement. After all, the specifications are there, so it’s better to choose a balance for the best user experience; The 28W in quiet mode is very easy, the P core only runs in the early 2G, and the noise is only about 38db. The experience is very good.

Conclusion

It is not difficult to see that, as a model in deep cooperation with Intel, the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022is actually inherited from Intel's own NUC Studio 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon, which can be said to be a deep "magically modified and optimized version", which improves the performance of a commercial model. Some of the pain points of Wall Street Canyon in the use of ordinary users have been redesigned to make the shell process more beautiful and more suitable for the attributes of household appliances. The most important thing is-not only is it more usable and beautiful, but it is also much cheaper! If the concept of "Mini PC is enough" can be popularized, this product will complete its mission. After all, computers don't need to be so expensive, and they don't need to be so big! Home appliances should be simple and sufficient !

Generally speaking, as the first desktop PC launched by Xiaomi, the Mi Mini PC 2022 did not disappoint the majority of users. First of all, it only has a body of 0.44L, which can be said to be extremely compressed in terms of body shape, and has unparalleled portability of traditional desktops or notebooks. The simple and exquisite appearance is suitable for any use scene, and it can also show the user's high grade. In addition, the good hardware configuration can also make the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 have better performance release, and perform various complex tasks smoothly. Very suitable for office workers or home users to buy.

The launch of the Xiaomi Mi Mini PC 2022 further improves the category layout of Xiaomi's entire PC product line, and also reflects Xiaomi's keen market insight and long-term strategic vision. The reason why Xiaomi did not rush to launch a traditional desktop PC is mainly because of the trend of portability, intensification, and high efficiency in the entire PC market, and the Mini PC just found a better balance between performance release and portability. The combination point is also an important development direction of office PCs in the future.