Xiaomi Mi A3 Review

Performance

Xiaomi Mi A3 and its China-bound twin - Mi CC9e are the first smartphones based on a Snapdragon 665 system-on-chip. Announced 4 months ago, this new SoC is created for the modern mid-range smartphones which are meant to offer better great mobile gaming, better cameras, and better performance. It is built on Samsung's 11nm LPP process and features Qualcomm's 3rd generation AI engine. The CPU consists of eight Kryo 460 cores in a dual-cluster arrangement - four clocked at 2GHz and four - at 1.8GHz. An Adreno 610 GPU manages the graphics department. However, the Mi A3 lacks the Game Turbo, Mi Turbo and application launch acceleration features which are found on its Mi CC9e sibling which runs on MIUI. There are 4GB of dual-channel LPDDR4X RAM clocked at 1866MHz and the UFS 2.1 storage arrives in two versions - 64GB and 128GB. Either way, the built-in memory can be expanded with up to 256GB. We are reviewing a 64GB version and of those 64GB, 50GB are available to the user. Our review unit scored 140444 points in AnTuTu 7 and according to our performance comparison charts, this clearly places it on one level with the Snapdragon 660, Helio P60 and Helio P70 chipsets. The single-core Geekbench 4 result of 1531 points puts it closer to the same SoCs plus the Helio X27 and the multi-core Geekbench 4 result of 5606 points confirms that. On the 3DMark Sling Shot and Ice Storm tests, the Mi A3 scores less than its Snapdragon 660-based counterparts - Mi A2, Mi Note 3. Redmi Note 7. However, on the PCMark tests, it is exactly the opposite and the results are definitely in favour of the Mi A3 model. As long as it concerns storage performance, the PCMark Storage test shows typical results for UFS 2.1 type of memory - around 11000 points. That's what other smartphones with this type of memory have shown - Mi 9, OnePlus 6T. Others score even less. However, the Androbench test shows results that are lower than the typical ones for UFS 2.1 memory.