Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Review

Performance

Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 is based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 AIE (MSM8976 Plus) system-on-chip. It was announced in the spring of 2017 and uses the 14nm LPP (Low Power Plus) process and is specifically designed for mid-range and upper-mid-range smartphones. The chipset houses eight semi-custom Kryo 260 CPU cores. The first cluster of four (Cortex-A73) is clocked at 2.2GHz and the other four cores (Cortex-A53) tick at 1.84GHz. An Adreno 512 GPU clocked at 650MHz manages the graphics department. The SoC supports Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 (3.1 + AEP), OpenCL 2.0 Full, OpenGL 3.1, and Direct3D 12. The Redmi Note 7 is equipped with a double-channel LPDDR4X RAM clocked at 1866MHz in three variants - 3/4/6GB. There are three storage versions as well - 32/64/128GB. The built-in memory is of the eMMC 5.1 type and can be expanded with up to 256GB. We are reviewing the base 3GB+32GB version of the model. Of those 32GB on board, 20GB are available to the user. Other smartphones based on the Snapdragon 660 AIE chipset which we have reviewed include Xiaomi Mi Note 3, Smartisan Nut Pro 2, Elephone U Pro, Xiaomi Mi A2, Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite. If we have to compare the chipset in general, the results from the benchmark tests are close to those of devices based on the Snapdragon 820 chipset. Our review unit of the Redmi Note 7 has the third best Antutu 7.x.x result and the third best Antutu 6.x.x result. This chipset demonstrates an impressively stable single-core performance on Geekbench 4 across all tested devices and the Redmi Note 7 does not differ. However, the unit's multi-core Geekbench 4 result is on the low side compared to the other models we've tested. The 3DMark Sling Shote and Ice Storm results are close to those of the other devices, so are the PCMark Work and Computer vision results. The PCMark Storage and Androbench scores are also similar across all tested models based on the Snapdragon 660 chipset.