The Redmi Note 8 Pro is not a good choice for smartphone gamers

With the Redmi Note 8 Pro, the Chinese smartphone brand is mainly trying to appeal to gamers. Here, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 of the Redmi Note 8 has been replaced by the gaming-focused MediaTek Helio G90T, which is primarily directed at gamers and, in the case of the Note 8 Pro, has liquid cooling. The HyperEngine gaming technology is supposed to improve the gaming performance of the chipset.

The MediaTek chipset consists of an eight-core CPU cluster with 2 powerful Cortex A76 cores with a maximum clock rate of 2.05 GHz and an energy-efficient Cortex A55 cluster for simpler tasks. In conjunction with 6 GB of LPDDR4X RAM, the Helio G90T inside of the Note 8 Pro makes for a subjectively good system performance - this also includes our gaming tests.

However, the SoC "only" integrates a Mali-G76 MP4 graphics unit - a relatively weak choice for a gaming smartphone. By contrast, the Note 8 Pro's GPU only includes a third of the clusters compared to the Exynos 9820 inside of the Samung Galaxy S10. Thus, the graphics unit of the Helio G90T is less well suited to gaming and less future-proof on paper. While the system on a chip stems from MediaTek and is advertised by Xiaomi as a gaming SoC, users should be aware of the fact that the Note 8 Pro does not achieve the same high level of CPU and GPU performance as the Snapdragon 855 Plus. Instead the performance is more in line with that of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 730 series, which is also quoted as a comparable chipset by MediaTek.

Overall, Redmi's latest mid-range flagship smartphone still makes a good impression in our review and in light of the price of around 220 Euros (~$244) for the international version, we have few complaints and the SoC performance is not one of them. However, it should not be seen as a cheap alternative to Xiaomi's dedicated gaming smartphone family "Black Shark". Particularly since a performance loss during prolonged gaming sessions is more than likely on the Note 8 Pro. As our tests have shown, the frame rate noticeably decreases as the system load increases. There can be a performance deficit of around 20 percent. Furthermore, the mid-range smartphone shows an overheating notification during our stress test.

We recommend you to take a look at our in-depth review of the Note 8 Pro for a more detailed impression on the Redmi smartphone's qualities. The EU version is now available on TradingShenzhen, the online shop that kindly provided us with the test device.