The Nubia Red Magic 3 Review: A 90Hz Gaming Phone With Active Cooling
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 27, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- ZTE
- Nubia
- Snapdragon 855
- Nubia RedMagic 3
GPU Performance
GPU performance of the Red Magic 3 is something I was particularly looking forwards to given it’s the only phone we have that actually has active cooling built in to its hardware design. The small fan has an air intake at the rear of the phone underneath the camera, and exhausts it on the side next to the volume buttons on the right of the phone. The fan can be toggled on and off in the software, and additionally have RPM settings of “auto” based on CPU temperature and maximum RPM. The fan is audible but it’s certainly not loud.
Unfortunately based on my extensive testing with the phone under different scenarios, I just wasn’t able to discern any kind of impact by the fan’s operation. Running the sustained performance tests with the fan on and off showcased a temperature difference of maybe 0.5°C, measured both in terms of peak skin temperature as well as reported by the phone’s gaming OSD temperature metric. I thought that maybe at least if temperature didn’t drop, at least performance would change, but again unfortunately the performance differences measured here were in the realm of measurement variability, differing a maximum of 1-5% in the sustained performance results compared to having the fan off.
The problem here is that he little fan just isn’t able to move enough air to actually make any kind of a difference to the significantly higher thermal envelope of the phone. The tiny amount of hot air coming out of the exhaust just pales compared to what’s radiated out by the whole body of the phone.
Given that there’s no noticeable difference with the fan on or off, there was no point in publishing two sets of performance numbers.
In the 3Dmark Physics test, the Red Magic fares very well and comes only second to the OnePlus 7 Pro when it comes to its throttling behaviour, amongst Snapdragon 855 phones that is.
In the Graphics test, the RM3 throttles a little bit more, but it’s still ahead of the majority of other Snapdragon 855 phones out there.
Overall, the Red Magic 3’s sustained performance is quite good, although it’s not quite as outstanding as the Reno 10x’s or the OnePlus 7 Pro’s. On the other hand, the positive about this is that the RM3 doesn’t get nearly as hot as those devices, and while it’s still certainly a warm phone when under full load, it’s still comfortable enough to hold. I think the RM3 here achieves a good balance between performance and thermals.
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stephenbrooks - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
The irony I've noticed is the higher-end the phone (or laptop) is, the faster the battery seems to drain. Presumably because of high-spec components.oRAirwolf - Saturday, September 28, 2019 - link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AraEj24 - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Aradidn't pan out
webdoctors - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
The future is streaming, even consoles in the living room are headed towards cloud streaming. With 5G and wifi everywhere on the horizon, its nuts to try to lug a highend SoC into the mobile arena.If an Nvidia Shield TV with 3 GB RAM can do streaming no reason you need such a high end SoC for a streaming gaming phone. They could build a proper streaming gaming phone and have it with much better battery life and lower cost.
peevee - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
Streaming sucks, streaming over wireless sucks more (hint: large and unpredictable latency).peevee - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
Plus of course ongoing subscription costs.abufrejoval - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
Streaming doesn't have to be from the cloud: Your gaming desktop in the next room might do just as well.I use that for kid's LAN parties, where I put notebooks on the dinnertable to avoid lugging the gaming towers to the "hot spot".
And yes, cables, even 100Mbit/s, beat WiFi any time of the day even for local streaming (e.g. Steam remote play).
Of course, a certain degree of masochism is required to game on a phone when you can have a proper screen (or simply younger eyes).
PeachNCream - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
I used to do quite a bit of streaming via Steam from a desktop PC that I had running headless and crammed into a corner near my cheap ISP router. It was wired at 100mbit. The other end was an Atom n450 netbook running Linux on WiFi and its NIC topped out at 54mbit. It was pretty good for stuff like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Latency was decent even when there was other usage of the local network for things like Youtube streaming or web surfing (the gaming desktop was the only thing not on wireless so phones and other laptops were being used by family members). I wouldn't want to play a twitchy shooter type thing over it, but for pretty much anything else it worked really well. I think in the intervening three or so years, things have probably gotten better but I can't test that since I no longer have a gaming PC, just some casual stuff that runs natively under Linux on my laptops. I haven't even had Steam installed in the last couple of years since entertainment is slowly shifting over to my phone these days. There just isn't much need for PC gaming or streaming between PCs.FunBunny2 - Sunday, September 29, 2019 - link
"With 5G and wifi everywhere on the horizon"Real 5G???? outside of sports stadiums, not going to happen. hell, it can't even get into a stick built house. you'll need a rooftop antenna to capture the signal. just watch.
"Verizon uses a window or roof-mounted 28GHz antenna to grab the 5G signal, which is distributed via WiFi from a home router indoors."
here: https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/verizons-fi...
IOW, Real 5G ends up being little different from phone pole fiber.
peevee - Friday, September 27, 2019 - link
You have missed the most important spec of a mobile phone - wireless protocols/frequencies supported.It is not an iPod after all.