nowadays you can get the gaming horsepower of a playstation 3 or xbox
360 in the palm of your hand and mobile gaming has matured to the point where
many of your favorite titles will not only run on your iphone or Android
device but they'll even support cross play with your friends who did manage to
get their hands on a GPU or a next-gen console not that you want to have
anything to do with those smug but anyway but you're not mad
you're gonna make the best of a bad situation and get yourself a gaming
phone and good news because these things are actually getting to the point where
even if you don't give two hoots about mobile gaming they are chock full of
really cool tech so let's take a look at them
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under the hood every one of our gaming phones has got the basics right
all three of our contenders have 12 to 16 gigs of RAM a few hundred gigs of
storage and a qualcomm snapdragon 888
processor so no matter your choice current Android games are gonna run as
smooth and pretty as can be so pick whichever one's on sale and call it a
day then right well no
unlike a pc if you choose the wrong screen or the wrong speakers there's no
upgrading them later and because all of your components are in the palms of your
hands as you try to out frag your opponents suddenly we care about
thermals not just for how they affect performance
but also for how they affect comfort
performance first though we used gfx benchmark and 3dmark for synthetic
benchmarks and while all three devices were close there is a clear loser here
in car chase the red magic 6 pro rendered roughly 400 fewer frames than
the legion dual phone 2 and the rog phone 5 which were neck and neck in
3dmark wildlife the race at the top seems even tighter
but this benchmark only runs for a few minutes which might not tell us the
whole story so we'll call it a tie for now
at first glance screen quality seems close across the board but side by side
at max brightness the red magic 6 is noticeably dimmer than its counterparts
as for the dual phone 2 and rog phone 5 there's no obvious winner to my eye so
we'll let our calman calibration software and spectrophotometer make the
call it should be noted though that the legion has the advantage of having an
ever so slightly larger screen giving you a better view of your opponent
regardless of color accuracy as for audio the rog phone 5 seemed to have the
widest sound stage and therefore offered the most immersive gaming experience
with speakers but it was honestly a little hard for
the others to compete due to their noisy internal fans
whether this is a big deal to you is pretty much going to come down to
whether you use earphones or not while you're gaming because even without
active noise cancellation both of their cooling systems are easily blocked out
unlike my shoutouts to lttstore.com
wait hold on a second cooling systems
that's right both the 6 pro and the dual phone 2 have
blower fans inside them that means that
both of them are obviously much louder than a silent fanless phone
but one of them is clearly more annoying than the other
you guys hear that noise the red magic 6 has this distinctive
wine to it that gets annoying pretty fast as for the dual phone 2
i guess it's just the nature of the beast because
it's not a lot better if you're looking for some great audio
by the way make sure to get subscribed so you can check out our upcoming asmr
pc build video with the sweet sultry sounds of Anthony's voice
anyway back to our phones the clear winner for acoustics is the rog phone 5.
of course a lack of cooling isn't necessarily a feature
here's a fun fact if mobile games development studios left
everything uncapped or they allowed their games to run at the highest
possible level of detail fanless devices like the phone you're probably using now
would just get hotter and hotter until they're uncomfortable to handle
anecdotally while working on development builds testers at mobile studios have
been known to put their devices in freezers to cool them down between tests
now obviously finished games typically have a higher degree of polish but it's
still an important factor so we used our thermal imaging camera to run some
benchmarks and see how the heat spreads across the back of our devices while
gaming the idea to put all the hot components
in the center of the dual phone too actually kind of works your hands stay
cool on either side while the center fan keeps the heat under control the red
magic pro on the other hand has the clearest hotspot unfortunately directly
under one of your hands as for the rg phone 5 it manages to stay relatively
cool by spreading the heat across the device with the middle being the hottest
zone so this one's pretty easy then the dual phone 2 wins it hands down and that
carries over very handily to what is probably the most important metric for a
lot of you remember how i said performance was a tie for now
well most people don't play games for five minutes at a time with freezer
cooldowns in between so we ran 3dmark over and over again to measure how
performance will degrade during an extended gaming session
only the dual phone 2 held its ground here which is kind of surprising given
the red magic on paper has a similar active cooling solution but before we
declare the dual phone to our big winner it's worth noting that it has the worst
triggers out of the three each of these devices comes with a number of sensors
along the top that act as inputs so that you can keep your thumb off the screen
when you're lining up head shots and they're not all created equal whereas
the red magic triggers are almost hypersensitive even with the sensitivity
cranked down the dual phone 2 seems to require the most force to activate
unless your fingers are positioned perfectly i mean when it works it works
but it's easy for your fingers to slip or be lined up in a way that makes
pressing them more difficult than it needs to be as for the rg phone 5 not only does it
have the best triggers out of the bunch but it actually has extra rear triggers
as well that admittedly weren't easy to use but at
least they're there so the winner surprisingly is the rog phone 5. finally
there are some other features that separate these devices the rog phone 5
has the dubious honor of being the least comfortable due to its sizeable camera
bump although whether having a decent camera on your gaming phone is
worthwhile is up to you and kind of beyond the scope of this video and it's
the only device without an internal cooling fan but it comes with an
attachable fan that kept it running significantly cooler while also adding
an extra set of triggers as well as some extra battery life putting it 500
milliamp hours over the legion and almost a thousand milliamp hours over
the red magic 6 pro you should think long and hard before committing to a
device based on how it performs with a bulky accessory like this though because
i mean it's great for some extra performance at home but it seems
unlikely that you'd want to carry it around in your pocket all the time the
lenovo legion dual phone 2 on the other hand brings a lot to the table with a
720 hertz touch sampling rate that just
feels a bit more responsive than the other two devices and easily the most
comfortable ergonomic design even though it does fall behind with the quality of
its triggers as for the red magic 6 pro it's a bit
unremarkable here it's flat back is comfortable enough and it has faster
touch sampling than the rog phone 5 at 500 hertz compared to 300 hertz but the
only big extra feature it has going for it at least when it comes to gaming is
it's hertz refresh rate compared to 144 on
the other two it's also lacking a great feature that the other two have a
secondary charging port for horizontal use
so the red magic 6 pro yeah it's a contender but it doesn't stand out from
the crowd until you factor in the price if money is no object it's hard to go
wrong with the dual phone 2 or rg phone 5 but they both cost over a thousand us
dollars for a phone for gaming
meanwhile the red magic six pro was in the middle of the pack or at the back in
nearly every category and then absolutely knocked it out of the park
where it counts delivering way better value at just 750 bucks that is half the
price of the ASUS and for a more comfortable gaming experience even if it
does come at the cost of some screen brightness and performance
now for some of you the lack of a horizontal charge port will be a deal
breaker but for others the inclusion of a headphone jack will be an equally
important deciding factor especially since the lenovo doesn't have one
as for those of you who need both rog phone five for fifteen hundred us
dollars then or at that point should you just buy a GPU from a scalper
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Linus bottom line then which of these would
you buy do you even want a gaming phone or are you just still watching this
video in hopes that i'll start talking about something else
sorry it didn't happen