We at Gizmochina have been testing gaming smartphones for the past few years. We’ve played with and tested almost all the gaming phones released in 2020. And we don’t think there are any big gaming phones headed our way, in the final three months of the year. So, we decided to bring you guys a full comparison of the best 2020 gaming smartphones. The 4 candidates we selected are from the brands of Asus ROG, Black Shark, RedMagic, and Lenovo Legion. This is still a niche market, with only a handful of brands focused on the mobile-gaming segment.

The devices we selected are all the latest models from these brands: the ASUS ROG 3 vs Lenovo Legion Pro vs RedMagic 5S vs Black Shark 3S. Thanks to Snapdragon 865 platform, they’re all excellent game phones in 2020 with superb performance. But so far we haven’t brought all the latest models together to pit against each other. Let’s change that today and let’s check out which one sits on the throne of smartphone gaming in 2020.

ASUS ROG vs RedMagic vs Black Shark vs Lenovo Legion: Design

Let’s start with their designs. All the models have distinct rear designs inherited from PC-gaming hardware such as customized RGB Logo and straight-line metal shells, which set them apart from those ordinary flagships.

The Black Shark 3S, the ROG Phone 3, and the RedMagic all inherit the brands’ identifiable design from their respective predecessors, while the Legion Phone is Lenovo’s first gaming model, which has a very special design. Unlike the three others, the motherboard and main hardware including camera setups were placed in the middle. Although it looks a bit strange, the Legion Phone is the most effective model to solve the heating problem while holding the phone. And it creatively applies dual-battery and dual-charging design to top up its 5000mAh with the superb charging efficiency of up to 90W.

Display

And looking at their front displays, they all are equipped with an e-sports friendly large display. The sizes of their displays range from 6.6 to 6.7 inches. For the RedMagic 5S and the Legion Pro, their 6.65-inch displays share a lot of common features. They have the same 1080P resolution with the same 19.5:9 aspect ratio, both feature a 144Hz refresh rate and a 240Hz sampling rate and have very similar color reproduction. On the other hand, the Black Shark 3S is the only one featuring a 6.67-inch 120Hz display with a special 20:9 ratio and also features MEMC Frequency Doubling Technique to boost the framerate of regular streaming content at the hardware level. This means that the Black Shark model can provide a smoother visual experience for video playback. But we found that the effect is not always stable even in the same video. The MEMC technology can handle some simple images but is not very useful for highly dynamic images.

However, among all the gaming phones, we think the ROG Phone’s display is the best one. It’s the only one supporting 10-bit HDR and covering up to 113.3% of P3 color Gamut. And more importantly, the display can boost the refresh rate up to 160Hz using a developer tool, which is the highest refresh rate that we have on a smartphone so far. But pay attention here – under 160Hz mode, the color accuracy could be damaged. And its 270Hz sampling rate is also the highest option in the market, which also, unsurprisingly, made it the best model providing superb touch operation in our actual gaming tests.

ASUS ROG 3 vs RedMagic 5S vs Black Shark 3S vs Lenovo Legion Pro: Shoulder Buttons

Talking about their optimizations for gaming, three of them come with shoulder buttons. But for the Black Shark 3S, the special button operation is composed of only two pressure-sensitive areas. This complete shift to pressure-sensitive buttons is a bit surprising given how we felt the best shoulder-button design ever was on its predecessor, the Black Shark 3 Pro that featured a pair of mechanical pop-up shoulder buttons. It gave users a similar experience as what we had on a gamepad. So, we are very confused as to why Black Shark didn’t retain the physical button design on the new 3S model.

Anyway, let’s look back at the Master-Touch pressure sensors, which is also an iconic design for every Black Shark model. However, compared to the shoulder buttons on the other models, the pressure touch buttons require a larger learning curve to get used to it. It will take some time to adjust to the sensors and sometimes it may come in between your gaming experience, especially in the initial period.

On the other hand, it’s much easier to get used to the shoulder buttons on the other models. But the experience over these three models is a bit different. For example, the RedMagic 5S shoulder buttons feature a super-high sampling rate of 320Hz, which is even higher than its 240Hz display sampling rate. And compared with other models, the position of the shoulder buttons on the RedMagic model is also more comfortable for our fingers. While for the Legion Phone, the buttons are not really in the right position for comfortable holding, and sometimes it was frustrating when we failed to touch on the designated area to activate the button while gaming.

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Well for the ROG Phone, the buttons have more options for operations. For example, you can assign each of them into two shoulder buttons, or set them for sliding actions, or even reset each of them for Macro play. But to be honest, most of them were too complicated to use in most games. The reason we want more buttons is to simplify our operation beyond touching the small display when holding the phone, but it seems that these complicated options help little and not really lead to a good gaming experience.

Let’s take PUBG Mobile as an example. No doubt that ROG Phone has the best display operation as it has the highest sampling rate. Operating delay on the ROG model is almost imperceptible, which means that you may have the opportunity for a faster response, possibly knocking down the enemies faster than others in a gunfight. The experience of the RedMagic 5S is also not bad. The good and fast feedback of the shoulder buttons makes sure that your mapping operations like aiming and shooting can accurately locate enemies with a comfortable holding.

However, on the Legion Phone and the Black Shark 3S, the operation is not so comfortable. The additional buttons may cause miss touches. You have to be careful with the pressure level when setting the pressure sensing buttons on the display, or you may get confused between holding the pressure-touch and the normal display touch in intense fighting. On the Legion model, your fingers would easily get tired when holding the uncomfortable shoulder buttons or you could even miss the shooting and aiming operations by touching the wrong area of the buttons.

ASUS ROG vs RedMagic vs Black Shark vs Lenovo Legion: Performance

As for performance, all these 4 models are equipped with the Snapdragon 865 platform. But only the ROG Phone and the Legion Phone upgrade the chipset to the Plus version. But it brings little difference in daily use and even in most games. Especially, so far, considering heating issues, almost all the brands are pretty cautious about giving users access to the full power of the 865 platform. For example, the Black Shark 3S and the RedMagic 5S would warn you about heating when you turn on the best-performance mode, while the ROG Phone would even check whether you have attached a cooling fan when you try to turn on the best-performance mode for games. If you were not playing with a cooling fan attached, the ROG Phone would close it and automatically switch it to level 2 of the performance mode.

In the performance comparison, we are going to compare their highest performance as a single model without any accessories. First, let’s see how they performed in some benchmarks.

3DMark

In 3Dmark, although the two equipping the 865-Plus chipset did not reach the 10% improvement as claimed, they still achieved a 6% higher performance compared to the other two models running the 865 chipset.

GeekBench 5

In Geekbench 5, the improvement of the 865 Plus is mainly reflected on the single-core results. And the improvement is much closer to the claimed 10%. Specifically, the ROG phone still won the single-core race, while over the multi-core test, the results of the 4 models are pretty close. And what’s interesting is that the highest multi-core score belongs to the Black Shark 3S but not one of the two models with the 865 Plus chipset.

AnTuTu

In the Antutu benchmark, the ROG Phone still won the test. And the results were also similar to what we got in 3Dmark.

And then let’s check out their gaming performance.

ASUS ROG 3 vs RedMagic 5S vs Black Shark 3S vs Lenovo Legion Pro: Gaming

In PUBG mobile, as we tested at 120fps framerate, except for the ROG model, the other three can reach an excellent framerate at over 110fps. Especially for the Legion model, it remained at the most stable level without much fluctuation. However, another model running the 865 plus chipset, the ROG model was disappointing as it could only run at 99.9fps on an average without the ROG cooling fan. When we tested it last month, the framerate level was similar to what we got on the Legion model, but after a recent software update, things changed.

PUBG

In terms of the heating issue, we were not allowed to turn on the level 3 of performance mode on the ROG model without the cooling fan, and it seems that ASUS is forcing their users to buy the official accessory for the best performance of the phone.

NBA 2K20

While in 2k20, things got a bit better for the ROG model, which went up one place to NO.3, followed by the Black Shark 3S at the bottom, while the Legion phone and RedMagic 5S maintained their leading places. Especially for the RedMagic model, it amazingly reached at 117.3fps, but at the same time, heated up in a few minutes. But we will talk about the heating test later.

Nimian Legend

And then we ran the Nimian legend as a stress test. The Legion phone was dominant over all the other models with the framerate of 75.29. The Black Shark 3S caught up with the RedMagic model and ranked in second place. The ROG model without the fan accessory was still a bit left behind with a framerate of 67.6.

ASUS ROG 3 vs Red Magic 5S vs Black Shark 3S vs Lenovo Legion Pro: Battery Life

As an e-sports smartphone, battery life and charging performance are also what gamers are concerned with. They are all equipped with large batteries and fast charging. Especially for the Legion Phone, along with the 5000mAh dual-battery, it surprisingly features dual-USB-C charging channels and the charging can be up to 90W.

Although the ROG Phone sports the largest 6000mAh battery, it only supports up to 30W PD fast-charging. The other two models also had great charging performance with over 50W charging efficiency. In the race to full charge, the Legion no doubt took the lead. The Black Shark model and the RedMagic models were only 4 mins and 9 mins behind the Legion Pro, respectively, but unlike the Legion Phone, they only require one charging port. As for the ROG model, the whole charging test took us over 1hour and 40mins, which is too slow for a gaming phone.

And then we did a test about their power consumption for gaming. After 30mins of NBA 2K20 gaming and another 30mins PUBG Mobile gaming, the Black Shark 3S won the competition consuming only 22% of power, even though it didn’t have the largest battery. So it was pretty efficient. The ROG model’s largest battery also performed well with 75% power left. Well, the RedMagic model was in the bottom place with an unbelievable 42% of power consumption, which is really unacceptable.

So overall, if you are a gamer who cares about battery and charging, just forget about the RedMagic model and make your choice between the ROG and Black Shark. Especially for Black Shark 3S, we really liked the phone and would pick it as our first choice.

Over Heating TEST

In addition, we were also curious about the heating issue of the Snapdragon chipset. So we recorded all of the four model’s temperatures after 30mins gaming. We could see that both the ROG and the Black Shark models had good temp-control, while the other two models easily got heated up at over 46℃. But on the Legion Phone, we didn’t really feel the heat when holding it as the internals are placed smartly to avoid radiating heat to your hands.

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ASUS ROG 3 vs RedMagic 5S vs Black Shark 3S vs Lenovo Legion Pro: Verdict 

So overall, we believe that the Legion Phone can work independently unleashing its max performance among the four, while the ROG phone also has the potential to challenge the Legion phone but you need to attach the cooling fan. But if you care more about operating optimization, the ROG and RedMagic models should be the better choices. The RedMagic model has excellent performance for a gaming phone but it does heat up very quickly.

The Black Shark model provided a balanced performance, even though it didn’t come out on top in most of our tests. As you can see, each of the four models have their own set of positives and drawbacks. Picking up the best gaming phone among these four would require you to focus on what’s most important to you.

We hope this ASUS ROG 3 vs RedMagic 5S vs Black Shark 3S vs Lenovo Legion Pro comparison and review will help you to find the perfect gaming smartphone. If you want more such in-depth comparisons between specific models, feel free to mention them in the comments section down below.