The founders of OnePlus used to say they only make flagship phones, but since the introduction of the R and the RT series, OnePlus seems to be focusing more and more on budget products. A couple of weeks ago, we briefly got our hands on the OnePlus ACE. Although it comes with the Dimensity 8100 Max processor and support for up to 150W fast charging, the lack of a ‘Never Settle’ slogan and the alert slider disappointed many OnePlus fans. Today, we’ll bring you the review of the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition, a product that may prove that the brand has just begun to settle.

OnePlus ACE Racing – Design

The design of the OnePlus ACE is based on the Realme GT Neo 3, while today’s Racing Edition is an appearance replacement edition for the OPPO K10 (review). It’s hard to notice the difference between them in terms of parameters, but over the appearance, they have a very similar back cover and are made of the exact same material. This plastic material with a matte finish can be very effective in preventing fingerprints, but may not be conducive to heat dissipation, which we will verify later in the gaming test.

The camera module of the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition looks identical to that of the OPPO K10. Although OnePlus has added a decorative camera shape in the lower right corner, seemingly disguising that this is a four-camera phone, the phone actually has only two lenses really working in daily shooting and another macro lens of only 2 megapixels.

For me the only positive detail of the Racing Edition is the support of a 3.5mm headphone jack, I believe that many people do not want to put up with the high latency of wireless headphones when playing games, but unfortunately, there is no other brand of flagship phones that support 3.5mm headphone jack except Sony. At this point, the Racing model looks good.

OnePlus ACE Racing – Display

The OnePlus ACE Racing Edition has a 1080P 120Hz LCD screen. As a result, it has a wider chin, as well as wider screen bezels, and a larger hole-punch front camera. And the in-screen fingerprint recognition has been also replaced by a side recognition button serving as a fingerprint reader, which, however, I think is a more efficient way to unlock the phone, as the capacitive fingerprint button has a better unlock speed and success rate than the under-screen fingerprint recognition in most cases.

Compared to the OnePlus ACE, the Racing Edition’s LCD screen looks sharper, especially when displaying text. But the LCD screen doesn’t perform as well as OLED in terms of color, contrast, and brightness, as you can see it has lighter colors and lower contrast, and doesn’t support HDR content, either. 

So if you like watching movies on your phone, I don’t really recommend the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition, and another point to consider is that it doesn’t support AOD, which means you’ll have to manually wake up the screen to check it when you want to check the time or just miss a notification.

OnePlus ACE Racing – Performance & Benchmarks

OnePlus ACE Racing Edition comes with the enhanced Dimensity 8100 Max chipset. We didn’t do performance and gaming tests in the previous OnePlus ACE unboxing video, so this time I’ll show how the Dimensity 8100 Max performs on a OnePlus phone with the ACE Racing Edition.

Here are some benchmark results we got on the Ace racing.

Antutu score is 777529, GeekBench 5 score is 959 single-core, and 3760 in multi-cores. 3D MARK scores 6000. The performance is a bit better than the Redmi K50, so let’s see how it performs in real gaming. In Genshin Impact, the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition was able to maintain a frame rate of around 50 fps for the first ten minutes, but as the phone got hotter, the frame rate dropped to around 40, yet I didn’t feel that the phone was too hot and obviously, OnePlus was still too conservative in its performance optimization.

PUBG has not yet been optimized on the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition. We are only able to run the game at the maximum framerate of 40fps with HDR graphic settings. Obviously, it’s far too easy for the Dimensity chipset.

OnePlus ACE Racing – Cameras

The Ace Racing is weaker in terms of camera configuration compared to OnePlus ACE, and the main camera doesn’t support OIS, although its target group probably doesn’t care much about taking photos, here we still want to show you the camera comparison between these two phones.

Compared to the OnePlus ACE, the Racing Edition’s main camera has a similar dynamic range and detail performance, but the colors are lighter than the OnePlus ACE and the view angle is a bit smaller. The ultra-wide-angle lens performs similarly, with the OnePlus ACE having a wider view angle and more vibrant colors.

When we move to night scenes, the gap starts to show up, with the Racing Edition not comparing to the OnePlus ACE in terms of dark details due to the smaller sensor size and lack of OIS support.

From these samples, you can see that the Racing Edition’s photo is brighter, but looking at the photo parameters, we can see that it just uses a higher ISO and faster shutter speed, which explains why the Racing Edition photo has poorer detail. 

But what’s interesting is that when you manually turn on the night mode to extend the shutter time and have a firm grip on the racing model, you will get a night shot with better detail performance than the OnePlus ACE.

What’s even more incredible is that the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition’s ultra-wide-angle lens performs much better than the OnePlus ACE, and in dimmer scenes as well, you can see the photos taken by the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition have better detail and color.

You can get the full-size samples of the OnePlus ACE and the ACE Racing edition here.

OnePlus ACE Racing – Battery Life & Charging

OnePlus ACE Racing Edition packs a 5000 mAh battery that supports up to 65W of fast charging. In the first 30 minutes it charged to 71%, but after that, it took 22 minutes to get fully charged.

Okay, so that’s the full review of the OnePlus ACE Racing Edition. As I said at the beginning, it’s a phone without many features of OnePlus, but it’s not a bad product in this price range, and the gaming performance is even able to compare to OnePlus’ flagships. I think it’s actually a good entry-level product for those new users who are new to OnePlus for the first time, but I still wish OnePlus could bring the alert slider button back to these entry-level products.

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