Thanks to Qualcomm’s update of its Snapdragon chipset, we saw brands queuing up to launch their flagship phones in the new year. Ever since 8 Gen 1 chipset debuted on Motorola Edge X30 in December, we’ve experienced and reviewed 4 models powered by this latest chip. But none of them really surprised us with their performance.

And today we have one more model for you, the iQOO 9 Pro. So let’s check whether the phone is able to stand out from the 8Gen 1 flagship crowd.

Obviously, iQOO has shifted its product strategy from gaming preference to a more common-flagship design. Especially on the latest 9 Pro, the specs seem to be more balanced with the phone coming with more features that we only see on the premium smartphone models. The iQOO 9 Pro adopts a completely new rear design with a triple camera setup housed inside a wide camera island almost covering the upper half of the rear panel.

iQOO 9 Pro Review: Design & Display

This time the 9 Pro comes in just two variants, an Orange leather-like version and the BMW Motosport edition in my hand. 

The new design makes it probably the most recognizable model among all the latest flagships. 

In addition to the triple camera setup at the left, the wide camera island is made up of a large piece of aluminum plate underneath the slightly-smaller glass cover.  

This design is not only for better looks, but also works as a key part of the cooling system. The aluminum plate could effectively transfer heat inside, while the glass cover could block the perceivable heat when holding the phone. 

Later I will show you how effective the cooling solution performs in our gaming test. 

The Motosport edition still includes the iconic BMW three-color stripes running from the upper part down to the bottom of the rear panel. 

The phone weighs about 204g and is 8.8mm thick, which is a bit bulky like the OnePlus 10 Pro. The front face is covering a 6.78-inch 1440p Samsung E5 display, featuring up to 120Hz refresh rate with adaptive support of LTPO. The iQoo 9 Pro features an Ultrasonic ID sensor, which offers fingertips a much larger recognizable area. It’s the best reader that I’ve ever experienced on a phone. Compared to those optical readers, adding a fingerprint becomes so quick that you only need to press the display once for a few seconds, and it allows you to have a larger unlocking area. 

The display is definitely one of the best panels for a phone in 2022. The new level-less adaptive refresh rate feels good as I barely feel the change in smoothness when activating this feature. And the 1440P E5 panel doesn’t let you down over color presentation and fineness.   

iQoo claims that the new technology would bring a longer battery life. However, by far the phone didn’t really offer good battery performance. And it seems that the updated software drains the power a bit too quickly. 

iQOO 9 Pro Review: OceanOS is unique

However, I still wanna talk more about the Origin OS Ocean, which is probably the most special mobile OS based on the Android platform. The Origin OS Ocean looks so different from the others with the brand-new UI design. It has a bold and avant-garde graphic style applying bright colors and fine interactive details. Users can customize their lock and home screen in detail, including adjusting dynamic effects, icon style, and wide options of built-in kits for the home screen. But to be honest, it’s hard to say whether these fancy features improve efficiency in use since it can get complicated for fresh users, and especially, this customized OS is mainly optimized for Chinese users right now. There are still some minor issues with the system language that are not perfectly adapted. 

1 of 4

But the good news is that the OS for China version has wide support for system languages beyond Chinese and English. 

Another strange point of the new system is that I cannot find updated options for most built-in apps in the official app store. I have to enter each app’s setting to check whether there’s an updated version available. 

Anyway, apart from the features shared by Android 12, the overall design of the new OS is fresh and innovative, which makes me still excited to see how it will perform when coming on a global model. 

iQOO 9 Pro Review: Performance & Gaming

Now let’s check its performance with the new 8Gen 1 chip. Well, its results in benchmarks look great. It achieved over 1200 for single-core, 3800 for multi-core in Geekbench 5’s CPU test. In the Antutu Benchmark, the overall result ran up to 1020000, which is also the best score that we got from an Android phone. 

In 3DMark, it achieved in the 9700s range in the wildlife graphic test, which is also close to the best result we tested at 20℃. Then to access its performance under heavy load, we ran the stress test in 3DMark, it also achieved the best stability that we’ve tested with 8Gen1. Considering that some 888 and 8Gen1 models couldn’t even finish the test due to heating issue, the 55℃ for front face and 49 for rear cover is still reasonable for a 8Gen1 model. And it’s also likely to be the highest temperature that we can access on the phone. Even in our gaming test, we never recorded such a high temperature on the phone. This likely means that the benchmark should be in the phone’s performance whitelist.

In PUBG Mobile, the iQoo 9 Pro’s framerate could stay extremely stable at 60fps. While for 30-min gaming in Genshin Impact, the average framerate of 54.4 is also the best result that we got on all 8Gen1 models, though the phone got throttled down a bit after the first 5 minutes. Good news is that the phone shows pretty good cooling effect and suppresses the max temperature to below 46 and 42℃ at the front and back ,respectively. 

Then we ran another game, Nimian Legends, under its highest graphics at 2K resolution, which probably is the heaviest game that we can play on mobile phone. After the first 5 minutes, the performance got throttled down more and the framerate remained at 40.3 fps, which is not so impressive compared to what we tested in Genshin Impact. But the result is almost the same as what we tested on OnePlus 10 Pro and Xiaomi 12 Pro. 

And the thermal performance is still good with a max temperature at below 46℃. 

By far iQoo is the only brand that uses an independent display chip to bring a smoother game experience with high framerate and low power consumption. In supported games, it can access up to 120fps or 90fps framerate through frame interpolation, ignoring in-game framerate limits. 

It sounds great, right? 

Well, unfortunately, I’m sorry to tell you that it doesn’t work outside of China at this point. Because by far it only supports 16 games, and all of them are China versions. Although we saw the Genshin Impact in the supported list, there’s still no trigger to activate the frame rate interpolation in the international version of Genshin Impact that we downloaded from the Google Play store. It’s disappointing though, we still want to show you how it works in supported games. For example, In the Chinese version of Genshin Impact, before entering the game, you have to switch the display resolution to the 1080P option since it doesn’t support 1440P display resolution.

There’re two modes in frame interpolation. Either access the 120fps gaming experience with the Framerate-Boost option on, or play the game at 90fps with the Optimize-power-consumption mode. With support of the display chip, it only requires GPU to render 60fps to have the 120fps gaming, and render 45fps to have the 90fps gaming. At the same time, the interpolation modes would slightly increase operational delay. Anyway, I really enjoy playing Genshin Impact at such high framerate, but all we can do is wait for the brand open the feature to more games and especially the global market. 

Hey iQoo, you have to do something, alright? 

iQOO 9 Pro Review: Cameras

Like most flagships coming this year, the iQoo 9 Pro also features a triple camera setup including a 50MP primary lens with Vivo’s Gimbal stabilization, a 2.5x 16MP telephoto lens and another 50MP 150° ultra-wide-angle lens supporting fisheye mode. We’ve seen the same wide-angle lens on the Realme GT 2 Pro and the OnePlus 10 Pro. However, it’s not so impressive. 

Okay let’s look at some camera samples. Under good lighting conditions, the samples shot on the three cams look good with bright colors and natural aperture. But when meeting high-contrast scenes, the imaging is not so stable and sometimes the fringing issue shared by all the three lenses could be annoying when you check the pictures on a bigger display. The wide-angle lens supports fisheye mode though we couldn’t get good distortion correction at 0.6x shooting. And there’s a bug on the 2.5x telephoto camera. We couldn’t get a true portrait-mode photo with it.

1 of 9

When it comes to night scene, the samples shot on the three cameras look a bit dull and lack detail. Especially for the wide-angle lens, the night samples even couldn’t capture red colors correctly. And when it comes to extremely low-light condition, the 2.5x telephoto camera wasn’t even activated. Instead, all the zoom pictures were shot on the main lens.

1 of 15

The most impressive feature of the phone’s cameras is the Gimbal stabilization technology. It still offers the best stability for mobile phones similar to what we saw on the Vivo X60 and X70 series. 

Anyway, I think iQoo still need to do a lot more work on fixing their camera software. I believe the phone can do much better than what we have here. 

iQOO 9 Pro Review: Battery Life & Charging

The phone could be fully charged within 20mins with the included 120W charger, and it also supports 50W wireless charging with 10W reverse wireless charging. While its battery life is not as impressive as the charging solution, the latest software probably is the reason behind this. 

iQOO 9 Pro Review: Verdict

So that’s all we want to share about the iQoo 9 Pro. Actually at the beginning we’re pretty excited to review the phone. The phone’s gaming performance really stood out from the 8Gen1 crowd. However, by far the software doesn’t really offer delightful experience for daily use and photography.

So among the five 8Gen1 flagships, which one has convinced you? Or are you not impressed by anyone?

The post iQOO 9 Pro Review: Excellent first impression but fails to shine as a flagship appeared first on Gizmochina.

We’ve talked a lot about the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 chipset in our preview video right after launch. Now the chip has finally come to our office inside the Motorola Edge X30, so let’s find out whether the new chip can rebuild the reputation of the Snapdragon flagship series. 

We’ll try to test the chip by putting it through a number of benchmark tests, starting with Geekbench 5. 

VIDEO

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 – Geekbench 5

After checking the results of the Geekbench 5 CPU test, you would find that there’s almost no performance improvement compared to the 888 chipset.

We got a score of 1200 for the single-core test, and 3700 for the multi-core test at a temperature of 10℃. While at 20℃, the multi-core result came down to 3500. It seems that the CPU performance might easily be influenced by the temperature.

But at the same time, note that the Geekbench 5 may not have got an update to adapt to the new chipset, and considering the software developed by Motorola is still an early version, the result might be not able to accurately reflect the improvement of 8 Gen1’s performance. 

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 – AnTuTu benchmark

Then we tested it again on Antutu Benchmark. The overall score doesn’t exceed 1 million as we saw in leaked screenshots but remains at around 980000. And there’s a little gap between these two chips’ CPU results. And surprisingly, the old 888 chip sometimes could achieve a better multi-core performance in the benchmark. Also, we learned that the result could be better if you find a way to get a lower testing temperature, like putting it in the fridge…. Alright it sounds a bit funny. 

Geekbench 5 power output

If there is no significant improvement over the CPU performance, how about its power consumption running the benchmark? We all know that the 888 chip doesn’t have good power efficiency on most Android flagship models, and the new 8Gen1 chip was even likely to be worse. At least for now, the power output when running the Geekbench 5 is even higher than what we got on the snapdragon 888 platform. On an average, it went up to 10.5W for multi-core test and 4.0W for single-core test. 

No wonder we felt that the battery was dropping quickly during all our tests.

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 – GPU: 3DMark

The first surprise from this chipset came in the 3DMark GPU test.  

We ran it at various temperatures and then tried to figure out how much of an impact was caused by the temperature factor. At 5℃ room temperature, the Edge X30 can run up to 9900 in the first round of the test, which has exceeded the average score of the latest Apple’s A15 chipset running in the iPhone 13 Pro, which is almost 70% better than most phones powered by the 888 chipset.

And then we brought it to 15℃ room temperature. The result was down to 9700. At 25℃, we ran 3 more rounds and the scores went down to 8900. It seems that the 8 Gen 1 is pretty sensitive to temperature. And in daily use, the peak performance probably will be hard to sustain for a long time gaming or the chip might throttle down due to the heating issue. However, we’re still pretty surprised by its GPU improvement from the 888 chipset. Even when we met the heating issue, the 3DMark result still got 50% increase. 

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 – GFXBench

And let’s do another GPU test in GfxBench. The result also proved the significant improvement of the new chip’s GPU. No matter for OpenGL or Vulkan test, the 8Gen1 has performed close to what we tested on iPhone 13 Pro and ran with 60% improvement from the Snapdragon 888 of the Mi 11.

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Gaming Performance Review

Genshin Impact – Framerate, power, heating

Now let’s test its gaming performance. It’s too easy for this chip to run games like PUBG Mobile. And there’s no perceivable heating being detected. 

But what about heavy games? We ran Genshin Impact under the highest graphics at 20℃. The result is not bad, and the gaming experience got slightly improved with a pretty high framerate in the first 15 mins.

But since the game hasn’t unlocked the 60fps limit, CPU loading only remained at around 30%, and we were probably not able to access the peak performance of the chipset. However, we still encountered the similar throttling issue found on all the 888-chipset phones. Due to high temperature and high-power consumption, the X3 large core slowed down, and the frame rate fluctuated, eventually stabling down at 54.4fps on an average. 

Further, we ran the game again to reveal its power-performance efficiency compared to the Mi 11 running the 888 chipset. We switched the framerate lock down to 30fps on both models and tried to simulate an average loading for most android games. Under such a situation, the power efficiency of the 8Gen 1’s result of 4.9 W didn’t get much better than the 888 chipset. So it looks like gamers may still need to bear the high-power consumption.

And the surface of the phone also got heated up quickly when running these heavy games. During the 30-min gaming test, the maximum surface temperature went up to around 53℃. So its power and heating performance may still be an issue for gaming, just like the 888 chipset. 

Gaming stress test: Nimian legends – Framerate, power, heating

In another game, Nimian Legends, to give it the hardest performance test, we upgraded the gaming resolution to a 2K level with the highest graphics. In the first 5 minutes, the Edge X30 powered by 8 Gen1 did deliver the excellent peak performance as we got in GPU Benchmarks, but it didn’t last long and got throttled down for the rest of the time thanks to the heating issue (46.28fps).

The highest temperature hit at 57℃ and the detected chip temperature went up to around 90℃, which is really insane. And the peak power even reached 14.1W, which is also the highest figure that we’ve tested over a phone’s power output. Eventually, the 30-min test consumed around 30% of power.  

But at the same time, one positive thing to note here is that the throttled performance is still at the level that’s close to the Mi 11’s peak performance. 

3DMARK stress test: Gaming, throttled performance, heating, stability

To prove this finding, we also performed a comparison of the 3DMark 4K wildlife stress test. We found that Mi 11 is better at maintaining a stable but lower framerate throughout the 20 loops, which protected the phone from getting over-heated, avoiding fast battery drain. While on the Edge X30, it started with an excellent result, but the performance throttled down with each round. However, just like we found in our gaming test, the new Snapdragon chip’s lowest score in the last loop is still much better than the Mi 11’s result of the first loop. Also, the X30’s surface was extremely hot at around 54℃, and it consumed nearly twice as much power as the Mi 11.

Moto Edge X30 Charging & battery

The Edge X30 features a 4500mAh battery and 68W fast charge. For its battery life, the phone didn’t perform well with the chipset. Here are the results of our battery test and charging test. 

Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Performance: Verdict

After all the tests we performed, we hope you’ve got an idea of how exactly the 8Gen 1 chip performs. 

But at the same time, I also want to tell you another important fact about these two chipsets: After months of optimizations, most flagships powered by the snapdragon 888 chip have used a conservative CPU strategy. On the other hand, being a very early model featuring the Snapdragon 8 Gen1, to avoid over-heating and to seek a balance with battery life, the Edge X30 has still got a lot of work to do with its software optimization. 

We do have to add that it achieved better peak performance due to the much better GPU. If you could effectively cool it down, the excellent performance can likely last for much longer. 

To conclude, the good message here is that the new snapdragon 8 chip brings an astounding GPU performance upgrade, which even catches up with Apple’s latest A15 chip. As for actual gaming, the 6MB L3 cache also provides better support to access a smoother experience in heavy games like Genshin Impact. But the bad news is that the improvement of CPU is not significant at all. And power consumption and heating are still the main issues that brands are left to deal with, and they haven’t really improved when compared to the 888 chip. 

So that’s it for today. We hope our performance review has given you a good overview of what to expect from the new Snapdragon chipset.

RELATED:

• OPPO Reno 7 Pro Full Review: Why the phone impressed us at first glance
• Huawei Lipstick Earbuds Review: A Great Fusion of Fashion and Technology
• OPPO Air Glass Hands-On and First Impression: A unique and lightweight design

The post Motorola Edge X30 with Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Performance & Gaming Review appeared first on Gizmochina.