ASUS ROG Phone 5 Review: An Android Gaming Beast Rises Again! By HotHardware

Hey there it's Dave Altamira for hot hardware, and this would be the ASUS ROG phone 5. It is a big, bold and, dare I say, beastly android gaming phone, and it's powered by Qualcomm's potent snapdragon 888 mobile platform processors, and it's strapped to the hilt with all kinds of features that you might want in a gaming phone. What do you say? We take you on a tour and show you what it can do next. So this is the ASUS rog5 in storm white, there's also a phantom black color option, but we have storm white here. This is the kit. As you can see, this is an optional accessory here.

This is the aero cooler clip on fan cooler, we'll talk about that in a little, but that is an optional accessory in the kit. With the phone itself, you get a number of accouterments here. You've got your standard lit pack plenty going on there, sim extractor tool there and oh nice, clear bumper case here and some ASUS ROG stickers. In case you needed some stickers for sticking the phone itself. Of course, the storm white ASUS ROG phone 5, with its RGB lighting on the back, we'll talk a little more about that, and then this powerful 65 watt ac adapter charger for the phone with its USB cable, really powerful, adapter we'll talk about that for fast charging inside the box, though it is adorned with some pretty cool artwork.

That actually is part of the experience. Let's take a look at that, it's a little of an AR VR action so yeah. This was a cool part of the setup for the ASUS ROG phone 5. During setup of the device you're actually instructed to fire up the armor crate, ASUS, armor, crate software scroll down the console here and to AR mission selfie you hit, go you're asked to choose your model phone and then pull back and scan the inside flap I'm going to pull back off camera here, get it into view. So it knows basically what the artwork is on the inside of the box, but once you do that you can go ahead and through and, as you can see, the artwork actually animates pull back a little more.

You can see, there's actually a play button there, so let's go ahead and fire up Akira. Yeah! Sorry about that here we go turn your phone landscape. Yes, you got it on it, and we got a little of video action with Akira, so that's kind of cool kind of an AR setup. It's going to instruct me to actually power him up there. He goes and sort of cool nice little out-of-the-box experience good stuff from the folks at ASUS.

The other thing you can do with the setup of the phone is created an AR selfie which, as you can see, is quite geeked out and kind of cool, and you can save this as an avatar. If you join the ASUS republic of gamers clubs by signing in with your Google account or Facebook, or what have you and as you can see, my AR metahuman is quite spiffy. Taking a walk around the ASUS ROG phone 5, we have a 6.78 inch custom-made Samsung AMOLED display on board here. It's HDR 10 plus certified and offers great saturation and pop like most AMOLED displays 800 nits of brightness. As well, but perhaps not quite as bright as some AMOLED displays, we've seen from Samsung directly or OnePlus for that matter, and it does offer low blue light support, eye comfort, support as well, but really a nice looking display all around and certainly buttery smooth for gaming at 144hz, refresh rate settings on the right edge of the ROG phone 5.

We have a couple of invisible, ultrasonic and motion sensor triggers called air triggers. These can be mapped to various button functionalities inside of games and even outside of games within apps to activate useful functions. Also, on the right edge is a standard volume, rocker and power screen lock button on bottom we've got an USB sync and charge port, and yes, that is a bona fide headphone jack. Meanwhile, on the left edge, we've got a sim tray, as well as an additional USB sync and charge port for charging in landscape mode and a set of Pogo pins to attach the ASUS aero active cooler, incidentally, that sim tray is not strapped with any sort of rubber marketing. So we're not talking about very robust water and dust resistance on the back of our device.

Is the ASUS ROG phone five storms white, all glass high gloss finish: it's actually really nice. Looking kind of understated and resists fingerprints. Pretty well has some nice etch artwork on the back as well as, of course, the ASUS ROG logo that is RGB illuminated with a number of different colors of the rainbow that you can dial in we'll look at that shortly and back here. Of course, we have the triple camera array of the ROG phone five. The main camera is driven by a Sony, mix 686 sensors, 64 megapixel sensor with quad Bayer binning that drives 16 megapixel shots with f 1.8, aperture and phase detection, autofocus and led flash and also back here, is a 13, megapixel, 125 degree, f, 2.4, ultra-wide camera, as well as a 5, megapixel, f, 2.0 macro camera. Meanwhile, on front is a 24 megapixel, f 2.45 selfie camera, and we will certainly take a look at camera performance shortly in terms of sound hardware. We have a really nice ESS, saber BS 9280 ac pro quad DAC on board here, as well as a pair of front firing, stereo speakers that sound amazing, probably the best sounding smartphone.

I've heard in a very long time, with excellent specialization. That's really kind of freaky for being able to pump out of a handset, but getting back to the proactive cooler. Five just line up the Pogo pins and clip on the opposite, edge, clip, and you've attached the fan to the back of the phone, which should bring some additional cooling by a couple of degrees on the back side. But whether it's practical is up to you also back here, which might be a bit more practical or a couple of paddle buttons, as well as a kickstand for setting up the phone in portrait mode for extra binge comfort and getting back to software features again. Asus armory crate is a nice set of utilities.

That's well appointed for managing the ROG phone 5. Here you can get into your game library. You can adjust the system performance in various x mode settings and, of course, dial in that led lighting bling to your taste and look at different system resources like CPU and GPU utilization, as well as memory and storage utilization and game genie is yet another utility that ASUS bundles in with the phone for in-game management of various system, resources and features. Here you get access to speed. Ups in various x modes, you can set, do not disturb functionality on the phone.

You can also dial in panel refresh rate, and of course, you also get access to air trigger mapping again. Those two top mounted almost shoulder button type controls on the right edge of the phone you can map to various game functionalities. Here I have it set up in Call of Duty. I'm not sure if it's actually all that practical in this game title, but then again I haven't used it all that much, but, as you can see, air triggers are now enabled in this game title also in game genie. You get access to system, health monitoring to look at CPU and GPU clock speeds, as well as temperature and frames per second performance in your game.

And finally, let's talk performance, but let's start with camera performance. Because, honestly, I didn't have high hopes that a gaming phone would really be able to compete in the area of computational photography. However, I was delightfully surprised with what the ROG phone 5 could render. Here. You can see in a very detailed intricate scene with challenging mixed indoor and adjacent outdoor lighting.

The ROG phone 5 produces really crisp detail with minimal noise and then looking at portrait mode, shooting, actually really impressive depth of field both effects, except on occasion, as is sometimes common in portrait mode shooting. You can trip the phone up, as you can see just over yogi's right, ear, flap here, as it lays against the backdrop of the stair runner behind him, and the phone has a little of a difficult time determining the edge of where his ear stops and the rug begins and in terms of video capture up to 4k, 60 shooting is available and, as you can see, with excellent image, stabilization and crispy detail as yogi digs away looking for varmints. Please don't dig up my wall, you're checking for varmints. You can get the varmints. Just don't hurt my wall, you beast: hey yogi! What's in there what's in there, yeah nut job, no don't eat! No.

What do you do? What whatever that is? Don't eat it in terms of compute and graphics performance, the snapdragon 888 powered ROG phone five is about eight to ten percent faster on the CPU side of the equation versus previous generation. Snapdragon 865 powered flagships on the gaming and graphics side. However, it's up to 30 percent faster in our testing versus again those previous generation snapdragon 865 phones. However, when you compare it to new current generation, snapdragon 888 phones like the Samsung Galaxy s21, for example- it's only about four to five percent faster, depending on the workload whether you're, speaking of CPU or graphics in gaming. However, what really differentiates the ROG phone 5 is its gamecool5 thermal solution that ASUS designed for the device.

This maintains consistent performance over heavy-duty workload, use cases in our testing with 3dmark wildlife, stress test, the phone maintained, 82 percent of its performance in standard mode across the entire 20-minute stress test and 99 of its performance in x-mode. Conversely, the Samsung Galaxy s21 will bleed up to 40 of its performance off after just a few minutes of this test. So it's impressive. What ASUS put forth here with its thermal solution in the ASUS ROG phone 5. And finally, with respect to battery life with its 6 000 William hour battery the arrow g phone 5 is an absolute beast in our PC mark for android battery life test, though, while gaming, your mileage will likely vary, but don't fret, with the ASUS 65 watt, hypercharge fast charger.

Top offs are going to be a breeze retail price for the ROG phone 5 standard editions, with 16 gigs of ram and 256 gigs of storage, as you see here has not officially been set in the US. Yet by ASUS, though we're told it will come close to its q2 launch rumors. Are that it's around twelve hundred dollars, which certainly sounds steep for a flagship device like this, but it's certainly decked out, and we don't know for sure what that pricing is so for now. It's all speculation and that about wraps up our quick, take look at the ASUS ROG phone five, but make sure you stop by hothardware. com for our full review with copious benchmark data and analysis and hit thumbs up and subscribe if you'd be so kind, we'd really appreciate it.

You'll get notified when we have some new content and look out for that live stream and hit the reminder bell so that you get notified when we go live with our always entertaining two and a half geeks webcast. I'm Dave Altamira for hot hardware, thanks for stopping by.

Source : HotHardware