Review – REDMAGIC 9 Pro

When Redmagic asked us to test their next smartphone, we jumped at the chance to bring you something different. Clearly optimized for gamers, the 9 Pro is one of the few UFOs on the market. Hang on, we’re testing the beast!

Perhaps prompted by Asus teasing of the forthcoming ROG Phone 8, REDMAGIC has just released the 9 Pro. This gaming phone is the most powerful device to date with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, eclipsing the REDMAGIC 8 as one of the best gaming phones of 2023.

When it comes to producing a powerful gaming phone at this price, you have to make concessions. So we generally expect the cameras to be awful. However, we were only disappointed by the front-facing camera hidden beneath the screen.

Despite these few drawbacks, there’s no denying that Redmagic has produced one of the best gaming phones on the market, providing everything you need to play the most demanding Android games without sacrificing performance or battery life.

Because we’re on overclocking.com, we have to benchmark, and that’s what we’re going to do with this baby.

Technical specifications:

• SoC: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
• RAM: 12GB, 16GB
• Storage: 256GB, 512GB
• Battery: 6500mAh
• Ports: USB-C, 3.5 mm
• Operating system: Android 14
• Front camera: 16MP
• Rear camera: 50MP (primary), 50MP (ultra-wide)
• Dimensions: 164 x 76.4 x 8.9 mm
• Screen type: AMOLED, FHD, 120Hz
• Weight: 226g
• Charging speed: 80W
• Screen dimensions: 6.8″
• Screen resolution: 2480x 1116
• SIM support: Dual SIM
• Cellular connectivity: 5G
• Wi-Fi connectivity: Wi-Fi 7
• Bluetooth: 5.3
• Audio : Two speakers
• Vibration: 2 haptic motors
• Fingerprint sensor under the screen

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Screen

The 9 Pro has a large FHD AMOLED screen with a refresh rate of 120 Hz. It’s 6.8 inches, which makes it quite massive. But with a screen-to-body ratio of 93.7%, the screen takes up almost the entire front of the smartphone.

The front camera and fingerprint sensor are located below the screen, which explains why the front selfie camera isn’t so great.

Brightness-wise, the Redmagic 9 Pro should go up to 1600 nits. We didn’t reach this value in our test, but we did reach 1300 nits, and anything above 1000 nits is more than sufficient.

Finally, the screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 5, which comes factory-fitted with a protective film.

Battery and charging

The battery is probably one of the main selling points for gamers. We’ve tried various tests to get good data:

• PCMark battery test, the REDMAGIC 9 Pro scored 10 hours and 23 minutes.
• VLC played videos for 32 hours and 51 minutes at 60% brightness, in airplane mode. An impressive performance.

With the 80W charger, you won’t need to plug in your 9 Pro for long. We reach 84% charge in 30 minutes, and 100% takes just 43 minutes. Note that there’s no wireless charging.

Audio

The phone is equipped with stereo speakers, perfect for playing games, watching videos or movies. The speakers can be very powerful, and the quality is decent. What’s more, the Redmagic 9 Pro is Dolby DTS : X Ultra certified.

Finally, a 3.5 mm headphone jack is perfect for gamers who don’t want the latency you can get with Bluetooth headphones.

Cooling

One of the main features is the cooling solution, called ICE 13, which incorporates a 10-layer heat dissipation sheet with a large surface area (10182mm2). With a small fan that goes up to 22,000 rpm while reducing noise emissions compared to the previous generation. Thanks to its steam chamber and ventilation, it promises temperatures as low as 18°C.

Camera

The rear cameras are Samsung components: GN5 50MP 24mm with OIS and JN1 50MP 13mm for wide angle. And on the other side of the screen is the 16MP selfie camera. The Redmagic 9 Pro’s rear cameras give very good results, which you can check out in our Vonguru.fr test (in French). As for the front camera, results are disappointing, especially when moving or in low light.

Other

Games require a fast response, which is why the screen has a multi-touch sampling rate of 960 Hz. This figure corresponds to the number of times the screen’s sensors update to register touch data per second. Shoulder triggers have a sampling rate of 520 Hz. By comparison, gaming mice generally have a sampling rate of 1,000 Hz (1 ms).

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Finally, I’ll leave you to look at the various options to give you an edge in gaming. And yes, the list is long… And the translations are sometimes approximate.

[nextpage title=”Experience Android Redmagic”]
Some non-gaming features and options.

[nextpage title=”Snapdragon 8 Gen 3″]

The new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 / Adreno 750

In a sentence, the new Snapdragon can go up to 3.30 GHz, has faster Ray Tracing and now supports AI via its NPU.

In terms of cores, a single Cortex-X4 core runs at 3.30 GHz, five Cortex-A720 cores, three of which run at 3.20 GHz, while the others run at 3.00 GHz. Finally, 2 Cortex-A520 cores operate at 2.30 GHz. According to Redmagic, these elements increase processor performance by 32% compared with the previous generation.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is also equipped with a 12 MB L3 cache, compared with 8 MB on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

And for the GPU, the Adreno 750 is claimed to be 25% faster (34% according to Redmagic) and 25% more energy-efficient than the previous-generation Adreno 740 found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It also improves Ray Tracing by 40%, according to Qualcomm.

Other notable features include support for up to 24 GB LPDDR5X RAM, with speeds of 4,800 MHz, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Snapdragon X75 5G modem, and support for Unreal Engine 5.2.

Regarding AI, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can execute up to 15 tokens per second with over 10 billion parameters for instant AI assistant responses. AI brings improvements to the camera, with features such as semantic segmentation, night vision video, object erasure in videos, Vlogger view, photo expansion, and much more. The new Hexagon NPU is also 98% more powerful than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 NPU, while consuming 40% less energy.

Finally, the gaming component has not been neglected. This new Gen 3 chip can support 144Hz and QHD resolution on the smartphone screen, and 240Hz and 8k on external monitors.

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Benchmarks

For our benchmarks, we compared the Redmagic 9 Pro to the best-known Android smartphones at a similar price. This also allows us to compare 3 SoC architectures.

It’s no surprise to see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at the top of most rankings. Similarly, if we look at other online benchmarks, the Red Magic 9 Pro is outperformed only by the iPhone Pro Max with its Apple A17 Pro chipset in Geekbench’s single and multicore tasks.

However, when it comes to pure GPU and combined performance, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is king. In short, the Red Magic 9 Pro outperforms most smartphones on the market in short tests, and uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to its full potential.

[nextpage title=”Conclusion”]

Pre-orders for the Redmagic 9 Pro open today, December 27, and sales will begin on January 3, 2024, on the Redmagic website.

The Cyclone model, with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of memory, which we tried out, will set you back €799. The white Snowfall version is €799 with the same specifications. Finally, the Sleet version with minus 12GB of RAM and 256GB of memory is €649 on the REDMAGIC site.

There’s a lot to like here for those who want to jump on an affordable gaming phone equipped with the latest hardware, but until mobile gaming catches up with what Snapdragon has to offer, this phone looks like it has a lot more to give than current games can exploit, so you should be able to use it for a few years.

REDMAGIC 9 Pro

We liked :

• The 120Hz AMOLED screen
• Snapdragon power
• Gaming features
• Futuristic design
• Huge battery

Our least favorite :

• Front-facing ” selfie” camera
• Easy to get dirty

All in all, if you want the ultimate Android gaming smartphone, there’s no doubt that the Redmagic 9 Pro offers one of the best mobile gaming experiences around. For this price it will potentially be a serious competitor to ASUS’s next gaming smartphone.

The REDMAGIC 9 Pro is currently the best value for money on the market.