Review: ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition

For several years now, ASUS has been constantly improving its gamer phone, the ROG Phone. This year at CES, ASUS presented the ROG Phone 8 and the ROG Phone 8 Pro. It’s now on sale, and we’ve received the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition, on sale for €1,499.

We recently had the Redmagic 9 Pro in our hands, a very affordable UFO for a muscular configuration. ASUS, on the other hand, is tapping into the top end of the market, with similar technical specifications but a product that’s refined from start to finish.

And because we’re here at overclocking.com, we have to benchmark, and that’s what we’re going to do with this baby. Who will get the most out of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC?

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Technical specifications :

• SoC: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
• RAM: 12GB, 16GB, 24GB
• Storage: 256GB, 512GB, 1TB
• Battery: 5500mAh
• Ports: USB-C, 3.5 mm
• Operating system: Android 14 ROG UI
• Front camera: 32MP
• Rear camera: 50MP (primary), 13MP (ultra-wide), 32MP (Tele)
• Dimensions: 163.8 x 76.8 x 8.9 mm* (13.25mm at photo sensors)
• Colors: Gray or Black (ROG Phone 8), Black at (ROG Phone 8 Pro)
• Screen type: AMOLED, FHD , 165Hz
• Weight: 225g
• Charging speed: 65W
• Screen dimensions: 6.78″
• Screen resolution: 2400 x 1080 px
• SIM support: Dual-SIM
• Cellular connectivity: 5G
• Wi-Fi connectivity: Wi-Fi 7
• Bluetooth: 5.3

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Unboxing

ASUS has taken the unboxingexperience of the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition one stepfurther . It’s like being in a cyberpunk James Bond movie, with Q guiding you through the features. In short, we don’t want to spoil the experience for those who buy the phone. For the rest of you, you’ll find unboxing videos on YouTube. Well worth a look.

Design

ASUS now presents the ROG Phone not only as a gaming phone, but also as a premium phone.

The ROG Phone has been slimmed down, while retaining the same screen size. The edges are thinner, and the front camera is positioned behind the screen. However, ASUS has opted for a better front image thanks to an eyelet, rather than having the sensor covered by the screen. For us, this is a big plus compared with the Redmagic, which surely has the worst front-facing camera.

In terms of thickness, ASUS has also fine-tuned its baby, reducing it from 10.49mm to 8.9mm… Well, that’s if you forget to measure the area where the photo sensors are located, which is measured at 13.45mm. The contours are rounded, making it very pleasant to hold.

Despite the 5500 mAh battery, the device is lightweight. ASUS has also chosen to place the chip in the center and the battery on either side, and this has its advantages. Firstly, the phone is perfectly balanced when held horizontally, and therefore in a gaming position. Secondly, the heat generated by the chip is concentrated in the center of the device, perfect for long gaming sessions. Finally, this component arrangement enables ASUS to offer us a fan module for heat dissipation that will be perfectly centered.

Screen

The screen is an OLED slab, more precisely a flexible E6 AMOLED. This explains the slimming treatment, but also the excellent colors. The screen can also run at up to 165 Hz, although you’ll have to find a game that supports 165 Hz and, above all, where it makes a difference. After all, the FPS we tested were often below 100ips.

Cooling

The ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition comes with AeroActive Cooler X. This module is installed on the back of the phone mainly for heat dissipation, but also has a 3.5 jack, RGB and 2 configurable trigger keys.

Battery and charging

At 5500mAh, it’s 500mAh less than the ROG Phone 7, but will last for 24 hours in normal use. But as soon as you activate “X” mode for gaming, you’ll be eating up battery percentages like hotcakes.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro comes with a fast charger, which ASUS calls HyperCharge adapter, which allows charging at 65 watts. We’re told it takes 39 minutes to charge, but in reality our tests went well beyond this, with a 53-minute charge on a hot phone following a gaming session, and 45 minutes when cold. You can also recharge the phone in 15W wireless mode using the Qi 1.3 standard.

Audio

The phone is equipped with stereo speakers, perfect for playing games, watching videos or movies. However, the speaker on the bottom of the ROG Phone 8 has considerably more treble than the other. And in gaming, this results in a less-than-balanced spatialization without headphones.

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

Other

The ROG Phone 8 is a premium phone, and as a result it has finally been awarded an IP68 water resistance rating. As far as we know, it’s the only gaming phone that can claim this. The AniMe Vision mini-LED screen can display a camera icon when you take a photo, a music viewer when you listen to music, or customized animations that you can configure in the settings. You can, of course, configure the screen in the settings and even unlock animations. This screen can also be deactivated if you don’t want it all to flash.

Games require a fast response, which is why the screen has a multi-touch sampling rate of 730 Hz. This figure corresponds to the number of times the screen’s sensors update to register touch data per second. By comparison, gaming mice generally have a sampling rate of 1,000 Hz (1 ms).

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Camera

This is undoubtedly where ASUS has put the most R&D effort. There are 3 sensors on the back:

• The first is a Sony Exmor IMX890 with 50MP, and an impressive stabilizer.
• The second is an Ultra-wide sensor covering 120 degrees with its 13MP. ASUS seems to have fine-tuned the software , as there’s no visible fisheye effect .
• The third is a 32MP telephoto lens with 3X optical zoom. The application allows 30X digital zoom.

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The front sensor is 32MP and has a 90-degree field of view.

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Finally, I’ll leave you to look at the various options to give you an edge in game.

[nextpage title=”Experience Android ASUS”]
ASUS menu navigation and non-gaming 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.

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 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 LPDDR5X RAM up to 24 GB, with speeds up to 4800 MHz, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, Snapdragon X75 5G modem, and Unreal Engine 5.2 support.

AI

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 smart phone screen , and 240Hz and 8k on external monitors.

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Benchmarks

For our benchmarks, we compared the ROG Phone 9 Pro with the most gaming (REDMAGIC 9 Pro) and premium (Samsung Galaxy S23) Android smartphones.

The ROG Phone 8 Pro is a hair below the Redmagic 9 Pro in almost all benchmarks.
ASUS is therefore not running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at full capacity.

[nextpage title=”Conclusion”]

The appearance of the ROG Phone 8 Pro is close to that of other high-end Android phones. Unlike consumer phones, the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro has a 3.5 jack and two USB-C ports, one on the bottom and one on the side, for easier charging of your device while playing.

With a very premium unboxing experience, ASUS clearly wants to offer us a premium phone. Now the price clearly hurts, as the ROG Phone 8 (12Gb / 256Gb) is priced at €1099. The ROG Phone 8 Pro (16Gb / 512Gb) is priced at €1199. And the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition (24Gb / 1To) we tested costs €1499.

However, ASUS has completely missed the mark in the audio department, where the experience is clearly not up to scratch, especially for a phone that claims to be a gaming device. And the marketing is a bit of a liar when it comes to the phone’s thickness, making no mention at all of the hump where the three photo sensors are located, which is nonetheless imposing.

The handling and software layer show ASUS’ full know-how, and this latest Snapdragon SOC delivers superb performance. The phone looks like it has a lot more to give than current games can exploit, so let’s hope ASUS continues to improve its concept without losing sight of its target.

ASUS ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition

We liked :

• 165Hz AMOLED screen
• The handling
• Gaming features
• Photo quality

What we didn’t like :

• The price
• Unbalanced stereo speakers

On arrival, the ROG Phone 8 Pro Edition is by no means a cheap phone, but a unique proposition that combines gaming and premium. With a superb screen, sleek design, superb photo sensors and plenty of gadgets, ASUS clearly stands out from the competition. And if I could keep it, it would definitely replace my iPhone. So that’s the Gold Award.