The ASUS ROG Phone II Review: Mobile Gaming First, Phone Second
by Dr. Ian Cutress on September 30, 2019 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Asus
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- ROG
- RGB
- Snapdragon 855 Plus
- ROG Phone II
System Performance
The ASUS ROG Phone II’s system performance is naturally of double interest: First of all, it’s actually the first Snapdragon 855+ based phone we’ve gotten to benchmark here at AnandTech. We don’t have too high expectations over the meagre clock frequency increase of the Prime core from 2.84 to 2.96GHz, but possibly ASUS’ tuning and the X Mode might be able to differentiate performance a bit more above what we see in other Snapdragon 855 devices out there.
We’re testing the phone in both its default out-of-the-box mode, as well as the X Mode:
In the PCMark Web Browsing test, we already see quite a bit difference between the two operating modes. The default mode is quite conservative as is matching the lowest scores that we’ve seen of other Snapdragon 855 phones.
X Mode on the other hand seems to increase the performance here to be more equal in behaviour to that of the Galaxy S10 – the best performing S855 device in this test. It’s to be noted that this test is also very sensitive to various DVFS shenanigans – for example the score might go up quite dramatically if the vendor decides to peg the frequencies to a higher minimum frequency. X Mode in this regard doesn’t behave this way and still properly scales along the full frequency curve – albeit doing it in a much more aggressive manner.
The writing sub-test is one of the most representative of overall performance of a phone. In the default mode the ROG Phone II performs well and is amongst the top S855 devices. Turning on X Mode makes the RP2 stand out amongst its competitors.
In the Photo editing test, the RP2 performs the best in both its modes. The higher scores here can also be attributed to the higher GPU frequency of the S855+ SoC in the device.
Overall, the RP2 lands in as one of the most performing phones on the market, and the X Mode in particular puts it ahead by a large margin. It would come at a cost of power efficiency, but with a 6000mAh battery, the RP2 shouldn’t worry too much about that.
In the web browsing benchmarks, the RP2 oddly falls a bit behind in Speedometer when enabling X Mode. Given that the test is a continuous workload with high load, the different scaling modes should indeed not affect it, but it’s still a bit odd to see the minor regression.
In WebXPRT 3, we’re seeing a more expected scaling between the two modes. The ROG Phone II here is able to take almost the highest scores amongst Android devices, just falling short of the Huawei P30.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
75 Comments
View All Comments
Vince789 - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Also it would have been interesting to see the GPU power consumption, and how it compares to the regular 855BramEPC - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Not really specific for this phone but would it be possible in general to indicate what version of USB (2.0, 3.* gen * (x *), ... PD ? ) the phone supports ? USB-C is not very helpful.Sharma_Ji - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Bottom type C is 2.0Side is 3.1
Now someone might get headache when they see me transferring files to PC and my phone connected to it through the side.😅
Notmyusualid - Saturday, October 5, 2019 - link
@ Sharma - THIS is true! Thanks for the tip buddy!Here is one for you - International ROM working on Chinese 'Tencent' 8G/128G version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVIWWMtqHp4
I won't try it until back home, so I don't leave myself high & dry on the road with a bricked phone.
Notmyusualid - Saturday, October 5, 2019 - link
@ me - sorry, here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPrQidE5H0o
brucethemoose - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
This was touched on, but if you can take the modest battery hit, a 120hz display (and low latency touch input) is an amazing experience *outside* of games. Pretty much any app that involves scrolling feels so much more responsive.s.yu - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
I also found that by setting animations to x0.5 in developer settings everything's more snappy. Turning it off entirely may save another fraction of a second but it may seem subjectively laggy.airdrifting - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
LOL 6000mAh battery, take my money please.But seriously, when can we have a flagship with 5000mAh battery? Who is going to be the first one to do it? Oneplus? Huawei? Xiaomi? I know it's not going to be Samsung or Apple.
Sharma_Ji - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
Only asus did this with 6Z , @ 5000mah battery.Lochtror - Monday, September 30, 2019 - link
helloi play 2 competitive online mobile games regularly. also while in public transport.
that made me realize that a feature a game oriented, or well, any high end phone, should offer is redundant internet connection with fast switching to which connection is better.
so... dual sim with two data lines active.
but also acess to 2 wifi networks at the same time with the same function. making sure the connection stays ups as well as possible.
does any device have something like that already?
or does the dualsim mobile data in other devices work better than in my phones?