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.
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mrochester - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
*buy.PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
Anything Google touches basically turns into a platform for data collection that exploits the user and yest the phone is ugly. What sorts of alternatives did you have in mind?AdhesiveTeflon - Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - link
You want us to get a Blackberry instead?Azurael - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
A phone with a large battery, no notch and a screen which isn't wrapped around the edges of the phone. Perfect but for the fact it looks like it was designed for a 12 year old (with rich parents?) and the camera suckss.yu - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
1. 3rd party cases look serious enough. Also consider removing the back panel and the whole paint job inside like how some people made Samsungs transparent.2. Port Gcam.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
These devices are simply the new [very] personal computers. The fact, that they evolved from phones is about as meaningful as to say that humans are a special type of single-cell organism, that stopped separating completely after cell division.And when you look at the typical daily usage pattern of these VPCs, you'll find that many, especially younger users, will go days without using the phone functionality at all: That's Mom & Pop stuff, ancient history and typically only used to remind them of chores left undone and thus silenced!
The phone moniker only serves to justify why these devices you're supposedly buying to own, are kept tethered to vendors and telcos, who have no business whatsoever on your very personal computers, after they habe become your property and digital brain extension or Internet of Bodies limb.
Please help ending this abuse if only by calling them by what they are instead of whence they originated eons ago.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
It's not just a kid thing. I could easily get by without any sort of more conventional PC by relying exclusively on my phone. In a roundabout way, I've already done that by neglecting to boot up a PC for several days and more often than not, I'm only turning them on to fetch updates or do something that benefits from a keyboard (less often now since I have a bluetooth keyboard paired up with my phone). The reverse situation where I would have to resort to only a PC and omit the phone would be more troublesome because of a lack of effective communications mechanisms and a lack of portability.abufrejoval - Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - link
Absolutely, and with this dock, I am seriosly considering to buy this as a mobile workstation: I do have some usable notebooks, quite a bit slower than this device (e.g. ChuWi 12.3).Of course, there is yet some other elements missing: The clamshell dock, which allows me to use this device as a notebook and the ability to run Linux desktop apps with the proper GPU acceleration: The current hacks running a Linux userland in a chroot() and an X-Server on the Android end eat too much 'snappyness' to.
I'd keep a dock in every major office location I work in, with either a nice 4k screen or dual monitor setup, keyboard and mouse and then use the clamshell on planes and trains if the ride is long enough to make it worthwhile and otherwise just use it handheld or with WiDi for presentations. A serious conference room could have a WGig dock.
It's not a hardware issue any longer, just "opposing software empires".
29a - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
Is there anyway to get uBlock to block these advertisement articles?zeeBomb - Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - link
Is this the first real superphone???