RedMagic 5G vs. ROG Phone II: Gaming phone showdown

The Asus ROG Phone two is considered one of the best gaming phones on the market today. Newbie has REGMAGIC 5G is making a run at that title. But does the 5G pack enough to dethrone a Asus? Let's find out. Now both of these phones are marketing themselves to gamers. And me being a gamer. I thought I'd pick them up and try them out for a month. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the experience that they both deliver, and most importantly, the performance. Both phones performed really well on Mac settings on a variety of games. I really didn't have any issues with drop frames or game crashes. In my month of using these phones, it was actually a really nice experience to be able to crank like pub g all the way up on both phones and have almost a ps3 kind of graphical experience. It was really great. [SOUND] Both of these phones have some physical attributes that separate them from traditional phone They both have shoulder buttons, on the Asus we have something called the air triggers which also act as a google assistant burning surf. You squeeze your phone vertically then Google will come up and ask you what you would like. The air triggers are only on one side of the phone. They are only on the volume worker side and you really cannot see them since they're ultrasonic sensors The Red Magic 5G has something called Pro Triggers over here on the top, again on the same side as the volume rocker. It senses an input 300 times a second so it feels incredibly snappy when gaming. But to me, honestly, I didn't really feel a difference when gaming between both devices. The air triggers were both very responsive. I actually had some issue with the red magic specifically in PUBG for some reason every time I would try to move around I would accidentally hit the trigger and the the the the right trigger would activate. But other than that, I mean, to be fair, it also happened on the A Sue's phone sometimes but just not as often as. The red magic 5g phone [MUSIC] Now a Soos has armory crate which is essentially a games launcher. Within the games launcher, you can find a variety of settings things that change like the refresh rate of the screen, you can turn on and turn off notifications when specific games are running. You can also adjust the performance settings of the CPU in here, and there's a lot of features within that Armoury Crate. But essentially, you could overclock your phone when playing a specific game. After launching a game in the Armoury Crate you also have have a bunch of options as an overlay called the game, Now that requires you to sort of swipe from one side of the screen to the other to bring up this on screen display. Once the game is loaded and you have the Game Genie overlay on top, you can make adjustments to your air triggers and sort of what buttons they click when you press them. You can set up macros for repetitive tasks you can turn on and always on on screen display that will give you your stats of your CPU,GPU. Battery life and I even think your temperature and you can activate a game capture as well as stream yes you can live stream on the Rog phone to twitch or YouTube. [SOUND] now the Nuba has something called game space which is activated by pressing the red button here. It's very similar to aces armory crate but I would say it's not as in depth. So yo u have options of just in the fan speed, again, you can change the performance per each individual game. Just don't expect to have a lot of sliders like you would see in the armory crate. Now once you've launched into the game, you actually bring up the game space 2.1 again by sliding from one side of the screen towards the middle And in there, there are actually more features than you would find in the traditional game space launcher. You can choose between four different types of performance, either auto, gpu focused, cpu focused, or performance focused which maximized everything. You can also adjust the shoulder buttons. You can adjust macros And you can also block text and block calls all within that overlay screen. In the game space, you can set up something called Red magic moments, where it automatically captures for specific games and you can either record the entirety of the game, or just moments when you get kills or die. All in all, I really didn't have any problems with both of the phones specific software. I really liked newbie his ability to adjust the screen refresh rate on the fly, especially when you realize the game couldn't get close to 144 hertz. It wasn't useful to burn your battery like that, but I did enjoy The ROG Phone II incredibly in depth tuning features which if you're used to overclocking on a PC, that's sort of what it felt like. I really didn't get too involved with it but when I was scrolling through the settings and seeing all the sliders for the different functions for each individual game. I felt that if you were really into tune your game and optimizing your performance you probably wanna go with the ROG phone too. But if you're just cool just like hitting like give me 100% everything, well then the Red Magic 5G might be for you. [SOUND] When you start playing for hours and hours and hours, that becomes an issue of heat. The ACS ORG phone too gets really hot, it has a traditional albeit beefed up cooling system, and it can be concerning at time, I wouldn't say I was worried about breaking the phone, but it was really hot. The Red Magic 5G phone fared a lot better when it came to temperatures. But it has a built in fan and it is the second phone to ever do that. The first being the Red Magic 3. It still got hot., don't get me wrong But it dissipated the heat a lot better. And when it comes to fan noise however, to be honest, they both sound like laptops, like a laptop that's kind of old and all the fan ports are kind of covered with dust. [SOUND] I do have to say that the Asus phone does have an attachment, which is this little fan do that here. It's not something that I carry with me all the time if I was going outside. If I were able to slide this phone into my pocket with this attachment on it Yeah, it's kind of thick and I feel like it would sort of snag as it enters. You know my sort of jeans and also I would lose this. [MUSIC] As far as comfort in the hand even though the red magic five G Has a bigger screen the overall thickness is a little bit thinner than the Rog phone. Not by much though, but because the Rog phone is a little bit fatter. It sort of made it feel more. More like controller and less like a phone when playing. I actually enjoyed the air triggers a little bit more than the Red Magic phone mainly because the Red Magic phone is a little bit thinner. But then again we're talking about phones here, thinner is better, less bezzle is better. So it's kinda tough to decide which triggers are the best. Obviously, the Red Magic ones feel a lot snappier But because of the robustness of the ROG phone it felt more like a controller and therefore I liked the air triggers a little bit more personally on the ROG phone. Let's talk about the displays. Both of these phones have been an OLED display with Gorilla Glass six. The ROG phone two is a 6.59 inch display with 120 hertz refresh rate. The red magic 5g is a 6.65 inch display with 144 hertz display. Now both of these displays have sort of shown me how far mobile gaming has come as far as graphics goes, but it also shows me that there's still a lot of improvement left to do, especially when it comes to the frames per second is generated by these games. More often than not many games are sort of caped at either 30 or 60 FPS. There are a few games that will achieve the 120 or 144 Hertz FPS that's needed to drive this displays but they're not just too common. That being said this phones are really excellent for daily driving. Scrolling is really nice and buttery smooth. Text looks nice and sharp, videos look good as well. We just can't show them to you because to be honest, we capture most of our video in 30 FPS, which isn't enough to show 120 or 144. Quickly touching on cameras They're just okay. The ASUS Phone has three cameras a 48 megapixel and a 13 megapixel wide angle camera on the back and then a 24 megapixel camera on the front. The red magic 5G has four cameras, a 64 megapixel, a eight megapixel ultra wide and a two megapixel macro lens. On the back, as well as 8 megapixel camera on the front. So really quickly, I'm just gonna show you a couple of images that I took especially zoomed in at 100%. And yeah, these phones they don't have a lot of texture in them. There's a lot of mud in the shadows, a lack of sharpness, the lack of detail tons of chromatic aberration It's really unfortunate too because there's a lot of high specs involved with these, like they have tons of mega pixels. But the cameras themselves are really lacking I would say. But again, you're not buying this phone for its cameras. You're gonna buy it for gaming features, which I've already explained, are top notch. Let's talk about accessories. As you may have seen, late last year when ASUS sent this phone out for reviews, they sent a lot of YouTubers. A kit full of stuff. Patrick Holland graciously letting me borrow his aces phone and here I do have the Really absurd Asus case. I just think that Asus kind of went overboard and provided way too many accessories for the phone. And then with the Nubia phone, they have a fair amount of accessories. I think like two or three which is much more manageable. So if you're not really interested in a ton of accessories like I am, maybe the Nubia will be a better choice for you, just because they just have a controller. To be honest, for me, if I'm mobile gaming, if I'm on the go or something like that, I'm probably gonna bring my Nintendo Switch. But if I'm gaming on a commute, say to school or to the office or something like that, I really don't want to walk around with a bunch of accessories, I already got a laptop with me most of the time. I think the air triggers and the shoulder buttons are just enough for me. Let's talk about some gaming services, Project XCloud is available on both of these phones. However, if you're interested in Google stadia, that is only supported on the Rog phone too. The Nubia. Red magic 5G does not have official support for stadia yet. Both of these phones also lack a waterproof rating. So keep them out of the shower, keep them away from steam or anything like that. [LAUGH] Get it to PC joke. Both of these phones have a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. On the Nubia it's located at the top of the phone with the USB-C charge port at the bottom. On the ASUS ROG phone, they have both the 3.5-mil headphone jack and the USB-C charge port on the bottom of the device. And finally, obviously, the most important part of these phones we need to talk about connectivity. The RedMagic supports 5G however I wasn't able to test it. Before You Buy it I recommend checking that your current carriers 5G is supported. It also has Wi Fi six. So if you have a newer router you can have Wi Fi six speeds. On the new via RedMagic 5G on the ASIS, RG phone two, it's just running regular 4G or LTE. And it's also running Wi-Fi 5, not Wi-Fi 6, so just be aware of that, so let's talk about battery life, the Asus ROG phone two has a 6000 milliamp hour battery, where the red magic 5G has a 4500 milliamp hour battery. It's difficult to talk about battery life because, both phones offer, a lot of customizations, for your game as far as performance goes, when I was using the Red Magic 5G, I did do a three hour gaming session starting at 100%. And after the three hours, I was still left, with about 50% battery. Now let's get down to the nitty gritty, the price. The Nuba red magic 5g starts at 579. While the Asis RG phone two starts at 899 in the US now when it comes to making a choice between both of these phones, it gets a little bit difficult both phones perform very similar to each other. They both have the shoulder buttons, They both have their individual game launchers. The paces phone has a little bit more granularity when it comes to picking performance or individual parameters for performance in the games. Whereas the newbie read magic just performs well I mean it has the Snapdragon 865 processor in it, and it has the faster refresh rate on On the screen, so making choices can be a little bit tough for me but I will have to say that the newbie red magic just winded overall by the price I mean at 579 you really can't go wrong with it just because they have so many similar features. The asis RG phone too though, does fit better in my hands. So it's kind of hard to put this one away. I mean, with all the tuning features if you're used to overclocking on a PC then you'll feel right at home with this. But if you're just looking for something that plays games really well, well then the newbie or RedMagic of 5G might be for you. It's worth acknowledging that at this point, the ROG phone two is nearly a year old. We've seen rumors of the ROG Phone three appear. And if a ASUS follows the same release cycle for the ROG Phone one and two, we would likely expect an announcement very soon, which could drop the price of the ROG Phone to making it more competitive price wise with the red magic 5G.