Asus ROG Phone 5s Stress Test: Can It Sustain Peak Performance?

| Published: Tuesday, February 15, 2022, 18:58 [IST]

Asus ROG Phone 5s has finally arrived in the Indian market. This is currently the only smartphone with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ SoC with up to 3GHz CPU clock speed. During the pre-briefing of the product, the company officials did confirm that the vapor chamber on the ROG Phone 5s is slightly larger than the ROG Phone 5.

Asus ROG Phone 5s Stress Test: Can It Sustain Peak Performance?

In addition to the new and improved copper 3D vapor chamber, the phone also uses a graphite cooling pad to increase the rate of heat dissipation. The Asus ROG Phone 5s is a passively cooled smartphone, which means, it does not have fans or radiators to keep the device cool.

Snapdragon 888+ SoC Powers ROG Phone 5s

The Snapdragon 888 SoC was infamously known as a chip that gets really hot, which tends to throttle the performance. Given the Snapdragon 888+ is a speed binned Snapdragon 888+, there were also speculations about the Snapdragon 888+ being a much hotter chip, and many speculated that a device won't be able to sustain the peak performance for an extended period.

We ran the CPU throttling test benchmark on the Asus ROG Phone 5s to get an idea regarding the performance of the Snapdragon 888+ SoC and also the cooling capabilities of the ROG Phone 5s. Here are some of the key findings from our experiment.

Test Bench Settings

We ran the CPU throttling test benchmark four times for different time intervals. While testing, the phone was running on battery, and the X mode was turned on, which offers the best possible performance on the Asus ROG Phone 5s.

Asus ROG Phone 5s Throttling Test Results

When we first ran the CPU throttling benchmark for 15 minutes, the CPU performance was throttled to 90 percent. Similarly, when we ran the benchmark for 30 minutes, the CPU performance was throttled to 87 percent. Next, when we ran the CPU performance benchmark for 45 minutes and 60 minutes, the performance throttled down to 85 percent and 77 percent.

Asus ROG Phone 5s Throttling Test Results

These numbers clearly indicate that, even if you play a highly demanding game for more than an hour, the ROG Phone 5s will still sustain around 80 percent of its peak performance. Do note that, unlike the benchmark, which uses 100 percent of the resources, most games won't use the complete computing capability, so, you are likely to get better performance while gaming.

As this is a passive-cooled smartphone, we did expect some sort of throttling. As you can see from the graph, there is no sudden drop in the performance, and it comes down gradually, where, after running the test for 60 minutes, we felt that the frame of the phone was pretty hot to touch.

What About Snapdragon 888+?

These numbers again indicate that when the Snapdragon 888+ SoC is paired with a well-engineered phone, it does not throttle much. Most of the phones that might have a throttling issue are likely to be related to an inefficient cooling solution. These numbers also indicate that you can continue to game on ROG Phone 5s for hours without worrying about any performance drop.