Redmagic 7 vs Redmagic 6s Pro & 6R Benchmarks — Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 vs Snapdragon 888 Plus & SD888 — Does active cooling make a difference?

Today, Redmagic has announced the global version of their latest gaming phone, the Redmagic 7 series.

I have been using the Redmagic 7 for the past couple of weeks and have previously reviewed both the Redmagic 6s Pro & 6R.

Normally with these benchmark comparisons, I do them for a general idea of how a specific chipset performs in comparison to others. However, with gaming phones from companies like Redmagic, the chipsets tend to be run with maximum power with less thermal throttling. So several of these benchmarks won’t be a good indication of how the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 performs on other phones.

I have also added the Realme GT 5G benchmarks which has a Snapdragon 888. This should provide a good example of how Redmagic tunes their phones.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 vs Snapdragon 888 Plus vs SD888 Specification

Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 vs Snapdragon 888 Plus vs SD888 Benchmarks

Antutu

This is the first phone I have used that cracks through the one million barrier. That’s 14% higher than the Redmagic 6S Pro, 20% higher than the 6R and 25% higher than the Realme.

3Dmark Wildfire Stress Testing & Thermal Throttling

This is by far the most interesting benchmark. There are multiple things to take in here.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is an absolute beast of a gaming chipset scoring 67% higher than the previous generation. That’s not some anomaly either, the official scores for the Motorola Edge X30, Realme GT2 Pro and OnePlus 10 Pro are all a touch under 10K.

Then we have stability. The Redmagic 7 drops down a bit compared to the Redmagic 6S Pro, but it is still considerably better than other phones. In comparison to the aforementioned phones, the OnePlus 10 Pro does the best, with a stability of 64%. The Snapdragon 888 on the Realme GT only manages 55% stability.

This stability score is an example of how Redmagic tunes their phones differently. They let them run at maximum performance, but this has a negative effect on battery.

Moving on to temperatures, the RedMagic 7 and 6S Pro have active cooling, while the Redmagic 6R and Realme are normal phones that are completely silent.

Looking at the temperatures, it is obvious that the active cooling makes a massive difference. The Redmagic 7 stays just as cool as the Realme but doesn’t need to throttle the performance. It also outperforms the previous generation staying 3 degrees cooler.

The downside is that the massive 10K score and 97% stability means the battery drops 31% in just 20 mins of stress testing, that’s considerably more than the previous generations.

Geekbench

Geekbench is a little less exciting. Clearly, there has not been much of a change with the CPU from the Snapdragon 888. There is a 4% difference vs the SD888+ and 8–10% difference with the SD888 for a single core.

It looks even less impressive with multicore, less than 1% vs the SD888+ and 8–11% vs the SD888.

PCMark 2.0 & PCMark 2.0 Battery

I have decided not to post these benchmarks properly because they are just not accurate. Each phone handles the varied workloads of the PCMark test differently. Some of the behaviour can be quite suspicious. Some phones get a low PCMark score than incredible battery life. Others get a massive PCMark score than the terrible battery.

For the Realme GT, a single PCMark run scores over 16K, but on the battery test, it lowers the performance to an average of 11K and then gets a 13h battery life.

For the Redmagic 6R and 6S Pro, the PCMark 2.0 Battery crashes at the end, and it appears that this happens at the end of the test at approximately 8 hours. For the Redmagic 7, I got it to complete the battery test running at 120Hz, but it only managed 5 hours.

Overall

If you want the best gaming performance possible, then the Redmagic 7 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is almost certainly the best option on the market right now. It will likely stay this way for most of the year, too. No other brand integrate a fan, and this clearly has an advantage for sustained performance.

Unfortunately, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has the same issues as last year. It is incredibly power-hungry and looking at the 3Dmark results when running at full throttle, it consumes significantly more battery than its predecessors.

For day to day use, I have not experienced too much of an issue, I can just about get through to the end of the day. I am not sure if the Redmagic 7 Pro is being launched globally, but, depending on prices, I’d certainly be tempted with that due to its larger 5000mAh battery.