Asus Rog Phone 9 Pro Review
Introduction
What’s going on everybody today we’re going to be taking a look at the all-new Rog phone 9 Pro from Asus and I’ve had this in my possession for about 2 weeks. This is a blazingly fast Android powered gaming phone and of course we are using the pro version, so it’s got tons of storage and tons of RAM.
But what makes this thing so powerful is the fact that it’s using Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon 8 Elite and Qualcomm does claim that this is the fastest mobile CPU on the market and through my test when it comes to gaming emulation and synthetic benchmarks, this thing is definitely toping the charts across the board.
Given the fact that this is an ROG device, they paired it up with some really awesome technology like up front here, we’ve got a 185Hz 6.7-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 2400x 1080 and it’s got a peak brightness up to 2500 nits.
Around back here on the Rog phone 9 Pro, we’ve got the AniMe Vision mini-LEDs which is fully programmable and on the pro model we have 648 dots with their AniMe play technology. So, we can actually play some retro games around back here that they have baked into the operating system. We’ll take a look at that in just a bit.
But I did want to tell you what else is included with the ROG phone 9 Pro. Now this is a bit different from the Rog Phone 9 version, we’ve got the pro model here, but with the pro model we do get this 65 wats PD fast charger.
It also comes with a pretty beefy braided USB Type-C cable and one thing here that I first personally love seeing with these gaming phones is an active cooler. We got their active Arrow cooler and basically what we’ve got here is a thermoelectric cooler. It’s going to strap on the device, use power directly from the battery or wall power.
It also adds some physical triggers, but from Armory crate there’s several different cooling modes that we can use with this and in turn while this is connected, we don’t have to worry about this thing’s thermal throttling at all. It also comes with this nice little carrying case for that Arrow cooler.
Rog Phone 9 pro Overview
So, like I mentioned I’ve had this device for about 2 weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of testing with it. But one of my favourite things here is the display. It’s made by Samsung, it’s actually a Samsung E6 flexible display, but it’s totally flat on the Rog phone 9 Pro.
The AniMe Vision around back does come in really handy. we can set this up to show different notifications, battery percentages, who’s calling and we can also set this up as kind of a countdown to control our camera plus like I mentioned, we’ve got something new here specific to the Rog phone 9 Pro and that’s AniMe play game.
There’s a few built in here and I’m not sure if they do plan on releasing more maybe even the SDK. So, you can create your own game, but right now there are four included and this was pretty awesome. I haven’t seen this in a phone before.
To some people it might be a bit gimmicky and yeah, I could definitely see that, but since we’ve got that AniMe display around back. We might as well utilize it in several different ways and with this AniMe play games, they’ve definitely figured out how to do that plus we can use this for notifications.
It also looks really good around back. I mean having that Rog logo or even a custom logo that you draw up is pretty nice. When it comes to the overall I/O or ports here with the Rog phone 9 Pro, on bottom side, we’ve got our SIM card tray, the 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB Type-C port.
Over on the right-hand side, we’ve got a power button, volume rocker and two air triggers. So, we’ve been seeing this quite a lot on gaming handsets, we can use these as physical buttons up top.
Over on the left-hand side, we’ve got another USB Type-C port and when using this port, it will take priority over the bottom USB Type-C port. But from this we do get display out and as far as I’ve been able to test 1440p 120Hz which is awesome for an Android phone plus this is where we’re going to send power to that active Aero cooling system.
Of course, when it comes to the overall specs like I mentioned, this is utilizing Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite and with this chip they’ve done a few different things here.
Rog Phone 9 pro Specs
In the past we saw efficiency cores with these Snapdragon 8 chips, but with the new 8 Elite, they’ve done away with the efficiency cores and now we have two larger prime cores with a clock up to 4.32 GHz which is pretty awesome for an Android device like this.
We’ve also got six performance cores up to 3.53 GHz and the GPU here has also been totally revamped. It’s an Adreno GPU and they’re claiming 40% faster performance, 40% better power savings and a 35% increase in ray tracing performance. But with this, we get three GPU slices up to 1.1 GHz.
Asus will be offering a few different models of this unit, but since we’ve got the Pro Edition, this has 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM running at a crazy fast 9600.
It also has 1 TB of UFS 4.0 storage, a 185Hz 6.78-inch AMOLED display made by Samsung. It’s the E6 display, we got a resolution of 2400x 1080 and a peak brightness up to 2500 nits. This phone has a 5800 mAh battery and it does come included with that 65 wats hypercharge adapter.
The rear main camera is a 50-megapixel sensor from Sony and the front on the Pro model is a 32-megapixel shooter.
So, with all this technology packed into a handset like this, I mean it’s not going to do much without software and that’s the next thing I wanted to go over. I wanted to tell you about all of the gaming Centric features we have here with the new Rog phone 9 Pro.
Rog Phone 9 pro Software
Since we’re working with an ROG device, we do have Armory Crate and as soon as we start this up, we’ve got our game library. These can be removed, you can add what you’d like, but with each we do have a scenario profile that we can use. Basically, we can set up different performance profiles per game.
We’ve also got our air triggers; we can download some pre-made settings here for those built-in air triggers. We got Key Mapper, so if you did want to use a mouse, keyboard or a controller, we can map it from here.
You got Macro, Block Touches, Display Area options with filled, shifted or cantered and with this game, Genshin Impact, I’ve been using X mode with this which is our highest performance profile without a cooler attached. But for people who really want to get the most out of the new Snapdragon 8 Elite there is an advanced mode and this makes a world of difference over on the GPU side.
if we go to edit performance mode, game tuning up to level three which will give you a warning telling you that this thing’s probably going to get hot you’re not going to get great battery life out of it, so use a cooler.
But with this we can go a bit deeper Advance game tuning then customize profile. We can set the maximum clocks on the CPU and GPU right here and what I did was just kind of go through create a Max profile and I do want to tell you what this will do in benchmarks.
So, for most of the stuff that we’re going to see in this review, I’m going to be in X mode, but just to give you an idea of what this thing can do once you start tuning everything, I wanted to tell you that also.
Moving over to console, this is where we can control the overall performance. So, with the Rog phone 9, we’ve got three different modes, well four when we’ve got the cooler attached X mode, Dynamic, Ultra durable which is going to give us the best battery performance and obviously, in X mode we’re going to get the best performance out of it. But there is an X mode plus when the cooler is attached to the phone, so keep that in mind.
We got AniMe Vision, on which we can also play a few games, but there’s more settings here, you can set it up. So, while you’re listening to music it’ll give you a little visual incoming call notification, charging screen on, screen off and you can disable all of these.
Another cool thing is if you’re recording by yourself with the built-in camera here, you’ve got that timer countdown and recording time and while we’re playing a game from the bottom, we can set this up with a preloaded image. So, we’ve got a few pretty cool ones here or when we come to custom, we can add our own. We can draw or we can unlock more.
I haven’t looked into a way to unlocking these without having a friend that has a Rog phone, but there are some really cool ones here. So yeah, if you’ve got somebody that has the same phone or another Rog phone you can definitely unlock these custom animations.
Moving down from AniMe Vision, we have Display Area option and again per app, per game, we can set this up. You also got that Aero active cooler X pro. This is great and there’s four modes, so you’ve got a smart mode, cool, Frosty and Frozen. Basically, it’s going to keep this thing nice and chilly. You’re going to get the best performance out of this plus there’s triggers built into the air cooler.
We also got Game Genie, Air Triggers option and there is an unboxing Mission and finally here from Armory Crate, we have featured games.
So, there are games that will support 185Hz, 165Hz, 120Hz and usually I go through here to find those really high refresh rate games, that way I can test how this screen looks while we’re playing a game at that 185Hz which in my opinion is a pretty crazy refresh rate for an Android device. But hey, I mean it’s here and this screen looks absolutely beautiful.
Rog Phone 9 pro Aero Active Cooler
Next thing I wanted to talk about here is the active Aero cooler. This is a thermos-electric cooler or a Peltier cooler. Basically, it’s a powered cooler, you’re going to send electricity to it, one side gets hot one side gets super cold and with this unit, we can actually just mount it directly on the back of the phone. It’s going to plug into that alongside USB Type-C port and it’ll automatically turn on.
Because I’ve been messing around with it, so I’ve already set up the software. We’ve got a little bit of programmable RGB back here and this doesn’t block any of the buttons like some of the other ones that I’ve seen on the market.
We can still access that power button with the built-in button on the active Aero cooler and through Armory crate we can fully control the RGB around back. We’ve got four different modes and one of these modes is not accessible over battery. You will have to plug in the cooler and while that’s plugged in, it’ll also charge the battery up or you can use pass through mode.
But we’ve got the Smart mode, Cool mode, Frosty and frozen over USB Type-C power and once this is connected, we’ve got access to another performance mode. So, we’ve got that X mode plus that we can use here. We can use the RGB on the rear for notifications and we’ve got a few different presets or you can go total custom with that RGB it’s really up to you.
But I’ll tell you even in Smart Mode this thing is not going to thermal throttle in X mode. Now I’ve been doing a lot of testing with it and running benchmarks and stuff like that, you can get better performance out of this because those clocks on the CPU and GPU will stay much longer since we’ve got an active cooler attached and that’s the next thing I wanted to talk about.
Rog Phone 9 pro Benchmarks
I did run some benchmarks on this. I kind of faced it off against the Galaxy S24 Ultra and that has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. On GeekBench 6, we’ve got the Rog phone 9 Pro single core score 3,290 and multi core score 10,259 and on the Galaxy S24 Ultra which was Qualcomm’s most powerful chip last year or last generation coming in with a single core score of 2,271 and multi core score is still looking pretty good here for an Android device up to 7,100.
Next thing I wanted to check out was some GPU performance and through my initial testing I wasn’t really impressed with the uplift of GPU performance when it comes to these synthetics versus the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. On the Rog phone 9 Pro we scored a 5,977 with Wildlife extreme and on the Galaxy S24 Ultra 4,942 with that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Of course, we did get a nice little uplift, but I thought it would be more and after that we scored more because we test it using the custom performance mode from Armory Crate. So, the Rog phone 9 Pro is up to 6,498 versus that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and if I run that a few more times on, the Galaxy might get a little better, might get a little less.
I’ve done a lot of testing with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, it definitely looks like we’ve got a really nice GPU uplift here also and the final Benchmark I ran here was AnTuTu, on the Galaxy S24 Ultra 1,787,000 and some change over, on the Rog phone 9 Pro 3,233,000 and some change.
So, that is a major uplift and when I looked down the individual scores, I could see CPU, GPU, UX, Memory is beating it out, but that GPU is well above that a Gen 3.
Rog Phone 9 pro Gaming
So, to test this phone’s capability, I just plugged this phone into my game capture using USB Type-C over on the side of the Rog Phone 9 Pro to an HDMI adapter and the way I’ve got everything set up, I got the resolution of 1440p with 120Hz refresh rate which in my opinion is more than enough for an Android device like this.
While we’re playing a game, we do have a lot of settings that we can use, so we did take a look at Armory crate. But again, while we’re playing a game if we swipe over, we can access our performance menu down the screen, our Game Genie.
Over on left side, we’ve got our real-time monitor, network switch, navigation blocking, no alerts, no calls, AI noise cancellation, smart bypass which is what I use if I’m plugged into power. Basically, if the battery really needs it, it’ll charge it if not it’ll leave the battery alone and just power the device. Kind of saving the overall life of the battery itself.
We can Mark a clip, lock brightness, but one of my favourite things here is that real time info. This shows a real-time frame counter, it’ll give us the temperature, battery percentage, CPU and GPU usage.
On the right-hand side, we got the AI Grabber, we can set up a macro, we can set up a macro, Vibration Mapping, Air Triggers, Edge Tool, Speed Up option which clears some background processes for us. Then, we got Record, Lock Touch, Crosshair, Quick Control. That Crosshair can be set up in basically any colour you want. This is great for FPS games. We got that on screen Crosshair that’ll stay right at the centre the whole time.
So yeah, when it comes to Game Genie here on the Rog phone 9 Pro, we do have a lot of great settings here and this does come in really handy for the harder to run games and that’s kind of what I want to move over to next. I want to tell you what this thing can really do.
First game we tested was Fortnite and we were totally maxed out here from the settings. We could only do up to 90Hz inside of the Fortnite application even though, we’ve got a 185Hz display. But I’ll tell you if we could do 120Hz and I’m not sure if it’s possible with Fortnite on Android. I think that this would definitely handle it.
But yeah at 100% resolution scale running, this game was super smooth. Every once in a while, we got a dip here and there, but other than that, this was a really steady experience with Fortnite on Android.
I also tested out Call of Duty Warzone. We were at the highest settings and the frame rate from within the game says it was uncapped, but it’s really capped at 120fps here. Again, one of those games that I think only goes to that certain level and I will admit that I haven’t played through this game enough.
But I didn’t notice any kind of pop in or anything like that. It played super smooth and by the way with these games here, I’m using an Xbox controller connected over Bluetooth. I also went through tested out Genshin Impact and PUBG.
With Genshin Impact, at very high settings 60fps, you can go all day long and you could just go to Dynamic mode, you don’t even need to be in X mode for a game like that and we know that this game is a harder one to run on lower-end devices, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite does have that CPU and GPU power we’ve been needing.
Basically, everything on the Google Play Store is going to be fully playable here with maxed out settings on the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Rog Phone 9 pro Winlator Test
But there was something else that I’ve been messing around with and that’s Winlator. If you’re not familiar with this, basically it allows you to play PC games on an Android device. Now this isn’t cloud gaming, it’s not streaming, this is emulating an X86 PC game. This is a very early Alpha of a Winlator build that’s been working pretty decently with the 8 Elite, because of the modified turnup driver that I have here.
But it’s still not perfect and as soon as we get some more updates, I will be testing out a bunch of games. Because just seeing how it runs here on an early version, I can’t wait to test out more. I tried Fallout 4, a full PC game with 720p resolution at low settings over and I got 60fps. I think when it comes to emulating PC games on Android this 8 Elite is really going to take the throne.
Rog Phone 9 pro Emulation
But another thing that this excels at is emulation. I tested some GameCube games using the Dolphin Emulator, didn’t have to do anything special. It was running at 6X resolution which is way more than the resolution of this display.
Basically, this was running GameCube games at 4k on an Android phone and with something like the Snapdragon 8 Elite, it also did an amazing job with GameCube and Wii emulation. But with that we were up to around 2560 X 2112 which was 4X resolution.
When it comes to PS2, I was sitting at 4X resolution on the Nether SX2 emulator with God of War 2, I got a feeling that we could go up much higher than this, but it was just going to be a matter of getting that emulator right for this new GPU.
I think there was a few things going on, because once I went up, I mean it’s pretty steady, but we did get that dip under 16 and this is about what the 8 Gen 3 can do right now, but we’ve got a much more powerful GPU and CPU.
Rog Phone 9 pro Battery Life
Final couple of things I wanted to talk about here and that are battery life and thermals. When it comes to battery life for the Rog phone 9 Pro, we’ve got that 5800 mAh battery with the included 65 wat charger. We can go from 0 to 100% in 46 minutes.
With heavy gaming something like Genshin Impact with 60fps maxed out settings, I was averaging 4 hours and 17 minutes. With video playback I was getting 21-hour hours and 6 minutes. Now that streaming from YouTube and average everyday use will give you about 25 hours. That’s no heavy gaming throughout the day, but some light gaming like Pokémon, TCG which I have been playing that quite a bit, but around 25 hours. So, you will get all day battery life with this unit.
Rog Phone 9 pro Thermals
As for thermals, without the active cooler, high settings locked at 60 FPS for Genshin Impact, back cover temperature was 44.1 degree Celsius and Call of Duty Warzone 43.8 degree Celsius. So, they’re right in there with each other. I mean, if I ran this test a few times, they’d probably average right out there.
So, it’s not unbearable heat coming off the back of this thing and as for thermal throttling without the active cooler yeah, this thing will definitely thermal throttle. With that same test high 60fps in that 30-minute test with Genshin Impact, the CPU did thermal throttle by 22% and with Call of Duty by 18%, but I’ll tell you what, they still stayed steady at 60 FPS and this is kind of a given.
I hear a lot of people talking about phones overheating when they’re playing games. I want to tell them that take your PC, turn all the fans off and try playing cyberpunk 2077 for 30 minutes and see what happens.
They’re packing a lot of power in these things and really when it comes down to it, I think this is pretty good given what kind of performance we’re seeing coming out of this unit.
Rog Phone 9 pro Cameras
Finally, let’s talk about cameras. Let’s face it, absolutely nobody buys one of these Rog phones for the optics, but it’s actually not a bad camera setup here. The primary shooter is a 50-megapixel Sony LYT-700 sensor. You’ve got six axis hybrid gimbal stabilization on there, so certainly more than do the job just for a simple everyday sharable shot or your family photos.
You got two alternative lenses slapped on the Rog Phone 9 Pro that is a 13-megapixel ultra-wide angle shooter as well as a 32 megapixel telephoto Snapper with three times optical zoom and the zoom lens is a Pro exclusive.
The regular Rog Phone 9 replaces it with a 5-megapixel macro shooter and in a clever way, Asus has allowed you to use that right air trigger as an actual camera shutter button which I’ve got to say is an awful. But it’s lot less awful than Apple’s camera button, because it’s actually quite comfortably positioned near the edge, so you’re not stretching all the way over to the middle to use it and no, you can’t slide your finger to zoom or anything on here, but then that was pretty chunky implemented on the iPhone anyway. So yeah, definitely top marks here Asus, good job.
You can record up to 8K resolution footage at 30 frames per second. You’ve also got a fresh new portrait video mode if you want to get a good bit of bokeh style photos on the go and plenty of other bonus modes including a full-on pro mode which allows you to tweak all the individual settings like the shutter speed, ISO, aperture etc.
Then, last up around front you’ve got yourself a 32-megapixel selfie shooter. You can’t shoot 4K resolution footage with this. This does top off at full HD, but the mic’s pretty good at cleanly and clearly picking up your voice which is pretty handy if you’re going to be doing a bit of the old live streaming while gaming or anything like that.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think Asus has done a really great job with the overall design. I do love that AniMe play around back and I’ve been messing around with those games. It’d be nice to be able to program your own and hopefully they do release the SDK.
The screen on this is absolutely amazing. I love AMOLED displays, super deep blacks, very vibrant colours and the fact that this will peek out at 2500 nits in daylight is awesome. I mean you can definitely see this thing in daylight when you’re out and about.
Of course, performance here is top-notch, because we’ve got that Snapdragon 8 Elite. I mean it’s topped the line right now; we’ve got those really high clocks on those Prime cores which is awesome, the GPU is putting out some stellar performance and overall, I mean this is a really good Android gaming phone.
But that’s going to wrap it up for this review if you’ve got any questions or you want to see anything else running on the Rog phone 9 Pro just let me know in the comments below.
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