ASUS ROG Phone 7 Rocks Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Firepower And A 165Hz OLED Display For Gaming
ASUS has announced a new set of gaming smartphones today, known as the ROG Phone 7 series. The new gaming flagship is a noteworthy setup over its predecessor and has received massive upgrades to the phone’s internals, and cooling solution, which should make it significantly faster.
The ROG Phone 7 and 7 Ultimate are packing Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, featuring a Cortex X3 core running at 3.2GHz, four performance cores running at 2.8GHz, and three efficiency cores operating at 2GHz flat. If you’ve seen our Galaxy S22 Ultra review, you’ll know the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in that phone is significantly faster than the previous gen ROG Phone 6 with the mid-cycle refreshed Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. So, expect the ROG Phone 7 series to pack similar, if not better, performance than the S23 Ultra with its high-performance cooler and accessories.
The new phone is also equipped with a new 1080P 165HZ 1ms OLED screen, making it the first ROG smartphone to come with a full-blown OLED panel. Users can expect inky blacks and excellent power savings to come from this new screen. Besides that, the screen isn’t a massive upgrade in responsiveness over the previous gen ROG Phone 6 series and features the same 165Hz refresh rate and the same 720Hz touch sampling rate as the new ROG Phone 7, though OLED typically has unrivaled pixel response times to eliminate ghosting. Nevertheless, these are bleeding-edge specifications you won’t find in any other flagship device right now.
Other specs include up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM (a 2GB downgrade from the ROG Phone 6 Pro), up to 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, WiFi 7 support, Bluetooth 5.3 support, Cornering Gorilla Glass Victus, HDR10 support, 1500 nits peak brightness and a 6000mAh battery with 65W fast charging. The phone also sports a new two-tone color design with two colors to choose from: Phantom Black and Storm White.
One of the biggest changes made to the new ROG Phone 7 series is the new cooling system which is reportedly 68% more efficient compared to the previous generation. This new cooling system is called GameCool 7, which cools the SoC from the top and bottom of the chip, with a “three-pronged” cooling strategy. For short bursty workloads, the phone’s Boron Nitride thermal compound reduces CPU throttling on one side of the chip. For mid-length gaming sessions, cooling is aided by a bigger vapor chamber cooler and graphite sheets which sit on the other side of the chip. Lastly, for “marathon sessions,” ASUS has an external AeroActive Cooler 7 cooling solution which mounts to the center of the phone, where the SoC is located.
Sound has also been improved, with twin 12 x 16mm front-firing speakers reportedly delivering 50% more effective volume compared to the ROG Phone 6 series. These speakers are aided by an additional 13 x 38mm sub-woofer that is housed in the AeroActive 7 cooler accessory which increases base volume by 77%. For headphone users, there’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack.
ASUS’ announcement did not mention a release date or availability time for the ROG Phone 7 series.
