It might not be the prettiest, but the Asus ROG Phone 5 has serious gamers in its sights
An ugly duckling, but the ROG Phone 5’s mobile gaming credentials are unmatched
Mobile gaming is big business. All sorts of AAA titles are flooding onto the Google Play store and esports competitions with inflated prize pools are rising in popularity. If you regularly find yourself at the top of leaderboards, you could earn life-changing sums of money. Take the ever-popular PUBG
Mobile, for instance, which in 2019 had an annual prize pool of $5 million.
Of course, anyone serious about mobile gaming needs a seriously impressive smartphone to train on. The Asus ROG Phone 5 is packed with gamer-friendly features, but can it really give you a competitive edge over the usual high-priced flagships? I was determined to find out.
Fast start
At first sight, its specs look like a runof-the-mill flagship. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, the fastest Android chip on the market, is paired with either 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of non-expandable UFS 3.1 storage.
Its gaming credentials start to take shape when you take a look elsewhere, starting with a 144Hz screen. Rather than go for a high resolution on this 6.78in AMOLED panel, Asus opts for a Full HD+ resolution, meaning 2,448 x 1,080 pixels. That’s still supremely sharp and translates into 395ppi.
Then there’s the pair of haptic touch-sensitive triggers on either end of the phone’s long right edge, plus a secondary USB-C charging port on the left that allows you to charge while playing games without the cable getting in the way. Note the enormous 6,000mAh battery and support for 65W fast charging too.
You can also adjust all sorts of gaming settings – such as tweaking the clock speeds of the GPU – with Asus’ preinstalled performance monitoring software.
Gamers’ delight
So to the next obvious question: how fast is it? I’ll start with the CPU benchmarks first. In Geekbench 5, the Asus ROG Phone 5 achieved a single-core score of 1,116 and 3,792 in multicore processing. That matches the Xiaomi Mi 11 ( see issue 319, p68), based around the same CPU, and is ahead of the Exynos 2100-powered Samsung Galaxy S21 ( see issue 318, p68) and the similarly specified Oppo X3 Find Pro ( see p70).
But the really good news is that this is the best gaming phone we’ve ever reviewed, achieving higher average frame rates in GFXBench’s Manhattan 3 and Car Chase tests than any of its Android rivals.
Games such as Alto’s Odyssey and
FZ9: Timeshift ran beautifully at higher frame rates, especially when I enabled the GPU-boosting “X-Mode” in the preinstalled Game Genie performance monitoring software. Running the benchmarks again, this mode boosted gaming performance by up to 20% in some instances.
The ROG Phone 5’s mappable AirTriggers worked a treat during games too, functioning as makeshift L2 and R2 shoulder buttons. If you have £150 to spare, you can also buy a Nintendo Switch-like cradle called the Kunai GamePad, which adds a pair of Joy-Con-esque controllers to either side of the handset.
The final piece of the gaming puzzle? In our video-rundown test, the ROG Phone 5 lasted a superb 23hrs 45mins on a single charge.
Brute force
The inevitable downside to all this power and battery capacity is sheer bulk. Weighing 238g, the ROG Phone 5 is one of the heftiest handsets you can buy and it’s also thick at 10.3mm. Try not to drop it into water, either, as it doesn’t have an IP rating.
Then we come to its styling. The “gamer” aesthetic means that it stands out from the crowd, but it’s definitely an acquired taste. To my eyes, the rear of the handset is a mess. A jumble of geometric shapes and a few haphazardly placed blue arrows don’t align with the £800 price.
I like the accented power button and SIM card tray, though, as well as the customisable RGB logo. The cyberpunk-inspired packaging it comes in is a nice touch, too. There’s even a selection of interactive anime panels on the inside, which you can use in conjunction with the phone’s camera as an augmented reality (AR) “experience” when setting up your Asus social profile.
Asus includes the usual USB-C port at the bottom, but offsets it to the left to make room for a headphone jack on the other side. There’s also that second USB-C port on the long left-hand edge. This works with the AeroActive Cooler too, which is an optional fan attachment that can supposedly deliver up to a 10°C drop in CPU temperature.
On display
Whilst I’m not a fan of this phone’s rear design, its front is much cleaner in appearance: there are slim bezels on either side of its gigantic screen and slightly thicker chin and forehead bezels, which is where you’ll find the 24MP selfie camera.
There’s nothing wrong with the quality of the screen, either. Or at least there isn’t once you navigate the choice of four colour modes – three of which are called Default, Natural and Standard. Someone needs to buy Asus a better thesaurus.
Standard mode most accurately displayed the sRGB colour space, providing 95% coverage with a total volume of 96% at an average Delta E of 1.17, but if you’re looking for vivid colours then (ironically) you should choose Natural: this covered 98% of the DCI-P3 space with 110% volume.
The fourth colour space is more sensibly called Cinematic, and that’s indeed the best choice for films as it covers 97% of the DCI-P3 space (favoured by film studios) out of 99% volume. What you see onscreen is likely to be exactly what the filmmakers intended.
My only grumble is that the screen isn’t as vibrant as I’d have hoped while displaying HDR material. Peaking at only 573cd/m2 , the ROG Phone 5’s supposedly HDR10+ panel is well below the required HDR10+ specification, and it isn’t anywhere near as impressive as the iPhone 12 ( see issue 315, p58).
Camera action
There are three cameras on the rear of the Asus ROG Phone 5: a standard wide-angle, ultrawide camera and 5MP macro unit. The main camera is a 64MP Sony IMX686 sensor, and the ultrawide camera captures at 12MP with a 125° field of view.
Asus places less emphasis on taking Instagram-worthy pictures than its flagship rivals, but image quality is right up there. There’s plenty of detail in well-lit situations and, in some instances, its pictures looked sharper than the same scenes taken on the more expensive iPhone 12 Pro ( see issue 316, p72).
Again, HDR proves one of this phone’s weaknesses, as the autoexposure needed help; I had to tinker with the brightness slider on more than one occasion. The portrait mode is also an odd fish, tweaking skin texture as if it was applying a micro-contrast filter or artificially increasing the clarity and structure sliders as you might in Photoshop.
As for video, the ROG Phone 5 can record at up to 8K resolution at 30fps, with 60fps recording available if you dip the resolution down to 4K. I have no complaints about the quality: it shoots stable footage with crisp details and judder-free panning.
“With unbeatable performance in a variety of Google Play store titles, the ROG Phone 5 is a great buy for ardent gamers”
Final scene
The ROG Phone 5 starts at £800, which buys you 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You can also have the same phone with 16GB of RAM for £900, but aside from bragging rights I can’t see this making any difference to your life. Either way, this phone certainly isn’t cheap.
Bear in mind the similarly specified Xiaomi Mi 11 costs £660, while the more rounded (in every way) Samsung Galaxy S21 costs £769.
However, let’s put aside such material matters for a second: for the Asus ROG Phone 5 is the best gaming smartphone we’ve ever tested. With a number of well thought-out gaming features, along with unbeatable performance in a variety of Google Play store titles, it’s a great buy for ardent gamers.
It’s just a shame that both the excellent Kunai GamePad and AeroActive Cooler are sold separately. Combine the Asus ROG Phone 5 with these two accessories, along with its natural speed and Asus’ software boosts, and it genuinely delivers on that initial promise: it really can give you an edge over everyone else.