The OnePlus 7 Pro Review: Outstanding Performance & Screen, Adequate Everything Else
by Andrei Frumusanu on June 19, 2019 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- OnePlus
- OnePlus 7 Pro
GPU Performance
This generation GPU performance uplifts of the new Snapdragon 855 were relatively muted in devices that we’ve tested until now; Qualcomm had only promised and managed an average improvement of 20% over last year’s Snapdragon 845, even though the chip came on a new process node that should have enabled it for larger power and performance improvements.
The OnePlus 7 Pro thus seemingly shouldn’t be any different than the S10, G8 or other S855 phones in terms of the peak performance of the phone. Where OnePlus however can differentiate itself is the sustained performance of workloads. The company had made an emphasis on its “10-layer cooling system” which in layman terms consists of a heatpipe system with some new carbon dissipation tape in the internal design of the phone and its motherboard. In particular OnePlus claims no slow-downs in games, while it’s not the first company to promise this, let’s see if this time around the phone is able to achieve this.
Starting off with the 3DMark Physics test which is mostly a CPU performance workload within a GPU power constrained scenario, we see that the peak performance of the phone is in line with other SoCs of this generation. What does stand out however is that the sustained performance, even though not as good as what we see on Kirin 980 devices, is indeed better than the Galaxy S10+ and the G8.
Moving onto actual GPU-constrained scenarios, we’re now starting to see what OnePlus was talking about: The OnePlus 7 Pro doesn’t seem to throttle much at all even after long prolonged periods of load. In 3DMark the device takes the very top spot in terms of performance. Until now last year’s Note9 was still the leader in this regard precisely because it was throttling less than newer Snapdragon 855 phones this year, but now with the OP7Pro also not throttling, it’s actually able to consistently showcase the SoC’s actual performance improvement.
In the GFXBench Aztec benchmarks we see a similar story: There’s almost no throttling at all happening, and the device is able to maintain near peak performance seemingly endlessly.
In Manhattan 3.1 and T-Rex we again see excellent sustained performance. It was a bit odd to see that the OP7Pro’s peak performance was slightly less than the S10+ and G8’s, it’s possible OnePlus is running the GPU at a slightly lower clock or has the DRAM running at more lax timings. However this doesn’t matter as it takes the performance lead after a short period of gaming.
Outstanding Sustained Performance – At A Cost
Overall, the OnePlus 7 Pro is currently the best performing Android device out there for gaming. OnePlus indeed was able to achieve an excellent thermal dissipation system, and the phone is able to disperse the heat across its chassis in a much more even manner than any other phone.
It’s to be noted that this still isn’t enough to catch up to Apple’s latest iPhone – here we’re just hitting fundamental limits of the Snapdragon 855 chipset which isn’t able to compete in performance and efficiency to the latest A12 chipset.
Although the thermal dissipation system of the OnePlus 7 Pro is excellent and better than a lot of other devices in the market right now, it does come at a cost. The company is still extremely lax in terms of maximum device temperatures under load. I was able to measure a peak of 51°C in terms of screen skin temperature, whereas devices such as the S10 will not allow for more than 42-43°C in the same scenario. So while the phone is extremely performant, it’s also extremely hot and the battery drain at these performance levels is also quite extreme and will go from 100% to 0% in less than 3 hours.
In the end, such load scenarios won’t be encountered by most users in every-day games, although if the game has an unlocked framerate, it will mean a lot more load than other 60Hz devices.
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DillholeMcRib - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Can I flash this damn thing and run WIndows ARM on it?Jez1 - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
I had this around a week and they were great things about it, but many things I didn't like so returned it.The screen was great and apps installed at an amazing pace, the UI was lovely but to many negatives. The camera was so erratic and one minute would take a nice photo, then the next would have washed out colors and lacked detail and sharpness when slightly zoomed in. A lot of the time my old S7 took more reliable photos and my wife's 6T was also better. I know this could get better with fixes, but was too poor out of the box.
The sides of the screen also got massive reflections outside and the inbuilt screen protector was rubbish. In a week of light use, it was covered in indention's from my nail and also stated getting air bubbles. So you couldn't even appreciate the lovely screen and there wasn't any 3rd party ones available.
The final thing which is subjective is the weight, it felt so heavy one-handed.
I then got a s10+ and and couldn't be happier with in comparison. I got a big discount for my old bashed up S7, so only paid £40 more. I hope OnePlus can get it together for their next phone as love their approach and really didn't want to get another Samsung
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
With this phone OnePlus went full marketing mumbojumbo.They spent a lot of cash on that only and while sidetracking all the negatives this phone has. 90Hz is a gimmick, so many people don't want that. Instead they want a phone which is marked at $700 these -
- A 3.5mm headphone jack, (How come the 6T dropped the jack saying no space for the finger print scanner while they crammed a motorized camera into the chassis, It's plain BS as always with Apple or any company, Note had S-Pen, LG has Display fused OLED crystal sound with proper ToF camera with an ESS DAC equipped phone)
- No SD card slot, No don't say cloud or 256GB, I have a ton of data on my PC FHD high bitrate movies, 4K UHD recording directly to SD card pictures to SD card, High quality recording of Audio through Stereo and high bitrate likes of LG, Emulators, FLAC/DSD files etc and top of all, a fully reliable offline cheap storage which just works and offers expansion as per user choice from 128GB to 1TB.
- No IP rating, No the damn shilled tests from Dave2D or MHBHD aren't going to cut it, the IEC conventions are internationally agreed standards not some bs offscreen tests saying it increases price and all rubbish kool-aid.
- Trash camera
- No QI wireless charging, glass back and peanuts charging, they don't wnat to give because they want to milk with all these features barring the jack for another refresh or new unit.
- No price cuts, OP phones never get a price cut, today you can buy an SD835 (By no means a problem) phones like S8+ for 500USD which has everything more than this gimmick phone, LG phones see price cuts, got my V30S for far less price under 500USD which outperforms in all features, Yes even the BL unlock, coming to that, S9 and Note 9 are cheaper at $600USD which again rape this phone to oblivion esp Exynos models which have BL unlock. And the latest S10 is already seeing discounts, and once Black Friday hits the G8 and all phones will drop price.
Next is Zenfone6 that phone is making waves apart from the mediocre LCD display (No pentile, so FHD is fine but the brightness is not enough) and it has 3.5mm jack, Stereo speakers, a big arse 5000MaH battery without this over charging current rate.
Huge thanks to Andrei a lot for this piece on this stupid overdrive current charging done by Oneplus, fools at many blogs and youtube shills refuse to believe me that over high currrent charging is insane simply due to the cathode-anode reactions and faster degradation, esp this is why we need Qi not battery raping marketing BS. These oneplus garbage phones always overcharge and do this rubbish, look at QC with Samsung/LG/Sony any company apart from this and Huawei have that, Apple even sandbags the battery death by reducing the CPU perf. This BS is not seen my 99% of the people and they end up with junk on top of the non user replaceable batteries.
So all in all this is an overpriced "toy" not a proper pocket PC / Powerful computer in your hand.
Quantumz0d - Wednesday, June 19, 2019 - link
Edit - Zenfone 6 specs include - it also got UFS storage unlike Pixel 3a with eMMC trash, an SD855 a great camera than this junk well, at-least from the users, an SD slot, Bootloader unlock and highest SKU is less than 600USD (8GB/256GB)zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I agree especially on the LCD display. I have a lot of praise for OLED until I got it for the first time in the S8+. It is easily not as sharp as my Nexus 5. Every time I open the Nexus 5, I'm taken away how sharp and clean the display is versus the AMOLED S8. I have late 30's eyes. I'd rather take an LCD display for my next phone as long it is reasonably priced vs premium OLED phones.I disagree with your fast charging criticism though. I'm no battery enthusiast, if rapid charging kills batteries, then we should not see them in electric vehicles such as Tesla cars.
My Nexus 5 doesn't have rapid charging tech but my second battery is, again, bulging with less capacity. It does heat a lot though with Data turned and/or during gaming. Certainly, it is heat is the detrimental effect and heat is only the effect of fast charging
Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
> if rapid charging kills batteries, then we should not see them in electric vehicles such as Tesla cars.Tesla batteries are also gigantic (In comparison to a regular wall outlet power) and designed to handle that.
We've had a smartphone vendor who promoted one of these super-high charging rate confirm some pretty atrocious long-term capacity degradation, while something like Samsung's degradation curve was like 20% higher in terms of retained capacity after the same amount of cycles.
zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I refer to Tesla's Superchargers where a Model 3 can charge to 80 percent in 30 minutes. A Supercharger charges its battery cells as fast as quick charging smartphones.OP can afford a faster charging rate than Qualcomm's QC because there is no voltage conversion happening in OP's phone, thus less heat. The only drawback only works with OP's charger and thick cable.
rabidpeach - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
sorry it's been years but hopefully the future readership realizes that TESLA herself encourages you to NOT supercharge the car constantly as that would increase the degradation as well as well-reported constant fleet usage of supercharge style system has shown degradation.Xyler94 - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
I will always prefer my AMOLED displays in phones. OLEDs have the advantage of having much higher contrast than LCD, because individual pixels can be turned fully off, creating true black. There's no LCD that can do that. LED LCDs come close, but only because you can turn off zones of the LED backlight.Also, colour calibration makes an image look better than the display tech. If the Nexus 5 had better calibration, then it would definitely be a better display. I know Samsung TVs always have too much blue (I've calibrated a few of them), it's possible their phone displays have a bit too much blue too.
zodiacfml - Thursday, June 20, 2019 - link
That's what I thought which led me to buy the Samsung. I realized, the infinite contrast has little value to me except watching movies in darkness.The sharpness of the LCD over the pen-tile AMOLED is noticeable with text, sharper edges with LCDs. Images from my DSLRs or conventional cameras are also sharper on the N5.
White background in AMOLED never convinced me, feels rough or dirty. I checked today, looked at my Samsung around 4 inches away, I can notice multicolored very tiny noise-like pixels.
The Nexus 5 has one of the best calibrated displays during its time. I'm just saying LCDs superior to AMOLEDs in image sharpness alone