This is no good: These top gaming phones with liquid cooling got caught for benchmark cheating

REDMAGIC is one of the few gaming phone manufacturers still on the market that offers devices with capacitive shoulder triggers, active cooling, and many other features. Unfortunately, it seems that the brand’s latest phone has been omitted from a series of benchmark rankings.

An excerpt from the banner seen on the REDMAGIC 11 Pro series benchmark page reads, “Devices are removed when the manufacturer has not complied with our benchmark rules.”

So what exactly did REDMAGIC do that resulted in it being removed from the list? Well, a Japanese language YouTube video Posted last month may be the answer. The channel apparently found a big difference between the scores obtained with the standard version of the benchmark app and the hidden or secret version. In fact, the video revealed that the REDMAGIC 11 Pro series could not complete its stress test through the standard app, while the Stealth version ran to completion.

The YouTube channel also found that the stealth test achieved a peak temperature of about 40 °C (104 °F), while the standard test reached a peak temperature of 55 °C (131 °F). It is worth noting that this phone has a cooling fan and liquid-cooling system. Therefore, even these revolutionary measures were not enough to save the phone from overheating.

However, this is a familiar method of benchmark manipulation, as some manufacturers identify benchmark apps and subsequently boost the device’s performance to achieve maximum scores. This usually has the side effect of very high device temperatures, which may eventually cause the phone to shut down the benchmark app for security reasons. This is clearly a test case for the YouTube channel. However, these same manufacturers do not recognize the hidden version of the same benchmark app, so the phone defaults to a more conservative performance profile with less heating.

This type of behavior is against the rules, as UL Solutions writes on its website:

A platform should run the benchmark as if it were any other application, without any modifications.

There is nothing technically wrong with keeping a permission list of apps and optimizing their performance accordingly. This happens all the time for games and general apps, allowing your phone to strike the right balance between performance and efficiency for a given task. After all, you don’t need maximum performance for WhatsApp or Google Keep.

However, this practice is particularly problematic for benchmark apps, as the performance achieved in these benchmarks will not reflect real-world usage for most people. These increased scores may find their way into official marketing materials, as brands claim that their phones have the best performance. Strangely, some mobile gamers have used this practice to their advantage by running emulators disguised as benchmark apps to get maximum performance. But this approach comes with a huge increase in device temperature and dramatically reduced battery life.

This is not the first time we have heard about benchmark manipulation. The Realme GT7 Pro was involved in similar behavior a year ago, while several other cases have been reported over the years. Still, I don’t think REDMAGIC will be the last phone maker accused of benchmark fraud.

We’ve asked REDMAGIC and UL Solutions about this apparent benchmark manipulation and will update the article as soon as the companies respond to our questions.