I tested this liquid-cooled phone in a UK heatwave, it made me sweat

If you want the gaming focus of an Android handheld without giving up the full smartphone experience, the niche market for gaming phones may be a good fit for you. The latest entry in this field is the REDMAGIC 11S Pro, which features a new AquaCore cooling system with a 24,000-rpm turbo fan.

The brand claims that it is the first to bring fluorinated liquid cooling to a mass-produced smartphone. It’s undoubtedly attractive to see little bubbles blowing on the back of the handset, but is it just a gimmick, or does it offer real benefits for demanding gamers?

That’s what I’m here to find out today, with the added twist of an unseasonal heat wave in the UK. If a gaming phone can prove its worth in 33°C (91°F) temperatures, it can do it anywhere.

Before the heatwave hit, I ran my regular benchmark suite, and the results are equal parts encouraging and worrying for Regmagic’s latest gaming handset.

The good news starts with Geekbench 6, where the phone outshines its competitors, even outpacing the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen5 by 3% in both single- and multi-core tests. This makes it the fastest Snapdragon-equipped phone we’ve tested so far.

The Snapdragon chip also maintains a significant lead over rival silicon. This is 17% better in single-core and 21% better in multi-core than the Dimensity 9500 of Oppo Find X9 Pro. The Pixel 10 Pro XL’s Tensor G5 processor and its older CPU cores lag even further behind; The 11S Pro has a 65% single-core advantage and almost doubles its multi-core performance.

But gaming is what you’ll want a REDMAGIC handset for, so I turned to 3DMark’s suite of stress tests to find out how the handset performs under sustained graphically intensive workloads.

Starting with Wildlife Extreme, a high-end traditional rasterization workload, the phone is clearly a top performer. It goes a little further at once, but also maintains performance far better than the competition. It retained 77% of its highest score by the end of the test, compared to rival models which fell between 60% and 49% of their best under stress.

However, there is one major caveat here. The REDMAGIC 11S Pro is capable of maintaining impressive peak performance even at the cost of extreme temperatures. A maximum temperature of 59°C and an average of 49°C made the phone so hot that it became difficult to hold even several minutes after the test ended, let alone during the test.

The next hottest rival I tested is the OnePlus 15, which peaked at 46°C in the same test, but most handsets aim to stay below 45°C, with average temperatures below 40°C. Redmagic is much hotter.

The same trend is seen in the Solar Bay ray-tracing stress test results. Again, temperatures reached 59 °C, with an average of 50 °C, compared to nearest rivals, which peaked at a still warm but more manageable 44 °C.

Real Gaming in Heatwave

Stress testing is one thing; Actual games are less demanding, with lighter graphical workloads and more balanced requirements between CPU and GPU. Most flagship phones in my testing can maintain 60 fps or higher well, even in long gaming sessions.

However, the UK heatwave provides me with a unique opportunity to test the latest silicone at sub-optimal temperatures. I booted up COD Mobile Battle Royale, Asphalt Legends and played Mario Kart Wii for 20 minutes through the Dolphin emulator to see how the RedMagic 11S Pro handled the heat. I maxed out all possible graphics settings to target the highest possible refresh rate and left REDMAGIC’s software to manage temperatures and performance.

With the graphics cranked up and targeting 120Hz on a large, open map, Call of Duty Mobile’s battle royale remains one of the better real-world stress tests for modern mobile graphics. After 20 minutes of gaming, the phone reached 43 degrees Celsius, which is well below the worst-case stress test benchmarks, but still uncomfortable to hold. The handset was undeniably hot by the end of the play session, but it managed to maintain 120fps the entire time, with almost no junk or frame hitches. Not bad, given the muggy background temperature of 33°C at the start.

I only gave the phone 10 minutes to cool down between gaming sessions, but even then, Asphalt came back with a starting temperature of an already high 39 degrees Celsius. Even with fans and a cooling loop, the high background temperature prevents heat from dissipating from the device quickly.

Unfortunately, not giving the phone much time to breathe led to some performance issues, with the handset struggling to hit close to 60fps, let alone 120fps, instead averaging just 45fps and a minimum closer to 30fps. Not good. By the end of the test, the phone had only reached 41°C, so not as hot as last time, but clearly hot enough to degrade performance.

The same problem did not emerge in a final 20-minute session of playing Mario Kart Wii via the Dolphin emulator. Despite a starting temperature of 37°C and a final temperature of 41°C, the handset was able to maintain a steady 60 FPS in the game. There were odd slowdowns in menus in particular, but I haven’t (yet) seen a phone play this game without any errors.

Overall, the performance was mostly solid – Asphalt Legends being the exception. The 120fps uncapped frame rate and ultra-settings combined with hot weather proved a step too far, even for the fan-assisted REDMAGIC 11S Pro. Still, the handset delivered strong performance in COD Mobile and my emulation tests, even in high-temperature environments. It’s exactly what you want from a high-end gaming-oriented handset.

Thankfully, temperatures in actual game tests proved far more manageable than in the stress tests when the handset was allowed to run unrestricted. Perhaps the first part of our testing revealed the caution REDMAGIC took to top the benchmark charts. Or just confirmation that real games aren’t that demanding.

As I’ve concluded from my time testing recent and previous generation hardware, modern graphics is becoming increasingly constrained by the silicon form factor. Power draw and thermals now limit how much extra performance phones can realistically maintain.

Free up devices without these constraints, and we see very extreme levels of performance, but with the heat and power constraints to match. You only have to look at the extreme results achieved by the REDMAGIC 11S Pro during 3DMark’s stress tests. Still, it’s impressive that the phone never shuts down at that temperature. While a stronger cooling setup seems necessary, especially with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – which we’ve noted runs very hot on almost all phones – this alone isn’t enough to overtake the competition by a meaningful margin in actual Android games and emulators.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra, OnePlus 15, and Xiaomi 17 Ultra already maintain 120 frames per second in the latest titles without novelty cooling – the real limit is often keeping power draw in the single digits. Thermal is an issue, but underclocking even the latest flagships leaves a lot of performance on the table thanks to the higher frame rates and oversampling of classic emulators.

Still, the extra cooling hardware seems to help the REDMAGIC 11S Pro continue gaming for long sessions at high performance even in uncomfortably hot environments, so perhaps there’s something to be said for the handset. The phone also comes with a large 7,500mAh battery and 80W fast charging to get the phone back on its feet quickly.

For $799/€799 it’s not a bad package if you’re looking for maximum gaming performance without breaking the bank. The sale of the handset will start on June 10, 2026.