Most smartphones rely on passive cooling to prevent overheating, but that’s not always enough. Sometimes you need to do more to cool your phone. Last year, RedMagic launched the RedMagic 11 Pro (later updated as RedMagic 11S Pro), the first phone that uses liquid cooling to prevent overheating under heavy loads. By heavy loads, we mainly mean gaming. When outlets like Linus Tech Tips ran benchmark tests, they found that while the phone outperformed competing devices, it didn’t provide much improvement.
Linus Tech Tips pitted the RedMagic 11 Pro against four other devices: the RedMagic 10S Pro, OnePlus 15, Galaxy S25 Ultra, and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Linus Tech Tips put the phones through multiple tests in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and Geekbench 6. After 20 tests, the RedMagic 11 Pro topped the 3DMark test with an average score of just over 6,000, followed closely by the RedMagic 10S Pro with a score of around 5,500. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S25 Ultra lagged behind with a score below 4 000.
Geekbench 6 tests yielded similar results. RedMagic 11 Pro achieved an average score of 3,768 across three tests for single-core testing and a multi-core score of 11,864, followed by the OnePlus 15 with scores of 3,639 and 10,979. Once again, the Galaxy S25 Ultra came in last place with a single-core score of 3,201 and a multi-core score of 10,129. When channels such as Versus tested the RedMagic 11 Pro with actual gaming, the phone generally ran better than the iPhone and Galaxy, but it also ran hotter as a trade-off.
How Does Cooling Compare
Based on the benchmark numbers, the RedMagic 11 Pro, while superior to other phones, isn’t a huge step forward. The RedMagic 11 Pro’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, which offers 20% more CPU power and 30% more GPU performance compared to the RedMagic 10 Pro line, likely explains most of the results. If we’re honest, the liquid cooling system doesn’t seem to provide much cooling. The system is little more than a sticker with liquid inside pressed into the phone’s internal components. As a result, the liquid simply displaces heat, which improves heat transfer to the main cooling components inside the phone: a small fan and a vapor chamber. A vapor chamber is a sealed chamber that uses water to absorb heat and disperse it through a repeated process of vaporization and condensation. These components do the heavy lifting.
Although vapor chambers are nothing new in the world of smartphones, RedMagic claims that the RedMagic 11 Pro has the largest vapor chamber in a phone, covering 13,116mm². However, it’s difficult to accurately assess this claim since phone manufacturers generally don’t publish their vapor chamber dimensions. For example, Apple’s client-side documentation sums it up to “three times the size of the previous generation.” Although the RedMagic 11 Pro offers superior sustained gaming performance, how much of it is the more powerful processor and how much (and which) of the cooling systems remains a mystery. The only thing we’re sure of is that the RedMagic 11 Pro isn’t quite up to par with the Steam Deck, mainly because RedMagic admitted it.
