I used a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered gaming phone, and I'm convinced Qualcomm has the fastest mobile chipset — there's just one glaring issue

When I saw initial benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, I knew it would be a beast of a mobile chipset. However, these tests don't tend to be indicative of real-world use as they're performed on reference devices optimized to get the best scores, so I wanted to wait and see if there's any noticeable difference on consumer-facing devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

Although there was a little bit of a wait, I've managed to do just that, thanks to the Redmagic 11 Pro. The phone is among the initial wave of devices featuring the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the phone serves as a good indicator as to just what the Qualcomm chipset is capable of, and after a week of testing and daily use, it's evident that this is the fastest mobile chipset available today.

And while I'm sharing testing data of the Redmagic 11 Pro, that isn't the only device based on Qualcomm's latest silicon I have on hand — there are two other phones I've been using alongside it, but as they're yet to launch, I can't talk about them just yet. Suffice to say that their performance is also in line with that of the Redmagic 11 Pro, with no measurable variance in synthetic workloads.

Looking at Geekbench 6 single-core scores, the Redmagic 11 Pro is 13% faster than its predecessor, and there's a 9% increase in multi-core scores. There's a smaller year-on-year increase in 3DMark scores, but again, it is in line with the gains Qualcomm has delivered with every new generation over the last three years.

Interestingly, there's just a 5% difference between the Redmagic 11 Pro and the MediaTek Dimensity 9500-powered Vivo X300 Pro, and that alone illustrates just how good the latest Arm cores are this year — they're able to hold their own against Qualcomm's custom design. It's a similar situation with 3DMark, and the ray tracing enabled Solay Bay test has both the Redmagic 11 Pro and Vivo X300 Pro on a level playing field.

But there's a problem: overheating. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 manages to get hotter than the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which I didn't think was possible. The difference is noticeable while gaming, and even on a phone with liquid cooling like the Redmagic 11 Pro, the thermals got so high that it was just uncomfortable to hold the device.

In fact, the Redmagic 11 Pro just shut down in the middle of 3DMark's Steel Nomad Light stress test as it overheated, and this is with the built-in fan running at its highest setting and liquid cooling active. I noticed the same thing on another Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5-powered device I'm testing, so this is clearly something Qualcomm needs to look into.

While the issue isn't as extreme in regular gaming scenarios, the Redmagic 11 Pro exceeds 52 degrees in extended gaming, and it got a few degrees hotter than its predecessor. To put that into context, I didn't see any of these issues with the Vivo X300 Pro, with the device staying under 45 degrees during marathon gaming sessions.

The solution? Most Android manufacturers will likely have a much more conversative thermal threshold that throttles the Qualcomm silicon before it can overheat. This is what I noticed in most 2025 phones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and there really isn't much more that can be done to manage the thermals.

Even in phones with dedicated thermal management systems, there just isn't enough surface area to effectively spread out the heat generated by the chipset, so all manufacturers resort to some level of throttling. It's almost a given that we will see the same in 2026 flagships — at least those powered by Qualcomm.

So while Qualcomm once again has the fastest mobile chipset, it's a Pyrrhic victory. The overheating issue curtails the excitement associated with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and if anything, the Dimensity 9500 is looking like a much more balanced platform this time.