The Asus ROG Phone 3 houses a gigantic 6,000 mAh battery that’s one of the largest on the market to date, and with good reason. The phone includes a powerful Snapdragon 865 Plus processor, a 144Hz AMOLED display, and is tasked with keeping gamers animated for those long gaming sessions.
The ROG 3 phone is specifically designed to deliver high performance yet still last a full day of intensive use. However, enthusiastic observers will have noticed that the ROG Phone 3 offers the same battery capacity as its predecessor, the ROG Phone 2. So how far can it push the battery life of the more powerful ROG Phone 3? That is what we are here to discover.
Our verdict: Asus ROG Phone 3 review: a gaming power for all
Before getting into the numbers, here is a quick rundown of how the ROG Phone 3’s competitors stack up against battery capacity. Note that there are phones like the Oukitel K13 Pro, which offers a colossal 11,000 mAh battery. But we don’t consider it a competitor because these oversized battery-powered phones generally point to a very low performance point. The Pixel 3a XL is also a really durable phone but once again it doesn’t meet the criteria of our gaming phone.
| Battery capacity | |
|---|---|
| Asus ROG Phone 3 | 6,000 mAh |
| Asus Zenfone 6 | 6,000 mAh |
| Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Pro | 5,260 mAh |
| Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra | 5,000 mAh |
| LG V60 ThinQ 5G | 5,000 mAh |
| Xiaomi Black Shark 3 Pro | 5,000 mAh |
| OnePlus 8 Pro | 4,510 mAh |
| Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro 5G | 4,500 mAh |
| Oppo Find X2 Pro | 4,260 mAh |
| Huawei P40 Pro | 4,200 mAh |
| Realme X50 Pro 5G | 4,200 mAh |
While smartphone battery capacity continues a generally upward trajectory, 6,000 mAh batteries are still rare. The phone’s closest 2020 competitors tend to land at and around the 5,000 mAh mark.
On paper, this gives the ROG Phone 3 a healthy edge and we would expect the phone to offer competitive, if not better, battery life than its rivals. Of course, battery life is much more than cell capacity, so let’s dive into a few benchmarks.
Benchmarking a battery
For consistent battery life results across all devices, we turned to our internal Speed Test G benchmark, which runs through a series of benchmark tests to stress the CPU, GPU, and memory until the battery runs out. We treat it as the worst case scenario for screen time as few people, if any, will run games on their phone during a full battery cycle.
The result gives us a very good estimate of how long a phone lasts given a continuous heavy workload.
The Asus ROG Phone 3 does not outperform our reference graphics, but offers excellent performance. At five hours and 48 minutes, Asus’ latest gaming smartphone can handle extremely long gaming sessions with battery to spare.
Impressively, the ROG Phone 3 outperforms its predecessor despite including more powerful hardware. Even with gaming sessions, it would really be difficult to run this phone in one day. For more typical day-to-day use, this phone offers incredibly incredible battery life and maximum performance.
Overall, the phone ranks third for comparable devices. It’s behind the Huawei P40 Pro Plus and Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro, but it’s right in the mix with the LG V60 and Poco F2 Pro.
Huawei and Xiaomi phones have smaller batteries, but they are known for heavy-handed optimizations that reduce performance in exchange for longer battery life. Huawei’s Kirin 990 (found in the aforementioned P40 Pro Plus) also doesn’t reach the high performance heights of the ROG Phone 3’s Snapdragon 865 Plus. With that in mind, we should take a quick look at the performance results of this benchmark to see if that also plays a role in the story.
This is where things get very interesting. The Asus ROG Phone 3 offers faster and more consistent performance than all phones that scored higher or similar in our battery test bench. Under tension, the phone has a battery life equivalent to that of the LG V60, Huawei P40 Pro Plus and Poco F2 Pro, but it provides faster and more sustainable performance.
The ROG Phone 3 only marginally loses OnePlus 8 Pro, Realme X50 Pro 5G, and Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra in terms of sustained performance, but the latter handles five hours of life under our stress test compared to ROG’s five and 48 hours minutes. Meanwhile, the Realme X50 Pro survived just over four hours, while the OnePlus 8 Pro records in just three hours and 30 minutes. The bottom line is that Asus doesn’t have to sacrifice performance or battery life, enjoying the best of both. All thanks to its 6,000mAh cell.
Finally, it’s worth noting that turning on X mode, a high-performance mode that can dynamically overclock the CPU to an intimidating 3.1GHz, sees the Asus ROG Phone 3 outperform its rivals in terms of performance and consistency. However, this mode drains the phone’s battery considerably faster, resulting in just over three hours and 20 minutes of heavy use. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus looks like a power-hungry beast when it runs at full throttle.
Asus ROG Phone 3 battery: the verdict
The Asus ROG Phone 3’s 6,000 mAh battery doesn’t disappoint. Although the phone does not escape with our battery reference crown, as some might have expected, it offers an impressive result of almost six hours. Remember that the phone is powering a 144Hz display and a more powerful Snapdragon 865 Plus processor than the current competition as well. Our benchmark is also an example of the toughest use cases for screen time.
The ROG Phone 3 will last noticeably longer when you surf the web, check email, and all those other less demanding things we use our phones for. If you somehow manage to deplete the 6,000 mAh battery, the phone’s 30W fast charge solution fully powers the battery in 107 minutes or about 87% in just one hour.
The Asus ROG Phone 3 doesn’t sacrifice performance or battery life, enjoy the best of both.
One last point on the phone battery, we noticed some variation in screen time during our review. The ROG 3 phone lasts up to nine hours and 21 minutes with 5% battery remaining during typical daily use, but other days it only managed seven hours. We believe this wide margin is due to the variable 144Hz refresh rate and the number of demanding applications you can run in one day.
Inconsistent battery life is becoming much more common as the industry adopts more energy-consuming, variable refresh rate displays. The bottom line is that between six and more than nine hours of screen time is just fantastic for such a high-performance smartphone.
Read below: Best of Android – Mid 2020: Which phone has the best battery life?
