nubia Red Magic 7 review

Synthetic benchmarks

The Red Magic 7 has the honor of being one of the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 1-powered smartphones to enter our office. The chipset's CPU is based on ARM's new Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 cores. Respectively, these core clusters are 1x Kryo Prime @3.0 GHz, 3x Kryo Gold @2.5 GHz and 4x Kryo Silver @1.8 GHz. The Adreno 730 GPU clocked at 818 MHz takes care of the graphically-intensive tasks. The whole chip is based on Samsung's 4nm 4LPE manufacturing process promising further power savings from last year's Snapdragon 888 series.

An improved internal X65 modem is also on board supporting download/upload speeds of 10 Gbit/s/3 Gbit/s over 5G.

The Red Magic 7 supplies the SoC with various memory options ranging from 8GB/128GB up to 16GB/512GB. The storage is, of course, UFS 3.1 with no option for expandability via a microSD card.

We ran the usual benchmark tests to see how much the Red Magic 7 has improved over its predecessors in terms of raw performance as well as compare it against the competition from Samsung. Sadly, we don't have data for MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 at the time of writing this review.

GeekBench 5 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  3855
• Asus ROG Phone 5 Ultimate
  3728
• iQOO 9 Pro
  3708
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  3667
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  3660
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  3657
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  3586
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  3521
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  3486
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  2831

GeekBench 5 (single-core)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  1246
• iQOO 9 Pro
  1221
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  1180
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  1175
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  1140
• Asus ROG Phone 5 Ultimate
  1128
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  1128
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  1124
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  1117
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  1042

AnTuTu 9

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  1056488
• iQOO 9 Pro
  997948
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  968359
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  866437
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  823354
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  761334
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  735588
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  719815

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (onscreen)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  64
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  44
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  43
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  42
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  42
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  40
• iQOO 9 Pro
  37
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  29
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  26

GFX Aztek Vulkan High (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  48
• iQOO 9 Pro
  44
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  35
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  32
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  31
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  31
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  31
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  30
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  30

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (onscreen)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  77
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  62
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  59
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  59
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  58
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  50
• iQOO 9 Pro
  46
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  39
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  37

GFX Car Chase ES 3.1 (offscreen 1080p)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  97
• iQOO 9 Pro
  95
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  76
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  74
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  71
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  70
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  70
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  69
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  63

3DMark Wild Life Vulkan 1.1 (offscreen 1440p)

Higher is better

• ZTE nubia Red Magic 7
  10118
• iQOO 9 Pro
  9673
• Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (1440p)
  7437
• Google Pixel 6 Pro
  6602
• nubia Red Magic 6S Pro
  5865
• Asus ROG Phone 5 Ultimate
  5745
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6
  5714
• ZTE nubia Red Magic 6R
  5667
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro (X Mode)
  5659
• Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro
  5556

In the pure CPU benchmark, Geekbench, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 takes a notable lead over this year's Exynos 2200 chip and last year's Snapdragon 888+ inside the Asus ROG Phone 5s Pro. In both, single and multi-core tests, the SD 8 Gen 1 overtakes the rest by about 5-6%.

However, in the combined AnTuTu 9 test, the chipset takes a more confident lead with a 9% difference over the Exynos 2220.

The GPU-intensive tests suggest of even greater performance leap beating the Xclipse GPU inside the Exynos 2200 by 36% in some cases.

It's evident that the Red Magic 7 utilizes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to the fullest, beating the competition fairly easy in GPU-bound workloads while posting a modest lead over the Exynos 2200 in strictly CPU-bound tests.

Sustained performance

Packing a powerful chipset under the hood isn't enough. You need a working cooling solution to maintain stable and sustained performance during long gaming sessions. Well, this is supposed to be Red Magic's specialty as it features a unique cooling fan. This year's iteration boasts a 35% improvement in air volume, probably thanks to the additional exhaust vent on the back.

The cooling fan itself caps at 20,000 RPM, and a metal cover reduces the sound emissions. On this version, the fan blades are transparent, and an RGB LED ring sits beneath them, creating a cool and flashy effect.

To help with the cooling fan, nubia has used composite graphene and "space-grade materials" for better heat dissipation. There's also an aircraft-grade aluminum used for the middle frame, a VC heat sink attached to it, which in turn is glued to the chip using high thermal conductivity gel. There's also a copper coil somewhere inside.

To put the new chip and cooling system to the test, we ran an hour-long CPU stress test since this is the main contributor to the heat inside the SoC. We first did the test without the cooling fan, let the handset cool off and then rerun it with the cooling fan set to maximum.

We were pleased to see that even without the cooling fan on, the passive cooling solution does a pretty good job of maintaining high clock speeds. The performance curve is rather smooth with no big dips. The handset throttled down to 87% of its maximum performance but only for a few brief moments. If we try to guess, the phone will be able to maintain a pretty smooth performance after an hour of gameplay. That's a notable improvement over last year's Red Magic 6s Pro, which was pretty good at sustained performance as well.

Cooling fan: Off • On

Turning the fan on didn't flatten the curve, but it prevented the system to dip below 91% of its maximum performance. That's an impressive score after an hour-long sustained heavy CPU-bound load.

It's important to note that the phone's frame was quite warm in both scenarios, and so was the glass back. The frame felt warmer, though. Don't expect the fan to help with the exterior heat.

High refresh rate gaming

We used Android 12's built-in refresh rate counter alongside Game Space's built-in FPS counter to determine which games really run at more than 60fps. Sadly, for the most part, games ran at 120Hz, but the actual FPS counter showed 60fps. We tried quite a bit AAA titles such as Garena Free Fire, Genshin Impact, Mobile Legends, Arena of Valor, Asphalt 9, Real Racing 3 and even PUBG Mobile. They were all locked up to 60fps, while Garena Free Fire and PUBG required some additional tweaking in their respective settings menus to go from 30 to 60fps.

There were some games that utilized the HRR display to some degree. Call of Duty Mobile got up to 90fps, Air Force 1945 got all the 165Hz as well as Sky Force: Reloaded and Real Racing 3.

Unfortunately, we are still far away from proper HRR gaming on Android phones, but the efforts are noticeable. Still, be prepared for the majority of games not to be able to saturate that speedy 165Hz display.