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

If you want the gaming focus of Android handhelds without giving up a full smartphone experience, then the niche market for gaming phones might be a good fit for you. The latest entry into the field is the REDMAGIC 11S Pro, which touts a new AquaCore Cooling System with a 24,000-RPM Turbo Fan.

The brand claims it’s the first to bring flowing fluorinated liquid cooling to a mass-produced smartphone. Watching the little bubbles flow around the handset’s back is undoubtedly eye-catching, 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 UK heat wave to contend with. If a gaming phone can prove its worth in 33°C (91°F) heat, it can prove it anywhere.

REDMAGIC 11S Pro benchmarks

Before the heatwave hit, I ran our 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 edges out its competitors, even outscoring the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy by 3% in both single- and multi-core tests. This makes it the fastest Snapdragon-equipped phone we’ve tested to date.

The Snapdragon chip also opens a sizeable lead over rival silicon. It bests the Dimensity 9500 inside the OPPO Find X9 Pro by 17% in single-core and 21% in multi-core. The Pixel 10 Pro XL’s Tensor G5 processor and its older CPU cores fall even further behind; the 11S Pro has a whopping 65% single-core advantage and nearly doubles its multi-core performance.

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

Starting with Wild Life Extreme, a high-end traditional rasterization workload, the phone is clearly a top performer. It nudges marginally ahead with a single run but also sustains peak performance far better than the competition. It retains 77% of its peak score by the end of the test, compared to rival models that fell to somewhere between 60% and 49% of their best under stress.

However, there’s a major caveat here. The REDMAGIC 11S Pro is only able to sustain impressive peak performance at the expense of absolutely colossal peak temperatures. A high of 59°C and an average of 49°C make the phone far too hot to hold even several minutes after the test finished, let alone during.

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

The same trend appears in the Solar Bay ray-tracing stress test results as well. Again, temperatures peaked at 59°C, with an average of 50°C, versus the closest rivals, which peaked at a still warm but more manageable 44°C.

Real gaming in a heatwave

Stress tests are one thing; real games tend to be less demanding, with lighter graphical workloads and a more balanced requirement between CPU and GPU. Most flagship phones can sustain 60 fps or higher very well in my testing, even over longer gaming sessions.

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

With 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 play, the phone reached 43°C, far below the worst-case stress test benchmarks but still verging on uncomfortable to hold. The handset was undeniably warm by the end of the play session, but it managed to sustain 120fps throughout, with almost no jank or frame hitches. Not bad, given the background temperature of a muggy 33°C to start with.

I only gave the phone 10 minutes to cool down between gaming sessions, but even so, Asphalt jumped right back in with an already high 39°C starting temp. Even with a fan and cooling loop, a high background temperature prevents heat from dissipating from the device quickly enough.

Unfortunately, not giving the phone longer to breathe caused some performance issues, with the handset struggling to hit close to 60fps, let alone 120fps, instead just averaging 45fps with lows closer to 30fps. Not great. By the end of the test, the phone had only risen to 41°C, so not as hot as last time, but clearly hot enough to cause performance throttling.

A final 20-minute session playing Mario Kart Wii via the Dolphin emulator didn’t reveal the same problem. Despite starting temperatures of 37°C and a final of 41°C, the handset was able to hold a steady 60fps in-game. There was the odd slowdown, particularly in menus, but I’ve never seen a phone play this game flawlessly (yet).

Overall, performance was mostly rock solid — with Asphalt Legends being the exception. Ultra-settings combined with a 120fps uncapped frame rate and hot weather proved to be a step too far even for the fan-assisted REDMAGIC 11S Pro. Still, the handset delivered robust performance in COD Mobile and my emulation test, even in a high-temperature environment. That’s exactly what you want from a high-end gaming-oriented handset.

Thankfully, temperatures in real game tests proved much more manageable than those in the stress tests when the handset was allowed to run unrestricted. Perhaps the first half of our test just revealed REDMAGIC throwing caution to the wind in order to top the benchmark charts. Or just confirmation that real games aren’t quite as demanding.

Do you need robust cooling on a modern gaming phone?

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

Unleash devices without these constraints, and we do see very extreme levels of performance, but with heat and power draw to match. You only have to look at the extreme results the REDMAGIC 11S Pro achieved during 3DMark’s stress tests. Still, it’s impressive that the phone never shut down under those temperatures. While a robust cooling setup seems to be a must with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in particular — which we’ve noted is very hot on almost all phones it powers — that 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 sustain 120 frames per second in the latest titles without novelty cooling — the real limit is often keeping power draw in single digits. Thermals are an issue, but even underclocking the latest flagships still leaves plenty of performance on the table for high frame rates and oversampling classic emulators.

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

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