ASUS ROG Phone 6 Teardown Reveals Its Cooling Secret
The Republic of Gamers, the famed gaming brand from Asus, just recently revealed its latest mobile gaming flagship. Just like its predecessors, the ROG Phone 6 and ROG Phone 6 Pro carry the brand's unique aesthetic but with a new twist this time around. Asus boldly claims that its style has evolved, leaving behind its gritty cyberpunk roots and launching into the space-faring future. The external design, however, is not all that has changed, and there are new features inside and out. Of course, Asus doesn't always talk directly about what happens inside its phone, but a teardown is thankfully giving us the inside scoop on the ROG Phone 6's cooling solution that doesn't involve a minuscule fan spinning inside.
Almost all high-end phones these days are capable of gaming, of course, but these dedicated gaming smartphones push the boundaries of what mobile hardware is capable of, no holds barred. That often means taxing processors and batteries beyond their normal capacities while generating heat that could spell doom for ordinary smartphones. That's where more sophisticated cooling solutions come in, and this is also where these gaming phones try to differentiate themselves beyond their designs.
Some like the Lenovo Legion and Nubia RedMagic try to take a page directly out of PC gaming books by including a tiny fan inside. While active cooling does have its perks, it also means inviting disaster when it comes to dust and water particles. Other phones opt for a more passive solution with a little help from an external fan, but the ROG Phone 6 has another trick up its sleeve to help things along.
A split design keeps things cool
A teardown video of the Asus ROG Phone 6 reveals the unique architecture of the phone's components. While split batteries aren't exactly groundbreaking at this point, Asus arranged the two battery cells away from each other and placed the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor between the two, right in the middle of the phone. Normally, the logic board with the processor will be located at the top, leaving room for a single large slab of battery to take up the majority of the space inside of the device.
This unusual design has the effect of spreading heat more evenly across the phone. The location of the processor in the middle also means it will be directly underneath the AeroActive cooling add-on, making its heat dissipation even more effective. Even without the external fan, though, the passive cooling system should still kick in to prevent premature throttling of the CPU that leads to dropped frames, at least in theory. At the very least, the design also keeps the heat away from your fingers when you're playing a game.
Whether this unconventional arrangement of components will actually be effective will require some real-world evaluation. The ROG Phone 6 is really pushing the limits of smartphone hardware, including a RAM capacity that puts some laptops to shame. It doesn't come without its price, though, as the base model costs €999 ($1,020), and that's without that AeroActive Cooler 6 accessory.