RedMagic 11S Pro+ Review: Steam PC Gaming, Snapdragon 8 Elite

From the first-generation Red Magic gaming phone in 2018 to today, the name Red Magic has almost become synonymous with "the performance ceiling of smartphones." Every latest and most powerful Snapdragon flagship mobile platform is first pushed to its absolute limits under Red Magic's thermal stacking and software tuning, serving players one performance-packed feast after another.

And this time, the Red Magic 11S Pro series has once again refreshed our understanding of a performance powerhouse. It is equipped with the most powerful Snapdragon flagship to date, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Leading Version 5th Gen, and for the first time brings PC-level Steam Direct Connect mode into a phone. In other words, this device weighing less than 200 grams in your hand can simultaneously be a phone, a handheld console, a PC host, and even a desktop phone capable of playing Black Myth: Wukong and Cyberpunk 2077.

Flat design, lies flat no matter how you place it

Actually, the first impression upon getting it in hand is not the powerful performance of the Red Magic 11S Pro+, but its design. Today's smartphones generally sacrifice appearance for powerful imaging performance, especially the protruding camera modules, which not only make the phone top-heavy but also make it very difficult to place stably on a desk.

The Red Magic 11S Pro+ is different, adopting a flat design, which can be said to be a quite stubborn and quite stylish choice made in this era where protruding cameras are everywhere. The back of the body has no protrusions whatsoever, which is not only attractive but also a delight to hold.

Of course, in the process of achieving a flat design, the stacking difficulty Red Magic needs to overcome is still very high, needing to fit in a water cooling module, a wireless charging module, a larger battery, a larger VC, and a fan — all while maintaining the flat profile. This stacking difficulty may be more complex than designing a gaming console.

As for the front, the Red Magic 11S Pro+ this time is equipped with a full-screen display: Wukong Screen 2.0, which is essentially a hole-free screen. The specs are also top-tier: 6.85 inches, 1.5K resolution, 144Hz high refresh rate, screen-to-body ratio as high as 95.3%, and bezels as narrow as 1.25mm. No punch-hole, no notch, no opening — flat at a glance.

In terms of under-display technology, the Red Magic 11S Pro series adopts BOE X10 under-display luminescent material, where pixels can be driven independently, resulting in a more refined display; a new UDC Ultra dedicated display chip has been added, making the screen display more consistent. The front-facing camera section uses high-transparency spatial invisible circuitry, combined with AI Portrait Algorithm 4.0, and the front-facing selfie performance has seen a noticeable improvement over the previous generation.

In terms of eye protection, a dual scheme of 2592Hz PWM dimming + DC dimming is supported, with SGS and Rhine TÜV low blue light flicker-free certification. Eye fatigue after prolonged gaming is noticeably reduced compared to traditional screens.

Combined with the flat, straight frame, it can be said that the Red Magic 11S Pro+ presents a very distinctive aesthetic.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Leading Version 5th Gen, a chip selected from among a hundred

Of course, performance is what Red Magic deserves attention for, and the Red Magic 11S Pro+ this time is equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Leading Version 5th Gen. So what is special about this Leading Version? Simply put, it is the Snapdragon 8 Elite 5th Gen with an exceptionally superior constitution, selected after rigorous screening against certain standards.

First is physical screening: the Leading Version is selected only from the central wafer area of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 5th Gen. This is deliberate — due to the physical characteristics of semiconductor manufacturing, the central area of the wafer has the most stable temperature and the highest etching precision, so the chips produced have inherently superior electrical performance compared to those from the edge areas.

Second is speed grading: when ordinary chips verify the maximum clock speed through automated test equipment, they often only reach around 4.6GHz. Chips that are to enter the Leading Version selection list must be able to stably reach a maximum clock speed of 4.74GHz — this frequency is not only the ceiling of the Android camp at present, but also directly exceeds the designed upper limit of competing products of the same generation.

Finally is high temperature/high voltage screening: through Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) testing, chips are placed in a high-temperature environment with voltage and frequency pushed to their limits, observing their stability and power consumption performance. Only chips that can still maintain frequency without dropping or falling apart under this hellish mode are qualified to be labeled as Leading Version.

After these three rounds of screening, what remains is a supreme constitution selected from among a hundred. So how does it actually perform?

We used Perfdog to conduct a real-world test of the Red Magic 11S Pro+ with 30 minutes of map traversal in Genshin Impact's Sumeru City, with an average frame rate of 61 FPS, and the overall frame rate performance was almost a straight line, performing extremely well.

In addition, the AnTuTu benchmark score also reached 4.41 million points, and the 3DMark stress test stability reached 82.7%, which is also very outstanding.

Beyond the main chip, Red Magic's self-developed RedCore R4 gaming chip has also been upgraded. This chip handles tasks such as touch optimization, lighting control, and rendering acceleration. This time Red Magic and Qualcomm jointly created dedicated high-speed video memory; in high-load scenarios, the RedCore R4 will call on the dedicated GPU for graphics load rendering optimization, reducing the number of accesses to system memory, shortening the data path and reducing bandwidth pressure.

Simply put, the main chip is responsible for computing, while the RedCore R4 is responsible for rendering; the two collaborate with division of labor, the CPU's pressure is reduced, and screen rendering is actually smoother as a result. Combined with the all-new CUBE Optimus Gaming Engine 3.0, which can finely allocate performance for different scenarios to achieve the triple goals of stable frame rates, low power consumption, and long battery life. Its existence allows all those hardware specs to truly reach the player's hands, rather than only living inside benchmarking software.

Wind and water dual cooling: when thermal management is treated as a systems engineering project

Whether performance can be sustained comes down to thermal management. The depth of Red Magic's R&D in thermal management has already reached the industry ceiling level, and the 11S Pro series has raised that ceiling another notch. The entire thermal solution is named the ICE Magic Cooling System, comprising four parts: Pulsating Water Cooling Engine, Active Cooling Fan WindRider 4.0, industry-first liquid metal, and industry-first 4D IceStage VC.

The most noteworthy among them is naturally the water cooling. It should be known that for a long time, water cooling has been standard technology for servers and PC hosts and such devices, but now Red Magic has squeezed it into a phone. To achieve this goal, Red Magic has done a lot of work, such as an exclusive piezoelectric ceramic micro-pump that achieves miniaturization of components and has also passed rigorous drop resistance tests. In terms of coolant selection, Red Magic also uses the same fluorinated liquid as NVIDIA AI servers, with a liquid-state range of -60°C to 108°C, which neither vaporizes nor solidifies, and both insulation and thermal conductivity reach top-tier standards.

The most remarkable thing is that because the Deuterium Silver transparent colorway makes the entire back shell transparent, the flow of the cooling liquid is visible to the naked eye. Lightly activate the water cooling mode, watch the coolant circulating and surging through the pipes — it not only achieves excellent thermal performance but is also visually very unique.

As for the fan section, Red Magic has been building built-in fans for phones since 2019, and this year marks the 8th generation product. The WindRider 4.0 this time reaches a maximum speed of 24,000 RPM, combined with 43 ultra-thin hurricane fan blades, and adopts an all-new forward-swept curved blade design, with significantly improved air pressure and sweeping area, yet fan noise is controlled below 30dB, almost imperceptible.

Front temperature

Back temperature

Combined with the industry-first liquid metal and 4D IceStage VC, the thermal performance of the entire phone is very outstanding. After 30 minutes of Genshin Impact gameplay, we used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature, and the results show that the highest temperature on both the front and back of the phone was just around 40°C, which is still a very outstanding performance.

Steam Direct Connect: making a phone truly a "PC" for the first time

With excellent performance and outstanding thermal management, the Red Magic 11S Pro+ has also made a revolutionary innovation this time to allow the phone's performance to be fully unleashed — that is the industry-first Steam Direct Connect mode. Many friends are also aware that in the past, for a phone to play PC games, one had to rely on cloud gaming, remote streaming, or emulators — these three paths all had a fairly high barrier to entry for ordinary players, and the experience was not necessarily good either.

The Steam Direct Connect mode equipped in the Red Magic 11S Pro series is truly running PC games on the phone in the genuine sense, backed by a translation engine self-developed by Red Magic Labs that has overcome the translation barrier from X86 to ARM architecture. Moreover, it is literally logging into a Steam account, syncing the games in your library, and playing freely.

We also used The Witcher 3 for the experience, and it can be seen that from logging into Steam, downloading the game, to playing the game freely, everything is very smooth. The key point is that it achieves account interoperability — the Black Myth: Wukong save you were playing halfway through on your home PC can be picked up on your phone when you pull it out on the high-speed train, something that was previously unthinkable.

In addition, the Red Magic 11S Pro+ also supports external expansion. Attach a controller, and it becomes a handheld console in complete form; connect a keyboard and mouse, and it becomes a gaming laptop; cast to a TV or monitor, and it becomes a gaming console, providing players with multiple forms of gaming experience.

Battery life, imaging, AI: bringing daily experience to the first tier as well

Finally, let's take a look at some other aspects of the Red Magic 11S Pro's performance. In terms of battery life, the Red Magic 11S Pro+ is equipped with a 7500mAh battery, supporting 120W GaN MagicFlash fast charging, as well as 80W wireless fast charging — long battery life and fast charging, allowing you to game freely without worrying about battery life.

As for the imaging section, for a gaming phone, it is not the most proficient area, but the Red Magic 11S Pro series still comes equipped with a quite pragmatic imaging combination: 50-megapixel ultra-sensitive OIS main camera + 50-megapixel ultra-wide angle + 2-megapixel macro, while the front features a 16-megapixel under-display camera.

Day samples

Night samples

From the actual experience, the entire imaging combination also delivers a good performance: daytime main camera imaging sharpness is sufficient, color reproduction leans toward a realistic style, and in HDR environments both highlight suppression and shadow detail can be retained; the distortion control of the ultra-wide angle is done well, with a high success rate when shooting architecture and landscapes; in night mode, the 50-megapixel main camera combined with ultra-sensitive OIS capability means handheld night shots basically won't be blurry, effectively meeting the needs of everyday recording.

In addition, at the system level, the new device this time comes with RED MAGIC OS 11.5; crucially, in partnership with Doubao, some AI capabilities have been added, such as AI Circle Search, AI Object Recognition, AI Eraser, AI Super-Clear Document, and more, also making it a phone that meets current-day needs.

Returning to the question at the beginning, what kind of phone is the Red Magic 11S Pro series exactly? It is a high-performance phone — Snapdragon 8 Elite Leading Version 5th Gen, powerful thermal management, and decent imaging capability, with gaming and daily use both covered; it is also a handheld console, with a built-in PC emulator, Steam Direct Connect, shoulder buttons, X-axis ultra-linear motor — every form a handheld console should have is all there. In 2026, an era where AI phones, imaging phones, and foldable phones compete for user attention, Red Magic still stubbornly writes the word "performance" in the largest and most prominent position, and has achieved a truly industry-generation-leading advantage. If you are someone who genuinely cares about the gaming experience, the Red Magic 11S Pro series deserves your serious consideration.