Tested: Forget performance, battery life is the reason to buy a Snapdragon

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Credit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority


Qualcomm’s sales pitch for the Snapdragon 8 Elite is performance, performance, performance. Whether you’re playing games, running the latest AI tasks, or simply using the new Oryon CPU to flick through your favorite apps, the latest Snapdragon promises to be fast. Probably faster than you really need, in fact.

However, tucked away in Qualcomm’s presentation was mention of up to 45% better energy efficiency for its new custom CPU setup, thanks in part to TSMC’s cutting edge 3nm manufacturing process. That’s the potential to add significant hours of screen-on time to certain scenarios. To see if these claims have any merit, I grabbed the new ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro, which is very similar to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-packing ROG Phone 8, and ran the phones through a series of battery tests. The results certainly lend weight to Qualcomm’s lofty claims, albeit with a few caveats.




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