Snapdragon 8 Elite, tipped to power Galaxy S25, prone to worrying level of overheating

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is an ambitious new chipset with custom Oryon CPU cores and a new Adreno GPU with a sliced architecture. The chipset features two prime cores running at 4.32GHz and six performance cores clocked at 3.53GHz. It's based on TSMC's 3nm process and Qualcomm is promising a performance uplift of 45 percent. The GPU is also 40 percent faster. It's also supposed to be more power-efficient than the chip it's replacing.

During stress tests, the Realme GT7 Pro got unbearably toasty, prompting the protective mechanisms to kick in and abort the benchmarking app halfway into the test. The phone also disabled all apps except for Phone and Messages. That's concerning, considering the phone even features a cooling chamber.

The good news is that the Snapdragon 8 Elite isn't necessarily to blame here. Apparently, the Realme GT7 Pro tried to cheat benchmark apps and potentially pushed beyond power limits.

This was confirmed when spoofed versions of benchmarking apps were used, which the phone was not designed to detect. Ignoring thermal limits allows smartphones to gain an edge on benchmarks.

Outside of benchmarks though, the phone performed admirably, getting only a little warm after a 30-minute gaming session, which is expected behavior. More importantly, the performance was smooth and flawless. However, that doesn't guarantee that it won't heat up when playing unoptimized or heavier gamers.

Also, during Geekbench tests, which put less strain on phones than stress tests, the Snapdragon 8 Elite did perform better than the last-gen chip, but only by around 11 to 13 percent, falling short of Qualcomm's claim of a more than 40 percent boost.

Benchmark tests exist to quantify performance but they don't accurately reflect real-world experience. One of their purposes is to find out a device's fastest theoretical performance and push all the cores to their maximum frequency. That's why, they should not be taken as a representation of the overall experience.

Regardless, it's not a good look for Qualcomm that a device with its latest chip has been caught cheating in benchmarks and while the chip maker can easily disassociate itself from this behavior, it's also not promising that the performance never reached the levels Qualcomm touted even when using anonymised benchmarking apps.