It has been a very busy few weeks for us as new devices with the latest chipsets are popping out everywhere – and this video is going to be all about the new iQOO 13. This phone has been released for quite some time in other regions but only recently launched here in Malaysia.
I had the opportunity to test it out extensively for the past 2 weeks or so, and here is our review of the iQOO 13.
Performance
So, we’ll obviously want to talk about the performance first. The iQOO 13 is using a special type of combination of chips. It is powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite and also has a proprietary co-processor called Q2 – and we’ll talk about it in a while.
Remember that gaming test we uploaded a while back? Yeah, I was in disbelief as the iQOO 13 performed really well in Genshin Impact at the highest graphical settings and still get nearly consistent 60fps through nearly one-hour gameplay, while the temperature barely hits 45°C. That is just impressive and we’ve never seen this level of performance on any phones before!
Then, when we move on to Zenless Zone Zero – particularly that long and intensive Nineveh boss fight, the iQOO 13 finally showed its true colors. After rewatching the entire footage, I realized that the frame rate, although consistent and smooth, is only at around 40fps.
And looking back, I think I know what the Q2 chip does. You see, Genshin Impact is one of the games supported by the Q2 chip and has a lot of additional features when we drag out the sidebar. We have things like the Game Super Resolution that upscale the game to these resolutions as shown on the screen, but the performance really drops a lot when we enable the Ultra High Quality option.
There is also an option to enable frame interpolation to get an even higher frame rate—that’s a topic for another day—but both these graphical options are unavailable on other games, like Zenless Zone Zero. That’s why the frame rates aren’t that good on ZZZ, and the performance has been throttled quite a lot. By the way, the Monster Mode doesn’t seem to change anything either, so I’m not sure what it actually does.
The logical conclusion here is that for supported games, the Q2 chip can take some load off the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Presumably, it has some sort of upscaler technology like DLSS or FSR as well because it manages to maintain such frame rate and such cool surface temperature. So with that in mind, iQOO can also lower the thermal limit of the phone to only around 44°C while still maintaining such high frame rates for certain games. These are all speculations, by the way. I reached this conclusion by looking at the data we’ve gathered and going through the process of elimination.
I mean, this is surely one of the many solutions to the ever-growing performance demands from games but it’s not a universal solution. I’m still waiting for game developers to adopt Arm’s Accuracy Super Resolution upscaling technology. It goes to show that the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s raw performance is just not sustainable.
Still, great gaming performance overall – but even better gaming performance if the Q2 chip supports those games.
Battery life
So, with that out of the way – how’s the battery life of the iQOO 13? Well, it’s as expected. It has a humongous battery that’s equivalent to 6,150mAh. I say equivalent because the iQOO 13 uses a dual-cell battery connected in series, so the voltage is doubled but the amperage is halved. Either way, it totals to 23.62Wh capacity – and to know more about why Wh is better than mAh, watch our video here.
1080p at 144Hz
1440p at 144Hz
I did two battery life tests on the iQOO 13. The first one is with 1080p resolution and it lasts for 21 hours and 47 minutes. That’s to be expected from a phone with such a huge battery capacity. If we turn it up to 1440p, it lasts for 19 hours 54 minutes. The impact isn’t significant at all – only about 1.8833% drop in terms of the battery life in this particular test.
Charging speed
As for the charging speed, this is where things get interesting as the iQOO 13 comes with a 120W vivo FlashCharge charger and it supports up to 120W via its proprietary charging standard, or up to 65W of USB-PD PPS. And oh – it’s also using a USB-C port.
So, with its default settings, it can charge the phone from 15% to completion in around 35 minutes. The temperature is indeed rather high too, as it can reach around 36°C.
Now then, we can head into the settings menu and enable the fast charging option. When we redid the charging test, we can see that the charging speed isn’t that much different from before, but the temperature goes up to 42.5°C, and that seems to be the thermal limit for charging.
Since iQOO claims that the iQOO 13 supports 100W USB-PD PPS charging standard, I reconnected it to our Ugreen 140W charger and found out that the iQOO 13 will only take in around 45W at most. Still, the charging speed is slightly faster compared to the stock charger with fast charging disabled, yet the temperature is much lower.
Again, I really appreciate that they’re supporting USB-PD PPS and not locking us down to proprietary fast charging standards. Good job.
Oh – the iQOO 13 also supports bypass charging, which they’re calling it as “Direct Drive Power Supply”. It works with a USB-PD PPS charger too – so we are not tied down to their own proprietary charger.
Screen
Now, let’s talk about the screen. The iQOO 13 has a 6.82-inch OLED screen with a high resolution of 3168×1440 pixels and also goes up to 144Hz refresh rate.
By default, the screen is really good as it go up to around 1737 nits brightness – and the color gamut coverage is really good too. We’re talking about 99.72% of sRGB and 97.74% of DCI-P3 color gamuts with a rather low ΔE number. The maximum ΔE number should be a fluke since the average is very low.
Now, there are two more different color profiles in the settings menu – and I’ll just quickly show you the results on the screen. I honestly do think that the default is already good enough, but the Bright color profile is also okay if you like a slightly more vivid screen while the Professional color profile is less vivid.
Software
Okay, let’s talk about the software. It’s basically the same software as the vivo X200 Pro that we reviewed earlier. Out of the box, it is running on Funtouch OS 15 on top of Android 15, and the overall navigation is super smooth – but since it is the same software as the vivo X200 Pro, it comes with all the same bloatware and ads as well. I’m really not a fan of this, but at least we can remove most of them.
I mean, for a phone that’s meant for gamers, the overall software experience is pretty bland. Yes, it comes with its own set of unique features like the 4D vibration, but that’s about it. There is no feature like button remapping when we connect an Xbox controller or anything like that.
What we do have, is the ring light around the camera bump. I personally will not use this feature but it is there if you want to. Kinda fancy, I guess.
Design
Of course, we’ll have to talk about the design too. The iQOO 13 is available in three different colors – and we have it in the Legend color – which is practically white and has the BMW branding on it.
The overall design is sleek and minimalist, and it has a matte back. It feels really nice to touch and hold, and the camera bump doesn’t stick up like a sore thumb either. However, that camera bump is big. It does act like a heat trap as shown through our thermal camera – and I hope iQOO can shrink the camera bump further in the next generation.
Camera
Speaking of the cameras, now is the time to talk about it. There are three cameras here, and all of them are 50MP sensors. So, are the cameras good?
To have a look at all the pictures taken with the iQOO 13, watch our video at the top of this review.
A few more things to mention
So, here are a few more things to mention about the iQOO 13. It has a USB 3.0 port at the bottom, and we can mirror the phone’s display to the external display.
It does have dual SIM card slots and also rated for both IP68 and IP69.
Should you buy the iQOO 13?
Finally – should you buy the iQOO 13? I think yes. If you’re looking for the latest and gaming phone, then this is a fantastic choice. As we’ve shown in this video, certain games like Genshin Impact can take advantage of the Q2 co-processor and that provides superb performance at a very low temperature.
However, other games that cannot take advantage of the Q2 co-processor will have rather low FPS because of the low thermal limit of only 44°C, but still steady performance overall.
At only RM3,499, I do believe that the iQOO 13 is a much better phone compared to the realme GT 7 Pro.
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