The arrival of the Black Shark 5 series basically announced that the Snapdragon 8 game phone in the first half of this year has been released and assembled.
As we said before, the evolution of gaming phones has roughly gone in two directions, one is completely for the game, penetrating the game one point, such as The Savior, the Red Devil, ROG, and the other is to balance the game and daily use, and the Black Shark now belongs more to the latter.
Unlike the Savior and the Red Devil, the Black Shark 5 series did not have a built-in active cooling fan, but chose to use a large-area VC heating plate design, which makes it more like an "ordinary mobile phone" in appearance and use.
These two directions of the game phone are not superior or inferior, but the Black Shark obviously gives the user one more choice, of course, the premise is that its experience is good enough, did the Black Shark 5 series do it?
This co-branding has ignition
Compared with last year's Black Shark 4, the Black Shark 5 series has hardly changed in the size of the whole machine this time, and the feel of the hand is very familiar at the first time, but the back camera module has changed from the previous center and horizontal to the left vertical arrangement. Perhaps in order to further convey the "novelty", the Black Shark 5 series also brought a Chinese aerospace version this time.
I remember last year's Gundam Limited Edition, which incorporated Gundam's iconic color combination design into many details of the fuselage, which impressed me. This time the Chinese aerospace version chose a white base, using multi-axis lithography geometric lines to form a space texture, the most conspicuous or "China Aerospace" four big characters, have lit up?
In terms of details, it also makes the RGB lamp into a star, which is very integrated with the back shell design even when it is not lit. The interior redraws the space-themed UI, and the wallpaper is a combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional space pictures.
Overall, the new Chinese aerospace version is a very good color scheme choice even for game phones, and this time it is a full series of Chinese aerospace versions. The Black Shark 5 in my hand is a Chinese aerospace version, and the Black Shark 5 Pro is a deeper black version of meteorite with a circuit board-like line livery.
On the left is the Black Shark 5 Pro Meteorite Black Edition, and on the right is the Black Shark 5 Chinese Aerospace Edition
Back to the configuration level that many people are more concerned about, this year's Black Shark 5 series continues the dual processor platform strategy, of which the Black Shark 5 still uses the Snapdragon 870 mobile platform, and the Black Shark 5Pro is replaced by the current latest Snapdragon 8.
Let's talk about Black Shark 5 first, still "minor changes", in addition to the main camera upgrade to 64 million pixels, and a slightly larger 4650mAh battery, hardware parameters have hardly changed.
We are already familiar with the Snapdragon 870 platform, which has achieved a good balance in performance and power consumption, bringing a sufficiently stable game performance output, and the Black Shark 5 has reached a stability of 99.3% in the 3D Mark stress test, which is a good confirmation of this. Still, I wanted to test the black shark 5's performance limits.
The result was some unexpected surprise, Black Shark 5 ran a 58.3 frame performance under the highest picture quality of "Original God", which is even higher than some Snapdragon 888 and even Snapdragon 8 mobile phones. It can be seen that the performance of the Black Shark 5 has been "squeezed" to the extreme by the performance of the Snapdragon 870.
Then the pressure may come to the side of the Black Shark 5 Pro. From the positioning point of view, black shark 5 pro is a strengthened version of black shark 5, "little brother" has been so strong, "big brother" what kind of performance will it be?
There's no suspense in the performance of reaching the top
Black Shark 5 Pro can also be seen as an upgrade of the Black Shark 4S Pro, the most obvious upgrade is naturally to replace the Snapdragon 8 processor, the main camera is also replaced by the previous 64 million pixel GW3 to 100 million pixels HM3, the battery is also slightly increased to 4650mAh.
There is also a screen that is easy to be ignored, although the parameter table is 6.67 inches, 1080P resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, but the Black Shark 5 Pro used a flexible direct screen for the first time, and other Black Shark mobile phones, including the Black Shark 5, are Samsung E4 hard screens. From the front screen chin width can be seen slightly different between the two, the chin is narrower is the Black Shark 5 Pro.
On the left is the Black Shark 5 Pro, and on the right is the Black Shark 5
In addition, the Black Shark 5 Pro inherits many unique features of the previous generation of Black Shark 4S Pro, such as the full-blood version of LPDDR 6400Mbps, a large sound cavity, etc., so the overall configuration gap between it and the Black Shark 5 is actually quite large.
The most typical is that the Black Shark 5 Pro has an additional SSD disk array system 2.0, compared to 1.0, its storage performance has been improved.
Taking Black Shark 5 as an example, the average LPDDR5+UFS3.1 score in sequential reading and writing is about 1600MB/s and 800MB/s. The Black Shark 5 Pro (12+256GB version) equipped with the SSD disk array system 2.0 has a sequential write performance of more than 2100MB/s and a sequential read performance of more than 1400MB/s on the Androbench platform.
This is not where it has improved the most, but its random read and write speeds have reached 800MB/s and 600MB/s respectively, directly doubling the fastest random read and write speed of the current Android flagship.
Such a strong memory score first brought some help to the Black Shark 5 Pro in terms of running score. The Antutu platform easily scored 1.1 million+ points, not to mention the score of other Snapdragon 8 models, which is higher than that of the same game phone savior Y90 and Red Devil 7 Pro.
Looking at the scores of each sub-item, it will be found that the Black Shark 5 Pro does not have a big difference in CPU, GPU and UX scores, the most obvious difference is the MEM score, up to 240,000 points, compared with the general score of about 180,000 more than 30%. This total result helped the Black Shark 5 Pro to reach the top of the Antu Rabbit performance list should be no suspense.
It should be noted that sequential read and write speeds are more determined by copy readings of large files, while game startup and loading speeds rely more on random read and write performance. The Black Shark 5 Pro's dramatically improved random read and write performance results in a faster loading experience for games, especially for large games.
On this basis, if the manufacturer can further optimize the software, then the overall game performance output and frame rate stability will be helpful.
Scheduling strategies are flexible and effective
The actual gameplay performance of the Black Shark 5 Pro can be said to completely confirm the above view.
At the highest quality of Protoss, the Black Shark 5 Pro delivers the best frame-count performance of any phone I've experienced so far. The average frame count of half an hour is 59.4, almost full frame, and the caton situation is very rare, which makes people have to say: This is the real performance level of Snapdragon 8.
Judging from the core situation monitored, the Black Shark 5 Pro used a special core scheduling method this time. We all know that Snapdragon 8 uses a 1+3+4 triple-cluster architecture, in order to balance power consumption, many times the super core Cortex-X2 is designed as a performance pocket.
However, the super core of the Black Shark 5 Pro has achieved a common scheduling frequency with the remaining 3 large cores almost the whole time, turning 1+3+4 into a 4+4 mode. Although none of these 4 cores ran to the highest frequency, the more aggressive use of super-large cores provided a guarantee for stable performance output, and finally achieved the performance of "Original God" in a heavy-load scene, close to full frame.
Under "Original God", black shark 5 Pro added the scheduling of super cores to the 3 big cores
"Original God" has such a performance, "Glory of Kings" 120fps mode, "Peace Elite" 90fps mode, Black Shark 5 Pro pulled out a frame rate curve close to a straight line.
Through core scheduling, it can also be seen that games with lower loads like "Glory of Kings" are basically more "idle", and in the face of "Peace Elite" with higher performance requirements, the super core is relatively more active. It can be seen that Black Shark has excellent adaptation and optimization for these mainstream large-scale mobile games, and there is also a flexible performance scheduling and response method.
Glory of Kings
The Elite of Peace
The response to the user level is a smooth and stable game experience, but corresponding to such a scheduling mechanism, there is also a heating of the fuselage during the game.
When playing "Glory of kings" and "Peace Elite", the maximum temperature of the fuselage is about half an hour is 38.2 ° C, considering the power consumption of the Snapdragon 8, such a hot performance has exceeded expectations.
This is also thanks to the Black Shark 5 Pro's "Reverse Gravity Dual VC Liquid Cooling System", which adds a track design to the VC vaporizer plate, resulting in faster liquid circulation speeds. More importantly, the total area of the double VC of the Black Shark 5 Pro reached 5320mm2, which is also the largest VC area of the mobile phone at present.
However, during the test of "Original God", the maximum temperature on the back of the fuselage still exceeded 50 ° C. In my opinion, a strategy like the Black Shark 5 Pro is desirable. As an e-sports positioning game mobile phone, the maximum performance release should be a priority guarantee, sacrificing performance to ensure temperature is obviously not OK, and then the choice can be given to the user.
Users can choose to use passive cooling devices such as fans, or reduce image quality requirements to achieve a balance between heat generation and power consumption. For users who do not have high load game needs, they can fully trust its overall game performance.
The choices that deserve attention in their respective price segments
Under the premise of full performance and firepower, in order to further enhance the gaming experience, the Black Shark 5 series is equipped with dual-zone screen pressure sensing technology, dual magnetic power solid shoulder buttons, 720Hz touch notification rate and stereo dual speakers.
The dual-zone screen pressure sense is used with the magnetic power shoulder key, which is enough to provide the ultimate control of four fingers to six fingers or even eight fingers, and there are mapping scheme suggestions for some games, which reduces the threshold for the use of shoulder keys.
However, the resistance of the shoulder key switch is small, and it is easy to open it by mistake, which needs to be paid attention to. At the same time, this shoulder button can also be used as a photo shortcut, obviously, gamers also have a need to take pictures.
As mentioned earlier, the main camera program of the Black Shark 5 series this time has a small upgrade. Coupled with the fact that Black Shark has adopted a pragmatic camera tuning strategy, the night scene sample also maintains a high level of picture purity, and the treatment of complex light is also in place. Although the imaging quality has a certain gap compared with the current photo flagship, it is also enough to send a circle of friends for daily use.
The biggest difference in the shooting experience between the two, mainly in focus and imaging speed, the Black Shark 5 Pro is faster.
Black Shark 5 Pro sample
Black Shark 5 samples
In terms of battery life, the Black Shark 5 series is still the standard 120W wired fast charge in the whole series, which can make the mobile phone achieve power replenishment from 0 to 100% in about 16 minutes.
Overall, it can be seen that the Black Shark 5 series continues the creation idea since the Black Shark 4 series, as a game phone, it takes into account almost all the factors that currently affect the mobile game experience, and has made corresponding software and hardware solutions for this.
If you are a heavy mobile game enthusiast, I certainly recommend the Black Shark 5 Pro, it is with the help of this perfect software and hardware program, at the game level, the Black Shark 5 Pro has enough experience advantages over many current Snapdragon 8 models. At the same time, it also meets the requirements of the daily workhorse, allowing heavy gaming and ensuring daily use to achieve a good balance.
The relatively cheaper Black Shark 5 is more suitable for some game users who pursue cost-effectiveness. Although there are many models to choose from on the Snapdragon 870 platform, it combines performance, game control, heat dissipation and endurance... You can see that at the same price point, the Black Shark 5 is one of the few options at present.