Can it game? No, it can’t. Thanks limited 64GB storage!
Part 3… there’s nothing much to see here because there’s really nothing much the A18 offers in the perfomance sector. It’s lacking in it, despite what our review guide says. It only has 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. Thankfully, it isn’t too outdated. It utilizes LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.1 storage so at least it can read and write fast.
BENCHMARKS:
After scouring through the depths of the internet. We discovered that there are a lot of ways to test your devices. Also thanks to our colleagues like Hana Kira and GizmoPinoy, we discovered a way to test throttling and see how can a phone withstand so much workload.
We mentioned in our previous review that the Oppo A58 had little to no throttling which is a good thing because that means the phone can maintain its most optimal performance even when there are a lot of things happening in the background. Can the Oppo A18, with the same MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, do the same? The short answer is… NO IT CANNOT.
The AnTuTu and Geekbench benchmarks are consistent despite having 2GB RAM less than the A58, scoring around 269K points in AnTuTu, to say the least. The Geekbench OpenGL test did fail and it scored way lower than expected.
The phone throttled a lot and the performance dipped. Keep in mind that the phone’s refresh rate is set at 90Hz. Going below 80% means the phone is using all of its willpower to keep its temperature stable. That isn’t a really good sign. The phone is also pretty choppy and a single update from Mobile Legends already consumed almost all of its remaining storage. Thankfully, the 4/128 isn’t as expensive, at PHP 5,999. We strongly recommend getting other phones, like the POCO C65 and the Itel S23, instead of this if you’re into gaming. Save yourself the misery and hassle.
We throttled the phone twice. The first is the default 20 threads and the next (first image), we lowered the threads down to just 10 (second image). All other settings were not touched. The CPU Throttling Test lasts 15 minutes and the phone started to dip at around the 4-minute mark and hiccupped at around the 11-minute mark. It maintained its 80% score throughout the test during the first 4 minutes. The app told us that the phone throttled to 81% of its max performance in our first test which is still acceptable but there is also considerable heat in an already decent room temperature environment.
In the second test with lower threads, the phone performed much better. We cooled it down first before retrying the test. As we mentioned, threads are lowered to 10 but every setting is kept the same. With half the threads used, the phone started to dip at the 10-minute mark but got back up again after a few seconds. During this time, it went on a steady up-and-down motion. We tested this phone with the same room temperature as the first. In conclusion, the phone is trying to maintain its good temperature but fails to do so because the internal temperature keeps constantly changing. It did feel a little less hot versus the initial test though.
We plan to discuss soon on how to torture-test your phone to determine how much workload your phone has to go through before it starts slowing itself down. This process is normal to keep temperatures at bay and is known as throttling. It also applies to the PC and Console world.
GAMEPLAY:
Although the phone did suffer trying to go through multiple tasks, it can at least play basic games, such as Plants vs Zombies, without any problem. Mobile Legends is out of the question thanks to its very very low 64GB storage and the game itself consumed 5.5GB and that’s not even the full game. We did download other games such as Metal Slug Awakening, as well as AnTuTu and Geekbench but on other phones with bigger storage, we do not have to remove these apps to continue testing. In the storage settings, there is about 9GB left which is pretty small considering that apps and the phone have updates and most of them consume at least 3-5GB.
In a nutshell, you can play your offline games here without problems. It’s okay for casual users but hardcore mobile gamers will need to stay away.
Wow, forget what we said at the beginning. There is a lot to say about the phone’s performance, despite its small storage and RAM. However, as you can see, they aren’t all that positive. Are we being harsh? Well, we don’t consider it since we learned a new way to test performance and we apply to them to our current and future reviews so we’d rather call it a room for improvement.
Stay tuned for part 4, fellow techies!