When it comes to new tech, you always have certain expectations. You’ll be looking for new features, exciting designs, and upgrades to what you know and love. For our REDMAGIC fans, we always try to go beyond those expectations to give you the extra edge.
Now, we get to celebrate the recent launch of our third gaming tablet with the REDMAGIC Astra 2. Armed with superior liquid cooling, riveting gameplay features, and much more in a sleek frame, the Astra 2 already takes things to a new level. Today, however, we’ll be focusing on the one element that makes our devices truly stand out in a sea of gaming devices: performance.
Wired for Speed
Designed to be different, the Astra 2 was fitted with a large battery, advanced liquid cooling, and visuals that would blow you away. However, the real star of the show is always what sits beneath the screen. The Astra 2 comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset to ensure lightning-fast agility and responsiveness.
Using a 3rd-gen Oryon™ CPU, the engine of this beast features 2 high-performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, reaching speeds of up to 4.6 GHz. Built on a 3nm Pro process and paired with the Adreno™ GPU, the tablet takes no prisoners and gives you smooth gameplay, pristine graphics, and silky speeds.
The tablet also has up to 16GB of LPDDR5T RAM and up to 512GB of 4.1 Pro UFS storage for seamless multitasking across gameplay and everyday tasks, ensuring consistent performance without lag.Ultimately, the Astra 2 was built to supersede in every way, providing 23% better graphics, 20% faster overall performance, and 35% lower power consumption.
Alongside the chipset, our upgraded RedCore R4 gaming chip works to allocate resources efficiently with system-level optimization, ensuring stable frame rates, 40% improved performance, and elite responsiveness during intensive gaming.
The new power push also gives you 23% better graphics, 20% faster overall performance, and ensures 35% lower power consumption. This powerhouse processing is combined with our enhanced in-house RedCore R4 gaming chip, which was built to provide system-level optimization and intelligent resource allocation, ensuring stable frame rates, 40% improved performance, and elite responsiveness during intensive gaming.
When it comes to gameplay, the Astra 2 easily outshines competing Android tablets, giving you a 145.3 average frame rate compared to 143.8 when playing a 1-hour session of Call of Duty: Mobile. The tablet also reached up to 8.33 hours of gameplay, compared to the 5 hours of the competitor brand, and only reached a temperature of 43.8°C, while the competitor brand stifled at 45.1°C. However, these results were based on in-house testing, so let’s take a look at what everyone else had to say about the Astra 2’s performance in the field.
Astra 2 in Action
When reviewing the Astra 2 on his YouTube channel, Tech Nick stated that we had taken everything that made our first compact tablet his favorite compact tablet and then improved on it in the areas that matter most to gamers. When comparing the chipsets, he noted that while the Astra 2 doesn’t sport the same overclocked leading version we find in the 11S Pro, it still manages identical benchmark scores, which are significantly higher than the first Astra tablet.
He also found that the tablet’s GPU scores have improved, making them identical to our recent flagship phones, because we’ve used the same upgraded Red Core R4 dedicated gaming chip. In the AnTuTu benchmark test, the Astra 2 scored a strong 4 246 060, which was a lot higher than the Astra 1’s 3 147 095.
Sourced from Tech Nick
According to Nick, one of the most important features of the Astra 2 is the image upscaling and frame interpolation. Playing Genshin Impact, he found that these features made the game look so much better and filled in the frame gaps to double the game's native 60fps to 120, where it stayed solidly for the entire session at maxed out graphics without ever feeling too warm to hold.
He also took on the challenge of Wuthering Waves, maxing out every setting and putting the game at its new native 90fps option. Once frame generation was enabled in the game settings menu, and because the tablet’s display can reach 185Hz, the Astra 2 became the only mobile device Nick had ever used to allow frame generation on top of 90fps to 180 frames per second, allowing the game to average at around 180fps most of the time, even when setting the game's resolution to ultra-high.
Also reviewing the Astra 2, Tech Spurt went ahead and put the tablet to the test with gameplay performance. He downloaded and installed all 50gigs of Wuthering Waves and ran it on the tablet using the highest graphics settings at 60fps just to see if it could cope, and “completely unshockingly, it was a beautiful experience.”
Sourced from Tech Spurt
For Tech Spurt, the Astra 2 gave about as close to flawless performance as you could possibly expect from a 2026 device. He noted that “unsurprisingly,” the highly optimized titles, like Call of Duty: Mobile, ran gorgeously on the tablet, even stuck at very high graphics settings, running at 165fps. He concluded that through his many, many matches on the tablet, he saw absolutely zero fluctuation, with the Astra 2 formidably sticking to that 165Hz performance.
Writing for Phone Arena, Rad Slavov called the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset the biggest upgrade from the Astra 2 over last year’s Astra. He stated that the tablet’s performance stability is superb, even when temperatures rise, noting further that the framerates remain stable with no obvious jumps. “In other words,” he surmised, “the thermal throttling is not an issue with this device, which is immensely helpful when doing serious gaming.”
He also stated that the Astra 2 is ultimately a fantastic tablet for gaming and anything else that may benefit from a more compact form factor, figuring that “in a world crowded with gigantic tablets, the Astra 2’s portability is a breath of fresh air.”
Sourced from Phone Arena
In the Geekbench 6 test to observe agility, multitasking, and intensive usage, the Astra 2 scored a whopping 3687, easily beating out the Astra 1, and since we’re always only in competition with ourselves, the 11S Pro came closer with an impressive 3720. Moving on to the 3D Mark Extreme test, the Astra 2 once again beat the Astra 1 with a 7811 score, proving to have superior sustained performance.
Sourced from Phone Arena
Harish Jonnalagadda from Android Central also took the Astra 2 for a test run, stating that it features the best internals you can get on any tablet, with a dedicated liquid cooling system to ensure the tablet doesn't overheat even with sustained gaming, and the battery lasts all day. Last year, the Astra was Jonnalagadda’s most-used Android tablet, and according to him, the Astra 2 is taking over that mantle in 2026.
In the review, Jonnalagadda notes that we’ve tuned the Astra 2 to deliver reliable framerates and sustained gaming that no other Android tablet comes close to. He found that the tablet held up particularly well in thermal stress tests, and while there was some heat, the liquid cooling system did an admirable job. He concluded that if you're looking to play marathon gaming sessions on a tablet, the Astra 2 is the one to get.
For Yanko Design, the Astra 2 offers a tasteful middle ground between loud gaming gear and professional tech gadgets. Their review stated that the AquaCore 2.0 cooling system is what makes extended performance possible, maintaining stable performance during prolonged gaming sessions in a way conventional cooling simply can’t match.
For them, this means that, in practice, you get higher FPS stability and faster responsiveness with lower power draw and less heat. With the Astra 2, “performance is stable and optimized, whether you’re gaming, enjoying a video binge, or, on rare occasions, being productive thanks to the plethora of apps available on Android 16.” They concluded that, as with gaming PCs, good gaming hardware tends to result in good performance across the board, and the REDMAGIC Astra 2 proves it.
Writing for Pocket Gamer, Connor Christie also added his input in his review of the tablet, stating that, in terms of performance, display, and battery life, there's not much more he could ask for from the Astra 2, and that the tablet easily beats out much of its competition. However, he’s not surprised by this fact, given that the tablet packs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, showing that you could throw any of the top mobile games at it, and the Astra 2 would simply take it in its stride.
To test out the performance chops of the tablet, Christie booted up Honkai Star Rail at the highest possible settings and only experienced a bit of stuttering at most.
Moving away from the Android games for a bit, Christie found the tablet pretty capable when running several Steam games. Playing Balatro, the tablet ran just as smoothly as the official Android version.
Zubi Khan from CGM also took the Astra 2 for a spin, using Rise mode to play Wuthering Waves for around 2 hours with a fairly consistent 90 FPS using a mix of high and medium settings. To test the competitive chops of the tablet, he set the device to its 185 Hz mode and booted up Call of Duty: Mobile on the high preset. The game ran at a very steady 160 FPS, feeling ultra-responsive and even better than what his current TV can output, which he said made the experience feel extra premium.
With the pared-back settings, Khan found that the Astra 2 lasted around 7 hours, compared with roughly 3 hours with everything topped off. Similarly, he tested PUBG Mobile and saw frame rates around 120 FPS with the same 7-hour window of use, making it truly one of the most efficient tablets he had ever used.
To conclude his review, Khan called the Astra 22 “the best Android tablet money can buy, blurring the lines between tablet and PC while making itself an all-in-one powerhouse for enthusiasts and core gamers looking for a dedicated gaming tablet.”
Power That Excites
The REDMAGIC Astra 2 is one of our most formidable gaming tablets yet. Stacked with upgraded features and fittings, the tablet easily pushes the boundaries of performance, endurance, cooling, and visual clarity. For anyone looking for a sign to go beyond what you think is powerful, give the Astra 2 a chance to redefine how you set your performance expectations.
Explore the REDMAGIC Astra 2 gaming tablet and the full lineup of gaming devices at mea.redmagic.gg.
