OnePlus 8 Pro battery test complete: 120Hz vs 60Hz

The OnePlus 8 Pro is here and it is the most advanced phone that the company has ever made: industry-leading display quality, super fast performance with 120Hz refresh rate, and finally a camera that can battle with the very best.

But what about battery life? The OnePlus 8 Pro does come with the biggest battery ever put on a OnePlus phone as well, but that is expected considering all of those cool new features also drain the battery faster.

To understand more about the battery life of the OnePlus 8 Pro we put it through out battery tests and below you'd find the results. But first, let's take a quick look at the battery specs.

OnePlus 8 Pro battery specs:

We kick things off with our browser test where we have the phone loading webpages and scrolling up and down to simulate the real-world browsing and social media experience. And with that new 120Hz refresh rate option, it really looks super smooth, plus this test is a great way to test the effect the 120Hz refresh rate has on battery life.

We have run the very same test once at 120Hz, and then again at 60Hz, and these are the results: 

The first thing that we want to highlight is that the battery life with the 120Hz option enabled is just around 10% worse when compared to the 60Hz. This is great news as it means that you can switch to this much smoother frame rate without seeing your battery numbers drop in a big way. It's interesting to compare this against the Galaxy S20 series: the Samsung phones are hugely affected by the 120Hz refresh rate and their battery life decreases by between 25% and 35%, and on those devices it might be a better idea to use the S20 series at 60Hz.

It's also worth pointing out that the OnePlus 8 Pro battery life is a bit lower than on the cheaper OnePlus 8, despite the OnePlus 8 having a slightly smaller battery. Overall, though, the OnePlus 8 Pro definitely trends above the average flagship battery life in 2020. 

Next up, we also look at how long the OnePlus 8 Pro lasts when streaming YouTube videos.

The results here are again solid, even if a bit shorter of the Galaxy S20 series. The OnePlus 8 Pro comes with a brand new option in the settings where it will use software to simulate smoother video playback, but that option is disabled by default so we haven't used it for this particular test and it might affect the battery life for video watching in a negative way.

Finally, we also test battery life when playing 3D games with challenging graphics. Think games like PubG, Call of Duty and Fortnite, but keep in mind that we are running this test with lower graphics settings to ensure it can be run on a wide variety of devices.

This is a particularly useful test for the gamers out there: this number will tell you whether the phone you want to buy will fit your use case well.

The OnePlus 8 Pro finished this test with flying colors. Its battery life is above the competition and the phone is able to last 10 hours and 33 minutes, which is nearly double the result of a device like the iPhone 11 Pro.

This is definitely great news for gamers: not only some games will benefit from the 120Hz refresh rate, but battery life is also stellar.

At the end of the day, the OnePlus 8 Pro and its 4,510mAh cell provide solid battery performance in various use cases.

The 120Hz refresh rate option doesn't affect the battery life in a huge way and it definitely brings value.