If there’s a single biggest enemy of high performance, it’s a cramped chassis from which heat can’t escape. The compact bodies of clamshell foldables are the harbingers of heat, meaning that you never quite get the very best performance from your flagship handset’s flagship chipset. Samsung is tackling this issue head-on with the Galaxy Z Flip 6, which boasts a dedicated vapor chamber.
The Flip 6 is the first Z Flip smartphone to incorporate a vapor chamber, usually reserved for larger power user handsets. In fact, the chamber is 150% larger than the one inside 2023’s Galaxy S23 Ultra, which bodes well.
If you’re unfamiliar, a vapor chamber is, as the name suggests, a thin sealed chamber filled with low-pressure liquid. When heat is applied from the CPU, this liquid vaporizes and circulates within the chamber, spreading heat across the surface in all directions. The heat still has to escape from the handset, but spreading this out over a larger area helps cool the CPU down and reduces any noticeable hotspots when holding the phone.
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 benchmarks
To see whether the vapor chamber makes any difference, I compared the Z Flip 6 to the Galaxy S24 and last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 5 against the S23. These pairs feature the same chipset between them, and by tracking the performance differential, we can roughly gauge if the new cooling system is indeed helping. Let’s dive in.
With single-run benchmarks like GeekBench 6 and PCMark, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 appears every bit as capable as the flagship Galaxy S24 and scores close to the bigger S24 Ultra too. This is a good result; the phone realizes its full potential for short tasks, but that was already the case with the Flip 5. We’ll have to look at stress tests to see if this vapor chamber makes any meaningful difference when high temperatures become an issue.
With the GPU running all out in 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme and ray tracing Solar Bay tests, the Flip has historically struggled to keep up with the base Galaxy S models, let alone the Ultras. However, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 performs better than last year’s model. It still drops performance pretty quickly, but the curve is much more in line with the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy S24, meaning we’re much closer to performance parity between the two. By comparison, the Z Flip 5 fell way behind the S23. The new vapor chamber certainly appears to make a difference.
For some figures, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 has a Wild Life Extreme stability score of 43.5% versus 60.6% for the same chip in the Galaxy S23 and 48.8% versus 73.9% in Solar Bay. Clearly, the Flip 5 was well off the pace. The newer Galaxy Z Flip 6 comes out at 46.4% compared to 47.9% for the S24 in Extreme and 48.0% versus 43.6% in Solar Bay. That’s not much of a stability improvement over the Z Flip 5 when you look at the raw numbers. However, the result is much closer to the S24 and arguably offers marginally better sustained performance than the mainstream flagship. Without the vapor chamber, the Z Flip 6 would look pretty dire.
Looking at the Galaxy S puts the results into context. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy is worse than the 8 Gen 2 when it comes to sustained performance, so the Flip 6’s cooling solution is clearly a decision to help prop up what would otherwise be a hot and quick-to-throttle little clamshell. The vapor chamber succeeds in improving the phone’s stability under stress, as the phone ends up putting out performance that’s right in the same ballpark as the Galaxy S24 in the tests we conducted. However, it isn’t a cure-all for high temperatures and the dubious stability of this more powerful processor.
Superior cooling helps the Z Flip 6 perform as well as the Galaxy S24.
Finally, a quick word on temperatures to help explain why these phones throttle at all. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 warms almost instantly, while the Galaxy S23 takes several minutes to hit 40°C under heavy load. Hence, the flip phone pulls back on the throttle so quickly. The Galaxy Z Flip 6 also hits 40°C faster than the S24 (both warm up quicker than the S23), and it actually climbs to even higher peak temperatures than the Z Flip 5. The Flip 6 maxed out at 44.2°C versus 41.1°C for its predecessor. Both foldables are quick to get hot and, therefore, quick to throttle. Still, the Flip 6 holds up better at slightly higher temperatures for longer periods, as it’s better able to move the heat away from the processor.
Lanh Nguyen / Android Authority
So, the new vapor chamber helps mitigate the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s higher temperatures somewhat and ensures performance remains much more comparable to the Galaxy S24. However, it’s certainly unable to take this little clamshell phone into the ultra-high performance space or compete with bigger and cooler phones like the Galaxy S24 Ultra or dedicated gaming handsets. Still, it’s a solid and probably quite necessary addition to the series’ hardware.
The Flip series has never been about blistering performance (no one buys these phones to break out all the emulators), and the Galaxy Z Flip 6 is no different. The handset really stands out because of its portable clamshell form factor, fashion appeal, and new Galaxy AI features. Still, with a powerhouse Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor and this new vapor cooling setup, you won’t be short on performance if you plan to pick the new Z Flip 6.
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6
Compact design • Foldable display • Improved battery
The Flip gets refreshed.
The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 introduces several exciting updates over previous Flip phones. It is equipped with a larger battery, improved cooling, and a next-gen chipset. 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage mean you do not need to compromise on performance. The 3.4-inch front display offers info at a glance, while the 6.7-inch 22:9 main AMOLED display offers a 120Hz refresh rate.
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