Leaked ROG Phone 6D Ultimate Upgrade Serves Up A Faster CPU

Thanks to the increasing popularity of mobile gaming, the past few years have seen the emergence of gaming smartphones as a distinct product category. Taiwanese smartphone major ASUS has been largely credited for spawning this segment after it announced the first "proper" gaming phone — the ROG Phone — back in 2018. Four years on, despite the arrival of several competing products from companies like BlackShark, Nubia, and Lenovo, ASUS continues to lead the gaming smartphone space.

A large part of ASUS' success stems from the fact that the company has regularly updated its product lineup. The company's most recent product launch happened less than two months ago — in the first week of July — with the ROG Phone 6 and the ROG Phone 6 Pro. Like their predecessors, both of these devices feature high-end hardware. In the past, this always meant that the ROG Phone used the fastest chips made by Qualcomm. While that continues to be the case today, it seems ASUS has finally warmed up to the idea of using a non-Qualcomm processor in the ROG lineup.

A few days ago, ASUS confirmed that it would launch an entirely new lineup of ROG Phones using MediaTek's powerful Dimensity 9000+ chip. Today, we have come across the first images of these products from a usually trustworthy source.

Two days after ASUS confirmed that it would launch the ROG Phone 6D Ultimate on September 19, the folks over at 91Mobiles published images of two new ROG Phone 6D models — not just one. According to the report, in addition to the top-of-the-line ROG Phone 6D Ultimate, ASUS may launch a vanilla edition of the phone called the ROG Phone 6D.

Visually, both devices look identical to the existing Qualcomm-powered ROG Phone 6 lineup, with the vanilla version getting the illuminated logo treatment on its back and the top variant featuring a rear-facing OLED display. While ASUS is yet to talk about the rest of the hardware specs of the ROG Phone 6D Ultimate, we expect the difference between the Ultimate variant and the vanilla version to be limited to a few visual changes and the amount of RAM.

As confirmed by ASUS, both these handsets will feature MediaTek's Dimensity 9000+ chip, an enhanced version of the older Dimensity 9000 processor from 2021. Based on a 4nm manufacturing process, the Dimensity 9000+ SoC features a single ARM Cortex-X2 core operating at up to 3.2GHz. In addition, there are three 2.85GHz Cortex-A710 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A510 cores. While the hardware looks promising, the real-world performance of the Dimesnity 9000+ is yet to be tested.

The rest of the features could be identical to that of the existing ROG Phone 6 lineup, which means we can expect ROG Phone 6D to get features like a 165Hz AMOLED display with 720Hz touch sampling, a 50MP primary camera, and UFS 3.1 storage, among other features.