Name: Asus ROG Gaming Phone Teardown - Are the vents even real?
Uploaded: 2020-03-06T17:50:52.000Z
Duration: 7 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You're not supposed to judge a book only by it's cover.

The same thing applies towards smartphones.

Today we'll be taking apart one of the most unique looking metal and glass combination

smartphones and reviewing it from the inside.

This teardown has been sponsored by Audible.

The ROG Gaming Phone from Asus is actually a pretty over-engineered and complex phone

The oddly shaped back glass panel makes things a bit more complicated, but it looks pretty

Heat is, as always, our best friend while softening adhesive.

And a little persuasion from my razor blade and metal pry tools can help quite a bit.

Heating up the glass when the adhesive cools down and gets hard, and then shimmying my

razor blade around the edges to slice through the sticky stuff.

The weird metallic growth on the side of the phone makes for some pretty awkward angles,

but I still managed to get the glass off in one piece.

Lifting the rear glass upwards as to not put any pressure on the fingerprint scanner ribbon.

It's a little Lego style connector that's hidden under a tiny rubber pad.

I'll unsnap that connector and release the back glass.

After dealing with so many boring rectangle phones, it's nice to see something different.

Asus is definitely pushing the aesthetic limits of this smartphone design.

It stands out for sure – especially with the transparent light-up logo.

Before we get any farther, we have 13 normal Phillips head screws holding in the back plastics,

11 of which are visible, and 2 of which are hidden under this...what should we call it...this

The thing is, it's not exactly metal, it's more of a thin shell about as thick as the

side walls of an aluminum pop can – meaning that it's really more for aesthetics than

The three little black circles you see are vents leading directly down to the motherboard,

but the visible exterior copper portion is only for decoration.

First, let's look at this white pad that fits underneath the transparent logo.

Remember I said the logo was really dim during the durability test?

That's because there is no back-lit lighting things up.

So when light shines through it at an angle, like it did with my wall-mounted PC I built

a few years ago, it catches the logo in the plastic center and reflects out.

The 2 side LEDs shine at different angles to illuminate the whole piece of plastic.

It works, but it's still a far less bright method than the back-lit LED like we saw inside

Let's take another look at the mid-plate.

The underside of the black plastic is hiding a pretty massive slab of solid copper.

Nor is it connected with the motherboard with any kind of thermal paste, but it is here,

And weirdly enough, surrounds the entirety of the circular vibrator motor.

The copper slab has nothing to do with the copper looking vents on the outside of the

The thin copper vent things on the outside are just for decoration.

There is a layer of plastic between the slab of copper and the outer copper vents.

You might be thinking to yourself, 'Hey Jerry, did you just break the whole phone?'

The phone actually works just fine even without the copper plate or decorative exterior metal.

I mean, look at how good this Audible app is opening right now.

Huge thanks to Audible for sponsoring this teardown.

The book I'm currently listening to is called Ender's Game.

It's a best selling classic about leadership while fighting space aliens...you know...the

Normal narration always seems a bit slow, so I bump it up a tiny bit and listen to Audible

Audible has something new called Originals.

Originals are content that's only found on Audible.

You can get your first audio book for free when you try audible for 30 days.

Visit audible.com/jerryrig or text the word “jerryrig” to 500-500.

You get to keep your free book even if you decide to cancel.

Audible is an app I use quite a bit, so I'm glad I get to share it with you guys.

We still have a lot of things to check out.

I'll unplug the battery and then find 3 silver Phillips head screws holding the rather massive

The board wraps around the entire edge of the phone.

I'll pop out the dual SIM card tray, and then start unclipping the little ribbon cables.

I found 8 of them before removing the large black sticker over the battery.

Unclipping that last ribbon cable for the screen and then the whole motherboard was

able to lift up and away from the phone body.

One tiny dollop of silver thermal paste connects the processor to the copper pad on the frame

Supposedly this copper pad is connected to a vapor chamber, but it's hidden below the

rest of the frame or sandwiched under the screen.

So there's no way of telling how big it is.

The 2 side USB-C ports are builtin to the motherboard.

These are for connecting all the additional accessories like the external fan.

The rear facing camera is uncharacteristically secured to the frame of the phone with 3 screws.

Asus is rocking a 12 megapixel main lens with optical image stabilization.

And an 8 megapixel secondary wide-angle camera that fan fit more scenery into a shot but

does not have optical image stabilization.

The front facing camera is an 8 megapixel little guy with no OIS.

Fun fact though: the optical image stabilization is done with little magnets inside the camera's

You can see how it attracts my screw as I try putting it back together.

The bottom of the phone has one silver screw holding the loudspeaker in place.

It projects the sound forward and out of the front facing speaker grille.

It's got the gold contact pads on the back that communicate with the motherboard.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Asus ROG Gaming Phone Teardown - Are the vents even real?

massive

sacrifice

reflect

bit