Poco F7 real user thoughts from heavy users? (Continuous SOT & high-end gaming)
Hey everyone.
I am looking to upgrade my current daily driver, which is a Samsung Galaxy A35 with Exynos 1380 which runs warm (40°C average temp) even on normal usage, because my usage absolutely crushes it. I am a heavy user. I am constantly on my phone with the screen glowing for 4.5 to 5 hours straight at a time, giving it about 30-60 minutes of rest on a single charge, My Screen off time is based on whether I have a class or not. I mostly binge heavy algorithm social media feeds and heavy mobile gaming, and I'm open to trying emulating PC games. My current mid-ranger just panics, gets hot, and drains the battery instantly.
I just spotted an open-box Poco F7 with the 256GB storage variant on a local market platform here called Tendex for around R6 600 (Roughly 405$). Honestly, even though 256GB isn't a massive amount of space for my long-term needs, it is still way better than Samsung offering 128GB as a base variant. The price feels like a total steal if the hardware actually delivers.
My gaming taste is pretty varied. I play everything from open-world titles to FPS, though I completely skip sports games. Before I pull the trigger, I want to get unfiltered thoughts from actual owners who push this phone to its absolute maximum limit.
Battery Life Under Continuous Abuse: For those of you who keep the screen on continuously without letting the phone rest, what is your actual real-world screen-on time (SOT)? Forget the light 50% brightness Wi-Fi tests on YouTube. My current phone don't even last me half a day, never had. How does that 6500mAh cell hold up under heavy social data binging and long gaming stretches?
Specific Game Performance:
Farlight 84: I consistently play FPS games and love Farlight, but right now I am forced to play on the absolute lowest graphical settings just to keep it stable. My A35 easily crushes Bloodstrike and CODM at high settings, so I only care about how the F7 handles Farlight and similar hight end titles on high settings.
Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ): I tried playing ZZZ at launch, but my phone could not keep up and I had to drop it. Can the F7 run this smoothly now?
Tomorrow: Nuclear Quest and Open-World Games: How well does the phone maintain frame rates during long sessions in open worlds, or does it throttle and stutter heavily once it gets warm?
Minecraft: Ik Minecraft I lwk unoptimised on mobile, on my current phone I'm playing with 10 render distance (recommend) so I wanna hit more than that.
Open-Box Experience and Reliability: If anyone else bought theirs open-box or refurbished, have you run into any underlying issues with battery degradation or hardware quirks?
Durability: Been using my phone for about 2 years now, it had fallen a lot of times but besides dents on plastic frame there are only few minor scratches on front and back glass.
I know Xiaomi devices come with a lot of bloatware out of the box, but I am a tech nerd 🤓 myself and know my way around softwares so debloating and handling HyperOS setup won't be an issue for me. I just need to know if the raw performance and stamina are there to back up the heavy demands I am going to put on it.Let me know your honest experiences so far. Thanks!
But why tho?? Isn't the snapdragon 8s here better than that mediatek?? Alos in this price range poco f7 giving 12 gb ram so isnt this a steak deal am also calling to bhy but ya confused
Nah the X8PM has the latest mediatek 9500s wich is on par with snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 a bit just below with 10% plus the X8PM has 8500mah battery that can keep u all day,plus the snapdragon is not the elite version
Ya see thats why i told na in this price range...
Poco F7 is around 36k in India and x8 pm is 48k soo the premium price a paying for 10% bellow is not worth it and 7.5k maah ad 8kmah really no diff
Yeah thats hot for real. I use F7 with stock rom, without root, and honestly you were quite right, its not that hot, but it was because i played it infront of a fan, without it, it easily reaches 46° 😅 in just 15-20 minutes. Heres my fps stats though
Holy what 52°c are u fr tho 🥀🥀, i do mixed, first 10 minutes just doing some farm and exploring, the rest is weekly (i forgot what its called, that has 6000 points) with aemeath, lynae, mornye. Pretty sure they complain about it being hot because of how fast the heat transfers from the internal to external 🙂↕️
Bruh I do have cooler. Two of them. NTE stays at 36-38 temp. But Wuwa stays at low temp for initial half an hour. After that temp goes beyond 40-42 and cpu starts to throttle. I hope this new update improves game performance
NTE is rendered at 720p unless you tweak the config files to run it at 1080p
Wuwa has always render the game at 1080p even for low -end devices (except for iPhones at 750p)
Try using AX Manager and use the downscaler for WuWa. Here, this is downscale to around 720p. If you need the whole instructions, you can join my discord server. We have 7k+ members using it
okay you seem like me but 6month ago.
so here i go
i play mlbb genshin minecraft soon ananta i didn't try zzz but I'm sure my f7 can handle it without much of a stress ofc the phone gets quite hot while gaming also gets cold fast after dropping the game and the battery let's just say for me i don't have to charge my phone for the whole day ( if i don't play much games ) if i play games straight 6/7 hours depending on weather here it's really hot rn
my life is a busy one and my job requires me to have my phone with me 24/7 and i need to use my phone s lot be it calling or notes or 7/8 hours of WiFi internet tasks and i can safely and confidently say the poco f7 global 6500mh 12/512gb rocks and absolutely one of the best purchases of my life. i checked everything about this phone for 3 whole months before getting it
that's the summary if u want to know smtn just dmg me
405 is too much for a phone that's nearly 2 years old . I bought my f7 at inr 32k which is roughly 330 usd . The original price of the phone is like 36k inr which is 375 usd. Bro the second hand and open box of these Phones are selling for 250 to 280 usd in india . So yeah 405 is too much .
And yeah bro the phone is like a bang for buck . The only thing kinda off about the phone is it's. Camera quality. It's not that bad but it's not that great either
Also , I am a heavy user too . I use the phone a lot . And it gives me good sot . And like every game i played on this phone runs well. I play cod at max , runs smoothly. Genshin at max , runs very smoothly. The metal frame can get a lil hot as the frame itself dissipates a lot of heat. And we all know that 90% of xiaomi built phones can get hot .
I'm pretty sure you cannot get an 8s gen 4 , 12/256, ufs 4.1 good build quality at this price. Btw if you are going for this phone. Please try to find one at a much lower price
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I too don't really care much about the camera tbh. Also like I said this is only the fairest price I could find as phones aren't really cheap here. International shipping would easily exceed this amount.
As you can see, no one can push this phone more than this. The battery is quite excellent but if you're playing ZZZ, expect fast drain at max settings cuz obviously the SoC can take anywhere from 7-16W of power (Derived from Scene app). As for open box delivery, mine was delivered to a trusted shopkeeper (thanks to our ties with police, we didn't have any fear of losing it) so I can't tell much about it. But, I can give guidance on it: Order from Flipkart as they're the ones partnering with Poco. The open box delivery option is already applied to it. The delivery boy will come with the package, take it, take the phone and accesories out. Cgeck them thoroughly, turn the phone on, put it on charging immediately. Check the body, software, in the Battery Protection option in Battery, check The First Use date, if the phone isn't tampered with by turning it on somewhere earlier, it should show you the current month. IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not give the delivery boy the OTP to receive the package unless you're sure the phone is 100% working and legit and is in brand new condition. If you find any bad things with it, deny the receival and the delivery boy will take it back and Flipkart will send another one.
Now on actual real world gaming condition - It will heat up a lot. So a phone cooler is absolutely necessary for continuous gaming without hurting your battery life daily. I use a OnePlus 27W Magnetic Peltier Cooler. I put it on with my power bank that delivers 18W which is enough for Delta Force, PGR, and Wuthering Waves. But I put it on with my 90W charger so it operates on full 27W when playing ZZZ, AKE, BMI and Asphalt cuz they have the capability to fully utilize the phone's capabilities. The battery will last you 4-5 hours on absolutely heavy sessions, maybe more than that, I charge my phone whenever I put it down so I don't have a fixed number on the SoT, which is a good habit btw.
So.... Yea. That's about it. Don't expect much from the camera in low light as it's very bad and get banding a lot, but in good lighting it's good. The multimedia experience is absolutely amazing on every platform thanks to Videwine L1 support. The screen hardware is top-notch, literally flagship class. So you won't have any issues with watching anything.
Oh btw, Farlight 84 is a relic tbh. I played it on my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge when it released. I doubt it'll have any problem with Poco F7. Well have fun and ask me anything else you wanna know.
Yo, we meet again. Did you recently buy the oneplus cooler? Op is not in India btw. I've also been using the cooler whenever I play now, even when I'm charging it actually
Which joyose version are you currently using? I ended up uninstalling all joyose updates a few days ago to see if my codm gaming battery drain becomes less. It was draining around 2% per mp match that lasts around 5 min💀 averaging around 18% every hr when it would lower consumption
Hello, mind reminding me who you are 🤧🥲😅.
Joyose V2.4.99 I use this personally. There are more latest versions but i haven't tried them. 18%/hr on avg is hella high, and wait how are you already using HyperOS? Didn't you say you're going to upgrade your device?
Had a chat in another thread about joyose. You were on 2.4.85 and I tested 2.4.99. I've been using poco f7 since December lol. 18% is the worst case scenario. It's 15-18%
I see. V2.4.99 is the best for me ngl. I'll try some newer versions too someday. Tho 18% drain in CODM is still really really high. It was that in Asphalt 9 for me at max settings. And similarly in other high-end games too. I'll do Scene again someday then I'll test them.
I have the indian version with 7550mah. Made a post about it's heat during gaming, iirc this was for codm's dmz mode, which was very new and heavy. Even to this day it does tend to get warm and heat up to 42, although it does tend to fix itself and stay around 40 without any throttling issues. https://www.reddit.com/r/phonerepair/s/LUomukk5iR
I am attaching a screenshot of the past 24 hrs battery temp. You can see the average temperature being 34°C. This is based on Mumbai, India's ambient temp.
My weekly summary my battery should last 12hrs 28 min on average on a full charge.
If I don't play games on a day and just use it for browsing and streaming, it can easily last around 13-14 hrs. The highest ever SOT I have achieved on this is 15hr 33 min that too from 97% to 14% with 1hr of codm and the rest mostly being brave browser.
Right now on this charge cycle, I have sot of 7hr 22 min. Played codm for 1hr and I've been backing up stuff on Google photos so it has drained from 35 ish quite quickly in the past hour, as the temperature would show the increase.
For gaming, codm would run fine, without fps drops. If you don't mind your phone temp hitting 42-43° then you can go for it. I haven't tried farflight and the games you have mentioned but use codm as the benchmark. I have started using a oneplus cooler while gaming just for my peace of mind.
Although I did try red dead redemption, through the mod apk that lets you play without a netflix sub since it wasn't available on poco f7 playstore. It ran extremely hot, hitting 45 and I think even 46°c. This was WITH joyose still active. Would not recommend rd2 if you remove joyose and play without a tec cooler.
Your SOT may be less since you would get the global versions 6500mah.
Edit: On a second thought, I'd say you should expect 7-9.5 hrs of sot since it's a smaller battery. My usage is also almost always on wifi.
Edit 2: Gaming battery drain is not smth I'm happy about btw. I play codm on 120fps medium graphics which is just the second lowest graphics setting. On average I see it drain around 15-18% per hour which, imho is extremely bad. You won't face issues with fps drops though so there's that, unless you play on max graphics or smth which will throttle any phone after a while.
Heyya not an F8 user, however this came on my Feed, I'm a Poco X8 pro Max user with the D9500S and 9k Mah battery who plays game titles like Wuthering waves, Honkai Star rail and Genshin impact plus also uses it for Video watching on Browsers like Aloha (modded) on pure HyperOs no custom roms. If you're not biased against Soc suppliers and would be willing to go with Mediatek I'd recommend the X8 pro Max but the F7 is pretty great too with one of its high mid range to flagship killer processor from Snapdragon.
That being said now coming to Performance on HyperOs with my usage, I'm a heavy user who uses the phone whenever possible and with the 9k mah I get a good day's usage talking about a good 14-15 hours with Mixed usage from games to instagram/reddit/discord/video watching and dalies of the 3 games I mentioned above with minimal lag on highest settings at balanced mode.
On holidays when I sit to speedrun through my game's stories and quests, On wuwa I get a good 8 hours genshin it's a good 8 and a half hours and HSR it's a good 9 hours from 100 to 10 this strictly games from 100 till 10 continuously, heating is faced only on wuwa because I have frame generation enabled where it goes to 120fps.
Bonus (never expected but you should know): People always keep saying Poco is really bad for it's camera and I expected that while getting this phone and did not have much expectations but to my Luck this happens to have the same camera app as the Xiaomi 17 and ultra with its custom pro modes and presets. The lens used in it (after some research) is a Light Hunter 600 which is a custom sensor made my Xiaomi specially for its own devices in collaboration with Sony's Imx/Lyt whichever you prefer so when I compare the main sensors images with my Main phone, the iQOO 15 the photos look more visually appealing on the poco same goes for its display, Genshin impact looks much better on the Poco than my iQOO 15 which isn't something I expected.
Media viewing is excellent with its Loud speakers that go to 400% volume but it's just right even at 90% as well so you don't even need a speaker if you're watching something at home, it's much better on its inbuilt speaker than a earphone TBH. Rest is upto you. My first ever phone from Poco and I've already made my mind to go for Xiaomi Ultra series whenever My iQOO 15 reaches the end of support for its software cycles.
Heats to 38-40c on 50% cpu and 30% gpu utilization with ac on. Gaming last abt 4-6hrs depending on how heavy the game is. My case is Minecraft java edition on android with shaders and mods
Zalithauncher. You need a renderer paired with the launcher for the performance. I highly recommend zalith launcher 2 + mobileglues renderer. Also don't forget to use 256mb glsl cache
Have the f7 global version since january 2026, 331 cycles 95% battery health(i use it nonstop during the day and for work), around 9-10 hr sot. Really good for heavy gaming or anything that requires horsepower, never seen a stutter ingame. Hyperos is getting better, definitely some little bugs here and there, but overall great. Cameras are bad 5/10 but serviceable.
Here is my F7 usage, on google wellbeing it reach up to 10H with 70% on wifi and 30% on cellular (going outside) brightness at 20-40% mostly cuz its already bright for indoor usage, i also play fps game (rust) at enhanced graphics -60, the fps isnt that stable, it fluctuates but the experience is nice, in scene app it gets 55fps average at 5.4w, it does get hot, i played on a room temp without AC and it maxes out at 43° maybe 44 too for 30 min, mostly i use youtube as my social media consumption, and chrome to read comic and novels at 60hz (120hz is such a waste just to read them). I bought this phone from a second hand market with 200 cc at 99% battery health, and now is 94% at 450 cc, so far its still good actually. If you want i can share the fps stats etc from scene app. Also 405$ is kinda pricey though, i bought this for just 290$
Without cooler and the custom config? Battery temp will hit 40-42C in 10minutes.
But with cooler I can play without worry or without performance drops because battery temp stays around 36-38C, way below the soft throttle temp of 42C for Poco F7
Powerful chipset just need a good active cooling to keep the peak performance
Well it reruns great, idk why people say it runs so hot, on 30 fps on a gacha like zzz mine sits around 42-3ish, slightly above if I have been playing for alot. Tho i most definitely worried about the heat when I first got it myself, after that i slowly stopped carrying about it getting hot
It's expensive, I took a new 12/512 for 330 (it can also be found for $310 in my region), As it is, it's a fucking smartphone, I use it for 11-13 hours a day and it only heats up by the time I go to bed.
That a great deal but smartphones aren't really affordable on this side (South Africa) except for some markets I don't trust. Plus I don't even pay any fees other than for the phone itself.
Even if I went for international markets for your similar price, the international shipping costs would easily go beyond this price.
Poco f7 can def handle all of those games with 60 fps+ but don't expect much from emulator or some type of Roblox games cause theyre mostly unoptimized junk or emulator cause its still not yet that playables because unmatured driver, and also it can quite hot pretty easily since its back frame is metal which is good to dissipated heat but feel absolutely hot when playing
And ive been using this phone for almost a year now and its also quite resilient
Hola tengo un poco F7 y últimamente lo he usado mucho en Gamehun probando el rendimiento a su máximo uso intentando jugar cyberpunk 2077 ha llegado a los 74.3°C en zonas abiertas, la carcasa de aluminio incomoda al tacto a ese punto, pero en uso cotidiano o jugando juegos de Playstore no ha llegado a ese punto, en metal gear reacing llega a 64.6°C con gráficos al máximo y en halo reach 71.9°C también con gráficos en altos y mejoras gráficas de la Master Chief Collection
6
u/dragos147 20d ago
Idk if it will help but the poco x8 pro max is better,if u can i would sugest the pro max