Qualcomm is expected to announce its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in a month, and it is not unusual to see the upcoming chipset benchmarked on various platforms prior to its official announcement as phone partners need to readily test out the silicon before release. This time, ASUS’ ROG Phone 8 Ultimate was spotted on Geekbench 6, and despite the gaming smartphone most likely touting a beefy cooling solution, the A17 Pro continues to hold the top spot while reportedly suffering from thermal throttling issues.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 narrows the multi-core performance gap with the A17 Pro, but Apple’s 3nm SoC is almost 32 percent faster in single-core

In a leaked Geekbench 6 results spotted by 91mobiles, The ROG Phone 8 Ultimate was tested with 16GB RAM and obtained a single-core and multi-core score of 2,213and 7,048, respectively. Keep in mind that ASUS’ ROG gaming handset lineup is known for being thicker than the competition, thanks to the use of an exceptionally large vapor chamber, allowing the chipsets to perform at their absolute best.

Even then, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 cannot beat the A17 Pro, though it manages to close that performance gap with the latter in the multi-core score. In a previous leak, we reported that the A17 Pro got 2,914 and 7,199 points in Geekbench 6, and these results were obtained while it was throttling due to an inadequate cooling solution used on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.

The only time Apple’s latest custom SoC can perform without being thermally constrained is by using an external cooling fan, with one test showing that multi-core scores increased substantially using this testing methodology. However, it is impressive that Apple’s A17 Pro is nearly 32 percent faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in single-core results even when forced to lower its performance target.

Qualcomm is expected to release an exclusive Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, which is reserved for Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 family, so it will be interesting to see how this variant performs compared to the regular one in the same test. We have also not discussed the GPU capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 tested in Geekbench 6, but that will be a leak for another time.