The RedMagic Nova is unapologetically a gamers tablet. But there's more to it than an overclocked silicon and a 20,000 RPM fan, all of which costs just $499.
RedMagic Nova MSRP $499.00 Score Details “At $499, the RedMagic Nova is an insanely good value, and the raw performance is even more so.” Pros Cons I recently had a brief experience with Samsung’s latest tablet. Starting at a cool $1,000, the first sentiment that the Galaxy Tab S10+ elicited from me was “Meh.” It isn’t exactly a sloth, but it lacks oomph. For that price, you can buy the M4-powered iPad Pro, a much better deal for multiple reasons.
But that’s just the start, as the Nubia-owned brand isn’t pulling any punches in any core department. Let’s start with the chassis, which is made entirely out of aerospace-grade aluminum. The dark gray aluminum has an anodized finish, which feels really nice to touch. The standout element is the transparent strip running across the camera lens, offering a glimpse of the RedMagic Nova’s innards. This strip is not merely decorative, even though it looks stunning, in the same vein as the transparent aesthetics of the Nothing smartphones.
A quality display, with some catches The Nova tablet offers a 10.9-inch display with a 2.8K resolution, eclipsing the iPad Air and the Samsung Galaxy S10+ in pixel density and sharpness. The aspect ratio is your usual 16:10 format. It’s the same kind of fluidity that I usually get on a phone or tablet after adjusting window animation, transition animation, and animator duration scales within the developer options. Or maybe it’s the lightweight software interface that is weaving its magic.
Another issue is glare. The screen is quite reflective, and it could have been a tad brighter to balance things out. However, you can still read content on it under daylight without too much squinting, though angle adjustments would be required from time to time. The company has only done a minimal job with reskinning Android 14 and now calls it RedMagic OS. However, the OS offers many tools baked at the system level, in addition to theming material, light, and sound effects. You hear the vroom of a sports car when you launch the Game Space. And the fan also triggers its own engine sound. Call it dedication to the craft!
I hooked it up with my 24-inch gaming monitor and played my fair share of Diablo Immortal and emulated games such as God of War. The experience was fantastic, and I didn’t run into any issues with frame rate dissonance or random stutters. The star of the show is the Game Space. It’s a neat little game launcher, but this is also where you see the work RedMagic has done for its gaming audience. At the top is RedMagic Time, a unified dashboard to access all your in-game capture files, neatly arranged in a slide format for each game.
In shooter games, you can enable the Audio and Visual Probes, which offer a guided highlight of the action far away, by circling the audio and motion activity. You don’t necessarily have to whip out the scope to find the action. Leading the charge here is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Leading Version. Compared to the regular version, this special silicon is an overclocked trim that speeds up the GPU to 1GHz, while the prime Cortex X4 CPU core touches a peak frequency of 3.4 GHz.
The overall score of over 2 million points put it ahead of mainstream options such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and it only lags behind a few other gaming-centric phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 silicon. Even after 20 successive loops, the performance stability only drops by around 8%. In Rise mode, after the 17th loop, the tally takes a sharp plunge, and you land at nearly one-third of the maximum system output.
Synthetic benchmarks are only one side of the equation. At gaming, the RedMagic Nova crushes it. I cherry-picked the most demanding titles out there, and every single one of them performed admirably. The experience translates well on a large screen using Z Smart Cast in wired mode, with controller and keyboard inputs. Feral’s Alien Isolation game, a fairly demanding title, worked well in a steady 60 fps ballpark.
This slate supports 80W fast charging. The only tablet that comes close to that figure is the OnePlus Pad 2, at 67W, while Samsung and Apple only reach close to the halfway mark. Conversely, you may not necessarily see the kind of fps gains you are expecting by doubling the GPU frequency and increasing the CPU clock speed to its maximum limit. The situation with the Nova is rather unique in more ways than one.
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