Redmagic 12 Pro Puts RGB Lights Inside a Liquid-Cooling Loop

Redmagic raised the launch price of its 12 Pro gaming phone to $949, a $200 jump over the 11 Pro, and spent part of that premium on RGB lights embedded inside the transparent liquid-cooling loop. The company confirmed preorders open November 12, with shipping from November 18. The top specification costs $1,199.

That is the commercial picture. The engineering picture is stranger.

Do the lights actually work?

Partly. The lights turn on, according to The Verge's hands-on, and users can set glow patterns, app triggers, and notification alerts. The problem sits in the liquid itself.

The cooling fluid is fluorescent blue. Blue and white lighting simply makes the loop look more blue. Green produces turquoise. Red and orange mostly render as colored bubbles drifting in a blue tide. Redmagic built a lighting feature that fights its own coolant.

The inconsistencies multiply across the chassis:

• A small light ring sits below the main camera.
• A side light shines out from inside the body.
• Thin light strips run along the touch-sensitive shoulder buttons.

Those elements have no blue fluid to contend with, so they display their intended colors and often look quite different from the cooling ring. Two visible strips of cooling loop in the phone's top-right corner, around and below the Redmagic logo, have no RGB lighting at all. They stay blue regardless of settings. Matching every zone appears effectively impossible.

What changed in the cooling system?

The measurable improvement is real. Pump output pressure reaches 130kPa, 85 percent higher than the previous generation, Redmagic stated. The active liquid loop works alongside a built-in fan and a vapor chamber. Redmagic claims this stack keeps the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 in check. No thermal test figures accompanied that claim.

The rest of the specification sheet follows the gaming-phone template. RAM options run to 12GB or 16GB — the 24GB variant from the last cycle is gone, apparently cut by the industrywide memory shortage. Storage spans 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB. The 8,400mAh battery should last one to two days even with the cooling and lighting running, and 80W charging is described as fairly fast.

One rating deserves scrutiny. The phone carries IP69 for water and dust resistance across most of the body. The section around the fan is only IPX8, with no rated dust protection. That is a large weak point on a device marketed for sustained gaming loads.

What did Redmagic remove?

The 3.5mm headphone jack is gone. Existing Redmagic users, a niche that has valued the feature, lose it without explanation from the company.

The cameras remain basic: two 50-megapixel rear sensors, one main and one ultrawide, neither with a large sensor. Their one genuine merit is design. Both sit completely flush beneath the single glass panel that spans the rear. The 16-megapixel under-display selfie camera is difficult to see — less visible than the iPhone Duo's equivalent — but photo quality is limited. It handles video calls. Selfies look poor. The aggressive AI beautification cannot be switched off, as far as the reviewer could determine, perhaps to mask the underlying image quality.

The display reaches 185Hz, though only in certain compatible games, as with most high-refresh panels. Redmagic calls it the first 185Hz display with an under-display selfie camera. That is a record defined by its own specificity.

Is the price rise justified?

Every version of the 12 Pro now includes both liquid cooling and RGB lighting, which was not true of the last generation. That is the concrete argument for the increase. Redmagic also cites industrywide pricing pressure, and memory costs likely explain the missing 24GB variant. The $949 entry price still sits $100 above May's 11S Pro, a phone released barely six months earlier, so buyers are absorbing two price hikes in a single year.

Whether a lighting system that cannot render red in blue coolant counts as an upgrade remains the buyer's judgment. The cooling gains are quantified. The spectacle is not.