We now have a phone with two active fans to keep it chill, and a ginormous battery too.
Putting an active cooling fan inside a gaming smartphone is not a revolutionary idea. Red Magic phones have done this for a while, but Honor apparently thinks a single fan isn’t enough to cool the demanding Qualcomm flagship chip, so it included two in its new Win 2 gaming smartphone.
The Chinese company unveiled the device alongside the Honor Win RT2 and Win Turbo2, both of which come with a ridiculous 12,070mAh battery.
Two fans somehow fit next to the cameras
The Honor Win 2 uses what the company calls its “Dongfeng Twin Star Turbine Cooling System.” One cross-flow fan can spin at up to 20,000rpm, and a second side-mounted fan reaches 31,000rpm. Honor claims the setup delivers 284% more airflow than the cooling system in the original Win.
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All that cooling is there to keep Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 running smoothly, paired with up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The phone also gets a 6.89-inch QHD+ OLED display, a 185Hz refresh rate, and a 200MP main camera. Honor has somehow managed to cram all of this into a body that is only 8.5mm thick.
The Win RT2 isn’t left out of the cooling madness either, since it gets the same dual-fan setup, but steps down to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The cheaper Win Turbo2 uses the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 and is the closest to a traditional smartphone in the lineup, since Honor has left out the mechanical fans entirely.
Honor is also trying to make power banks obsolete
Compared with the other two models, the Win 2 isn’t exactly a slouch in the battery department. Honor has stuffed a 10,100mAh battery inside, basically a small power bank’s worth of capacity in a phone. It supports 100W wired charging and 80W wireless charging as well.
The Win RT2 and Turbo2 take things even further with 12,070mAh batteries. Honor claims the Turbo2 can manage up to 17.7 hours of continuous gaming, which sounds like the perfect pitch to a gamer. All three phones are already on sale in China. The Win Turbo2 starts at 3,199 yuan, roughly $479, while the flagship Win 2 starts at 5,499 yuan, around $823. Honor has not announced whether the lineup will be released internationally.
Xbox may finally be giving Game Pass the overhaul it badly needs
The planned overhaul could let players pay for individual Game Pass features instead of relying entirely on fixed subscription tiers.
Microsoft has spent years treating Game Pass as the centerpiece of Xbox, but the subscription service has become something of a problem for the company. Subscriber growth has fallen far short of internal expectations, while putting expensive first-party games on the service from day one has reportedly hurt the full-price sales Microsoft still relies on.
According to Fortune, Sharma is planning a major Game Pass overhaul that would let players choose some features à la carte, including add-ons for console-only games, cloud gaming, and multiplayer, while keeping a tiered subscription structure.
Xbox Project Helix is eyeing a 2028 launch, but the price could be as high as $1,800
As per internal estimates, Project Helix could cost between $1,200 to $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to sell it at a loss.
Microsoft has made plenty of waves with its upcoming Project Helix console, and it appears the company is planning a whole family of devices rather than a single gaming box. Beyond the expected performance leap, it seems the upcoming console will deliver another surprise, and not the good kind, mind you. Here's a hint: an astronomical price hike.
According to an expansive profile of Xbox chief Asha Sharma, Microsoft is eyeing a next-gen handheld for 2027, followed by Project Helix in 2028. The catch is the price. The next-gen Xbox could carry a steep asking price unless Microsoft absorbs part of the cost and eats into its margins, or even sells the console at a loss in the hope of making the money back through its services.
AMD drops FSR 4.1 on five-year-old Radeon graphics cards, and Xbox is next
AMD just breathed new life into RX 6000 cards months ahead of schedule
AMD gave RX 6000 users some good news earlier this year, but followed it up by making them wait till 2027. But now, Team Red seems to be moving ahead of schedule. FSR Upscaling 4.1 is now officially available on Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, with support arriving through the new Adrenalin 26.10.1 driver.
It is still several months earlier than AMD's previous early-2027 target and brings its machine-learning upscaler to a GPU family that first appeared all the way back in 2020. AMD's Jack Huynh confirmed that support stretches from the RX 6900 series down to the RX 6400 class, with the company retuning the model and optimizing its execution for the older architecture.