Is liquid cooling inside a phone actually useful, or is it just pretty lights?

Redmagic’s 12 Pro keeps its true liquid-cooling loop — now with 130kPa output pressure, a reported 85 percent up on last year — and adds RGB lights inside the loop. The cooling does the work; the lights are decoration, and the blue coolant tints their colours.

Your phone gets hot, throttles, and your game turns into a slideshow twenty minutes into a session on the couch. Short answer: the cooling is real; the lights are decoration. Redmagic’s new 12 Pro, covered by The Verge on November 3, 2026, keeps the true liquid-cooling system introduced in last year’s model — a transparent loop filled with fluorescent blue liquid — and improves the cooling itself, with output pressure of 130kPa, which the report says is 85 percent up on the previous generation.

This year the loop also gets RGB lights, which can glow in set patterns, light up for specific apps, or trigger for notifications and calls, alongside a small light ring below the main camera, a side light, and light strips on the touch-sensitive shoulder buttons. Why it matters: sustained heat is what slows a gaming phone mid-session, so moving heat away steadily matters more for long sessions than a one-minute benchmark burst. One honest catch from the review: the blue liquid distorts the RGB colours — green turns turquoise, while red and orange mostly become coloured bubbles in blue liquid — and two strips of visible cooling near the logo have no RGB and stay blue no matter what.How to judge a gaming phone before you buy:1.

Judge cooling by sustained performance in long gaming tests, not peak scores.2. Decide whether you game long enough in one sitting for active cooling to change anything for you.3. Weigh the extras you actually use — shoulder buttons, notification lighting — against software-update support and battery life.4.

If matching light colours matters to you, know the blue coolant tints them before you buy.Pro tip: do not pay a premium for lights alone — lights do not cool anything; the loop does.Ad’s take: I like real cooling that solves a real problem — a hot, throttling phone. The light show I will happily skip if it saves money.