Which iPhone for Honor of Kings? A 13–17 buying guide

Which iPhone for Honor of Kings? A 13–17 buying guide

Plenty of people upgrade in order to play games, but the question they ask is usually “which generation of chip is powerful enough”.

The chip usually isn’t the bottleneck. The A15 in the iPhone 13 is still powerful enough for Honor of Kings today. What actually shapes the experience is three things: whether the display supports a high refresh rate, whether the game has opened 120fps for that model, and whether the cooling can sustain it over a long session.

This article is built around those three points.

⚠️ The scope of this article — let’s be clear up front

The compatibility details below refer to Honor of Kings, the mainland China client (王者榮耀, operated directly by Tencent).

This article does not cover the international client of Honor of Kings. The international client’s support list may differ from the mainland one, and the answer may differ depending on which client you play.

Also, frame-rate tiers and supported models change with season updates. Prices were checked on 2026-09-27; each compatibility item carries its own observation date (see the end of the article).

The short answer

In one line: 120fps has to pass two gates — the display must support a high refresh rate, and the game must open the option for that model; once past both, whether it holds steady comes down to cooling.

The 13–16 standard models and Plus fail at the first gate (a physical 60Hz ceiling); the 13–16 Pro models and the standard 17 pass both, but their unlock dates are years apart; the iPhone Air has 120Hz but, as of the public testing available on 2026-04-01, fails at the second gate.

Limitation one: 120fps needs more than a capable display — the game has to open it

This is the most easily misunderstood part, and most explanations online simplify it to one of two things — either “the display decides” or “the chip decides”. Neither is complete.

The accurate model is two gates, plus one condition for sustaining it:

The first gate is physics — there’s no way around it. A 60Hz panel draws 60 frames a second, and that’s that.

But the second gate stands on its own: having a 120Hz display does not mean having 120fps.

iPhone Air is the clearest example

The iPhone Air has a 120Hz ProMotion display, just like the 17 Pro — but as of the public testing available on 2026-04-01, it has no “Ultra High” frame rate option in the game.

It isn’t greyed out and unselectable — the option doesn’t exist.

⚠️ The observation date for this is 2026-04-01. ITHome published a screenshot of the Air’s in-game settings page that day, headlined “the Air seems to have been ‘forgotten’”; PChome reported the same day that Air users “can only choose between the two tiers of 30fps Power Saving and 60fps High”. Before this article was filed (2026-09-27) we could not find any later official compatibility announcement from Tencent, so “the Air is still not opened” is an observation from 1 April, not a September measurement. Check against the game version you actually have before buying.

Note what this chain of evidence does and does not prove. What it proves is that the Air had no such option in the game at that time. It does not prove why Tencent hasn’t opened it — this article has no information on the game side’s actual decision-making. The industry commonly calls this a “model whitelist”, but that’s a colloquial term, not an official one.

⚠️ A separate question: being able to select it doesn’t mean it holds

The above is about whether you can select it. There’s a separate question: even if you select 120fps, does the phone necessarily run at 120Hz?

No. Apple’s own documentation supports this (and this is a separate chain of evidence from the Air example above — the two cannot be used to corroborate each other). From Optimizing iPhone and iPad apps to support ProMotion displays:

The system insulates the ProMotion display’s actual refresh rate from your app — you can’t force a ProMotion display to show your content at any specific rate.

In other words, even the game itself can only express a preference — it can’t lock the rate. The same document also states that ProMotion switches dynamically between 10Hz and 120Hz. That’s why “Ultra High” is a ceiling rather than a guarantee, and why there’s still a third gate (cooling).

Two pieces of evidence

① Same 120Hz, three different outcomes

When the iPhone 17 line launched in September 2025, all four models were 120Hz — but:

All three support up to 120Hz, yet the tiers available in-game differ. So a 120Hz display alone is not enough to guarantee a 120fps option.

⚠️ But you can’t say it’s “nothing to do with hardware” either. The 17, 17 Pro and Air differ in GPU, chassis and cooling, and this article has no information on the criteria Tencent actually uses when opening each model. All that follows from this is: 120Hz is not a sufficient condition.

② The iPad Pro precedent: it can be taken away, and given back

In June 2021 Tencent closed the “Super High” option on the iPad Pro (90fps, not 120fps), and only opened “Ultra High” (120fps) in June 2024 (S36). ITHome reported that the stated reason at the time was “gradual performance testing” — that is a second-hand account, not a formal Tencent announcement.

A feature that policy can switch off, and switch back on three years later, shows that the second gate is decided on the game side, not by chip capability.

In-game frame-rate tiers (iOS)

The highest tier on iOS is “Ultra High” = 120fps.

When each model was opened

⚠️ A practical warning: 120fps and the highest graphics quality are an either/or.

The in-game settings screen says: “Ultra High frame rate mode cannot currently be used at the same time as Extreme Canyon graphics quality or HDR effects quality”. Choose Extreme graphics and the frame rate is capped. A few Android models are exempt; this article found no reliable record of any iPhone being exempt.

⚠️ The support list changes. The historical dates in the table are season announcement times; “still not opened” for a model is an observation date, not a guarantee. Any season update may add or adjust models. Before buying, it’s best to confirm with someone who owns the same model, or look at the actual in-game options.

Limitation two: cooling decides whether it throttles

Hitting a high frame rate at the start isn’t hard. Holding it twenty minutes in is.

Note: cooling and battery life are two different things. This section is about whether the frame rate drops (cooling); how long you can play (battery) is the next section.

Phones heat up when gaming, and an overheating chip throttles — the smoothness you see at the start is not what you’ll get for a whole match. So what really has to be compared is sustained performance.

Cooling design

Across the 13 to 17 generations this article covers, the 17 Pro / Pro Max are the only models with a vapour chamber. Apple also moved the 16 Pro’s titanium back to an aluminium unibody — both are relevant to cooling.

The iPhone Air is confirmed to have no vapour chamber (teardown). As for why it doesn’t, and what replaces it, the circulating claims come from unreliable origins, so this article makes no assertion.

⚠️ The vapour chamber’s effect has to be stated precisely

Apple claims the 17 Pro’s sustained performance is “up to 40%” higher than the previous generation. Third-party stress-test results are more complicated than “did it reach 40% or not”.

Two things need separating:

• The 17 Pro still throttles heavily — one third party recorded a roughly 39% performance drop in a 3DMark stress test, similar to the 16 generation
• But the 17 Pro Max’s sustained throughput still beats the 16 Pro Max — the same batch of tests shows it about 50% higher in the first round, and its final round still better than the 16 Pro Max’s peak

So on cooling, the accurate statement is: the 17 Pro still gets hot enough to throttle, but at the same heat the 17 Pro Max genuinely does more than the previous generation.

Don’t expect the 17 Pro to run “cool” when gaming — it gets just as hot, but it does more at the same heat.

(Data sources at the end: Tom’s Guide’s 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test.)

16 Pro / Pro Max: measured sustained load and temperature

There are concrete measurements here, not hearsay. X.PIN (差評), via The Paper (澎湃新聞, 2024-10-04), ran Honkai: Star Rail for 30 minutes:

• iPhone 16 Pro: 47.8°C on the back, 42.9°C on the front
• Apple at the time claimed a 20% sustained gaming performance gain for the 16 Pro. Using a single game, that outlet measured only +0.1 fps against the 15 Pro — a single game under a single set of conditions is not enough to refute Apple’s overall claim, but it shows that an official percentage and what you feel in one particular game can be very far apart.
• Around the same time, 16 Pro Max users also reported: screen brightness reduced, a black screen for several minutes, and charging paused

To be fair: an Apple Hong Kong support document explicitly lists reduced brightness, a black screen, throttling and paused charging as designed overheating protection, and notes an operating temperature range of 0–35°C. This is behaviour, not a defect — but if gaming is your main use, it’s part of the real experience you have to count in.

Why are thicker phones usually better? A larger body means potentially more room to dissipate heat. But that’s only a structural advantage, not a guarantee — actual performance also depends on internal design, power draw and how the maker tunes it. Within the same generation of chip, the Pro Max generally holds up longer than the smaller model, but you can’t reach a conclusion from size alone.

⚠️ Two downsides, to be stated plainly

A gaming buying guide shouldn’t only talk about the good points. These two affect your actual experience:

① Touch latency — in both of these test groups, the iPhone was slower than the Android flagships in the same group

⚠️ You can’t infer from this that “every iPhone loses at every game”. The two test groups used different games, different models and different methods, so all you can say is: under the conditions of these two tests, the iPhones tested had higher touch latency than the Android flagships in the same group.

② The first wave of 120fps marketing numbers were measured in “Custom mode”

When 120fps opened for the iPhone 13 Pro / 14 Pro in 2022, the impressive numbers in the launch reviews were Custom mode only. The original reviewer wrote it plainly:

“This test was conducted in Custom mode only; frame rates in 5v5 matchmaking/ranked games should drop further as large numbers of skills are cast.”

Going back through that batch of coverage, PConline’s news-channel version cut that sentence (PConline’s own original version from the same day kept it). Another review said the iPhone 13 Pro “struggles to hold 120 fps, mostly sitting between 70 and 90 fps”, even with the phone cold.

This is why this article doesn’t print a table of measured frame rates. Test conditions differ too much between sources (Custom mode vs real matches, graphics settings, room temperature, device age), and merging them into one table would mislead.

Limitation three: battery life decides how long you can play

The last section was cooling — whether the frame rate drops. This one is the battery — how long you can play.

They’re different things: a phone can hold its frame rate the whole way and still be flat in two hours.

First, the most easily misread thing: the “hours” in the spec sheet are not gaming hours

When you see “iPhone 17: 30 hours” on a spec sheet, that’s Apple’s official video playback figure, not gaming time.

Gaming is roughly one third of that number.

We lined GSMArena’s standardised test up against Apple’s official figures (one and the same 3D game, locked to 60Hz, 200 nits, aeroplane mode):

All 12 phones land between 31% and 41%, with no exception. So you can use it this way: if the spec sheet says 30 hours, expect roughly 10 hours of gaming.

⚠️ This ratio is our own arithmetic, not any organisation’s official figure, and it is a cross-source comparison — Apple’s side is local video playback, GSMArena’s side is a 60Hz 3D game, so the two are different activities. Use it as a rough guide, not as an actuarial calculation.

Which figure is the “battery life” in the spec tables below?

They are all Apple’s rated video playback hours. Apple also publishes another, lower “video streaming” figure for the same model — the tables in this article use video playback throughout, so the rows are comparable with one another:

(The Hong Kong 17 Pro / 17 Pro Max are rated 31 / 37 hours of video playback; the US eSIM-only versions are 33 / 39 hours. We could not obtain their streaming figures.)

⚠️ Two points need stating, because they directly affect how you compare:

① Apple does not publish the detailed test environment on its spec pages (brightness, network, volume and so on), and this article could not obtain its test-condition footnote either. So these numbers can only be compared within the same maker and the same metric — they cannot be set directly against third-party numbers from GSMArena, Xiaobai Review and others.

② The same label doesn’t mean the same procedure. The 13 generation (2021) and the 17 generation (2025) both label their figure “video playback”, but Apple has genuinely adjusted how it measures over those five years (for example, adding the “video streaming” metric). This article could not verify whether the test procedure is consistent across generations, so leave some room when comparing across generations.

Same-generation comparison: the bigger phone wins, but the best one isn’t the Pro Max

In GSMArena’s same test, under the same conditions, gaming battery life within each generation:

Three findings:

① The bigger phone wins by a clear margin. The 15 Plus does 27% more than the 15, the 16 Plus 21% more than the 16, and the 17 Pro Max 15% more than the 17. The bigger screen doesn’t claw back the bigger battery.

② But the Pro isn’t the best in its generation — in both generations it loses to the standard model. The 16 Pro (8:26) loses to the 16 (8:53); the 17 Pro (10:14) loses to the 17 (10:32). The smaller body has worse cooling, and over a long run that costs you.

③ Most surprising: the Plus beats the Pro Max, and it’s the smaller battery beating the bigger one.

In both generations the Plus beats the Pro Max.

If what you want is “play the longest” rather than “the highest frame rate” → pick the Plus over the Pro Max (that’s what GSMArena’s measurements show in both generations; this article has no information on the cause).

But the Plus is 60Hz and can’t reach 120fps (see “Limitation one”) — so this is the choice you’re making: 120fps or longer play sessions. You can’t have both.

Game for Peace (和平精英): data for the iPhone 13 / 14 generations

GSMArena’s test doesn’t cover the 13 / 14 generations. For those two there’s another set: Phoenix Lab (凰家評測, 2022-09-30) using a “run it to death” model, with Game for Peace as the last stage (HDR HD + Super High frame rate), at 350 nits, 25°C, Wi-Fi.

⚠️ This is the total for “5 hours of mixed use + Game for Peace run until shutdown”, not pure gaming time. Don’t read it as “9 hours of Game for Peace”.

⚠️ “Super High frame rate” is not 60fps. Game for Peace’s tiers are: High 30 / Super High 40 / Extreme 60, with 90fps and 120fps tiers besides. This test ran HDR + 40fps.

But it is still valid for comparing models within a generation: the 13 Pro Max lasts 1 hour 47 minutes longer than the 13; the 14 Pro Max lasts 1 hour 07 minutes longer than the 14. Consistent with GSMArena’s conclusion — the bigger phone really does win.

One separate figure: an iPhone 13 Pro Max playing Game for Peace drains 11% an hour (100% brightness, 24°C, aeroplane mode, Wi-Fi; the frame rate and graphics quality are not stated, so it can’t be treated as a 60fps figure).

120fps costs battery — the direction is certain, but nobody has published a magnitude

This needs saying honestly: we could not find a single measurement of the same phone, the same game, at 60fps vs 120fps.

Not in Chinese, not in English. So this article will not give you a “120fps costs X% more” figure — the “30% more” going around online comes from an AI-generated content-farm page, whose own two numbers contradict each other on the same page.

What there is, is directional evidence:

• GSMArena’s methodology page states plainly that high-refresh gaming means “up to 50% shorter runtimes” — that is an editorial estimate, not a measurement, which is why their game test deliberately locks to 60Hz
• When Xiaobai Review (小白测评) retested the iPhone 16 Pro Max, moving Honor of Kings from “60 fps + Extreme graphics” to “120 fps + HD graphics” produced “battery consumption increased somewhat” — direction only, no magnitude — and it changed the graphics setting and the iOS version at the same time, moving two variables together
• 3elife’s measurements: with Honor of Kings at 120 fps the body temperature rose noticeably, while Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail showed little difference at 120 fps — meaning Honor of Kings is unusually sensitive to high refresh rates

Conclusion: 120fps is an option you pay for in battery. This article won’t put a number on the size of that cost, but the direction is clear — and the fact that GSMArena would sooner lock to 60Hz than deal with it suggests it isn’t small.

One more practical item: testing the iPhone 17 series in September 2025, Xiaobai Review noted “for now the 17 series only has 60 fps in Game for Peace and Honor of Kings” — that is, both games were locked to 60 fps when the 17 line launched, and 120 fps came later with an iOS update.

Hardware specs, model by model

What to look for in the tables: the refresh rate column — that 60Hz on the 13–16 standard models is exactly why they can’t reach 120fps (the standard 17 is already 120Hz).

Prices are as checked on our site on 2026-09-27 (the starting price of each model’s lowest grade), they move daily, so re-check before you transact.

iPhone 13 series (2021)

iPhone 14 series (2022)

The standard 14’s chip is the one in the 13 Pro — A15 with a 5-core GPU and 6GB, but the display drops back to 60Hz. From a gaming point of view, the standard 14 is “a Pro’s chip without a Pro’s screen”.

iPhone 15 series (2023)

iPhone 16 series (2024)

iPhone 17 series (2025)

“Not stocked by GiggleFone” means we don’t carry that model — not that the phone is unreleased. The 17 line went on sale in September 2025; we simply haven’t brought it in. If you want one, you’ll need to find another channel.

The “battery” column in the tables is Apple’s official video playback hours, not gaming hours (see “Limitation three”).

Hong Kong figures differ from US figures — Hong Kong 17 Pro / Pro Max units keep a physical SIM tray and are rated 31 / 37 hours; US eSIM-only versions are 33 / 39 hours.

All four 17-series models are 120Hz — the biggest difference from the previous four generations. Across the 13 to 17 generations this article covers, the 17 Pro / Pro Max are also the only models with a vapour chamber.

How to read these tables:

• GPU core count stopped being the bottleneck from the 13 generation on — even the 13’s 4-core A15 is powerful enough for Honor of Kings. The real differences are refresh rate, in-game support and cooling
• Hardware ray tracing (from the 15 Pro) doesn’t help with Honor of Kings — the game doesn’t use it. It only counts if you want to play other games that support ray tracing
• The standard 14 is a trap: the same chip as the 13 Pro, but a 60Hz display, so it can’t reach 120fps in Honor of Kings
• 12GB of memory (17 Pro / Air) helps little with Honor of Kings right now, but if you habitually leave games in the background and reply to messages mid-match, more is better
• The Air’s A19 Pro is the 5-core GPU version, one GPU core fewer than the 17 Pro (not a clock reduction — a different core count), and with no vapour chamber, if 120fps and sustained high-load performance are your first requirements, the Air is not this article’s recommended pick

⚠️ Two points about the numbers:

① Battery mAh is not listed anywhere here — Apple never publishes iPhone battery capacity, and the circulating figures come from teardowns and regulatory databases, which disagree with one another. What’s listed is official video playback hours, which can be compared with one another.

② RAM figures are not published by Apple — they come from Xcode and third-party teardowns, and are background reference only.

While we’re here: how do the Plus models game?

The Plus is “big body, big battery, but 60Hz” — whether it’s right for you depends on whether you accept 60fps.

Conclusion:

• If you accept 60fps → the Plus is theoretically better suited to long sessions: larger body, potentially more room to dissipate heat, and longer battery life (this article found no same-generation measurements to support that)
• If you want 120fps → the Plus can’t help you; you need a Pro
• The 16 Plus is out of stock on our site (Apple has discontinued it), so if you want the larger body, it’s the 15 Plus or the 14 Plus

Note: from the 17 generation, Apple stopped making the Plus, replaced by the iPhone Air. But the Air is a 5.64mm ultra-thin body with no vapour chamber — from a gaming standpoint these are two different directions: the Plus leans on a large body, while the Air is clearly aimed at thin-and-light portability rather than sustained high-load performance.

Price vs gaming experience: a counter-intuitive conclusion

If you want to play 120fps and you want it cheap, the answer is the iPhone 13 Pro, not a newer standard model.

The standard 16 costs about HK$1,600 more, yet its ceiling on displayed frame rate is lower than the cheaper 13 Pro — the standard 16 is 60Hz, the 13 Pro is 120Hz. (Note that the 13 Pro can’t lock 120fps either — see the third gate above.)

⚠️ The ✅ in the table only means “the 120fps tier can be selected in-game”. That’s a ceiling, not a guarantee. Real 5v5 matches drop frames as skills are cast and team fights grow — the publicly available measurements are not enough to guarantee that any iPhone holds 120fps throughout every real 5v5 match, at every graphics setting and in every environment.

But that doesn’t mean the 13 Pro is always better than the 16. The 16 has a newer chip, longer system support, a better camera and 8GB of memory. If gaming is only one of your uses, the standard model still makes sense; but if 120fps is a hard requirement, the 13 Pro is the cheapest answer.

What to check on a second-hand phone for gaming

Gaming is the most demanding thing you can ask of a phone, so the inspection needs to be targeted.

① Battery health — gaming drains it hardest

Settings → Battery → Battery Health. Gaming draws a lot of power and produces a lot of heat, and a low-health battery makes throttling arrive sooner. Below 80%, count the cost of a battery replacement into your offer.

Apple Hong Kong official battery replacement pricing (out of warranty):

(We could not obtain the official replacement prices for the 15 / 16 series. Third-party replacement is separate: around HK$350–380 for the 13 series.)

That figure goes straight into your negotiating room — on a 13 starting at HK$2,100, HK$709 is already a third of the price.

② Sustained-load test — especially on the 16 Pro / Pro Max

There’s no reliable way to judge a second-hand phone’s “overheating history”, so test it directly: start a match and watch it, noting where the body heats up and how quickly it throttles. Don’t just switch it on and glance at it.

③ Screen and touch — it directly affects your control in-game

Honor of Kings is a touch-heavy game, and a faulty screen makes it unplayable immediately. Check on a pure white or pure grey background at low brightness for colour casts or lines, then test multi-touch. See screen and camera function checks.

④ Regional version — don’t buy the mainland China unit by mistake

Different regional versions differ in physical SIM and eSIM support, and your game account and server region have to match. Before buying, check against the specific model number, your account region and your carrier’s requirements.

⑤ Storage — this game takes up space

The Honor of Kings install plus its asset packs take up a lot, and with other games and photos on top, 128GB fills up fast. If gaming is the main use, start at 256GB.

Further reading

For a full review of a single generation: iPhone 17 series | 16 | 15 | 14 | 13

For choosing across generations: 13–16 cross-generation comparison (the 17 line isn’t included)

Budget first: what to pick on a HK$3,000 budget

How our grading works: grades explained

Sources and notes

Where each figure comes from

For the 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 Pro rows, the Apple figures in the spec tables were read from Wayback-archived copies of Apple’s own pages — Apple has 301-redirected those pages to current model pages, so the originals can no longer be opened directly.

This article’s core argument — that 120fps has to pass the display gate and the game gate, and only after that does cooling decide whether it holds — rests on the following:

• The iPhone Air has no “Ultra High frame rate” option — two outlets reported the same event on 2026-04-01; these are not two independent tests: ITHome, “Tencent’s Honor of Kings finally opens 120 fps mode for the iPhone 17 standard model after half a year, but the Air seems to have been ‘forgotten’”; PChome, “Honor of Kings opens 120 fps for the iPhone 17 standard model; the Air is still unsupported”. Both are dated 2026-04-01 and are media reports / in-game screenshots, not official Tencent announcements.
• The opening-date list by model — this table is compiled from media reports and players’ in-game screenshots, not from official Tencent announcements (we found no single public Tencent page supporting all the dates at once). The 13 Pro / 14 Pro are 2022-09-22 (S29), the 16 Pro / Pro Max 2024-09-25 (S37), and the standard 17 2026-04-01 (S43). Each item is “media report / in-game observation”.
• ProMotion can’t be forced to a specified refresh rate — Apple’s official developer documentation, Optimizing iPhone and iPad apps to support ProMotion displays, quoted above; the same document’s ProMotion device list includes “iPhone 17 and later”.
• The iPad Pro precedent (closed in 2021, opened in 2024) — what closed in June 2021 was “Super High” (90fps); “Ultra High” (120fps) only opened in June 2024 with S36: ITHome, “Three years on, Tencent’s Honor of Kings mobile game opens Ultra High frame rate for iPad Pro models again” (2024-06-26). The “gradual performance testing” explanation is ITHome relaying the official reason, not the text of a formal Tencent announcement.
• The triple-buffering explanation is not adopted — it has been suggested that iPhone touch latency comes from “Metal using triple buffering by default”. Checking Apple’s official documentation, Understanding hitches in your app, the text says:
• “Most Apple devices operate in a double-buffer mode”;
• “One of the reasons the system may switch to triple buffering is to recover from a render hitch”;
• “The system can also use the triple-buffer mode during regular operation for various reasons, such as to save energy … or when a specific use case needs more time to render”.

So “triple buffering is not the default” holds, but it can’t be simplified into “it’s only a hitch-recovery mode”. The available material is not enough to support the causal claim that “Metal’s default triple buffering causes touch latency” — there is currently no official explanation of what causes touch latency. - Frame-rate tier and graphics quality are mutually exclusive — ZOL (中關村在線), “Honor of Kings 120 fps is about to launch: these three models get it first” (2021-09-09) reports that the in-game settings screen shows: “Ultra High frame rate mode cannot currently be used at the same time as Extreme Canyon graphics quality or HDR effects quality”, and on the same page notes that “under Ultra High frame rate mode, graphics quality can be set to HD at most”. That sentence is text from a game settings screen, relayed through media coverage; we found no original Tencent announcement for it. - Thermals and sustained performance (17 generation) — Apple Newsroom (2025-09-09) officially claims “up to 40%”. Third parties: - Tom’s Guide (2025-09-17), 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test, two 20-minute rounds: 17 Pro Max stability 65.2% → 68.4%, 16 Pro Max 54.7% → 67.7%, iPhone Air 65.1% → 58.8% (the only one that kept falling); surface temperature 17 Pro Max 100.66°F vs 16 Pro Max 101.12°F. - Notebookcheck (2025-09-18), citing The Tech Chap’s test: the 17 Pro drops 38.7%, the 17 Pro Max 28%, with throttling in line with the 16 generation; but the 17 Pro Max is 50.5% higher than the 16 Pro Max in the first round, and its final round still beats the 16 Pro Max’s peak. - iFixit (2025-09-23): the 17 Pro settles at 34.8°C; the 16 Pro Max begins throttling at an external temperature of 37.8°C.

So the accurate statement is “the 17 Pro still gets hot enough to throttle, but at the same heat the 17 Pro Max does more than the previous generation” — not “third parties couldn’t reproduce the 40%”. - 16 Pro overheating measurements — X.PIN (差評), via The Paper (澎湃新聞), “After tearing down four new iPhones, I’d suggest Apple take some cooling notes from Chinese manufacturers” (2024-10-04), a 30-minute Honkai: Star Rail test: 16 Pro back 47.8°C, front 42.9°C; after removing the graphite film, frame rate fell from 57.8 to 48.2; Apple claimed +20% sustained performance, while the measured average frame rate was only 0.1 fps above the 15 Pro. - Touch latency — - Honor of Kings, 7-phone comparison: Xiaobai Review (小白測評), “Xiaobai Review database 5.0 update…” (2025-08-10) — iPhone 16 Pro Max 61.4 ms, the slowest; the fastest was the Honor Magic7 RSR at 25.6 ms. - Game for Peace, 44-phone comparison: Geekerwan (極客灣), “Mobile gaming performance mega-comparison”. ⚠️ The original video (Bilibili, 2026-02-15) was taken down on 2026-02-22, so this article cites second-hand coverage instead: 電腦王阿達 / KOCPC (2026-02-18), and “An analysis of Geekerwan’s test methodology” (2026-03-07) — the whole iPhone 17 line-up at about 60 ms, last; Android flagships about 35 ms. - Battery replacement cost — the official prices for the 13 series come from media market rates reprinted in our own 13-series review; the official prices for the 17 series come from the Senco-Masslink (Apple Hong Kong authorised service provider) price list, cross-checked against two media outlets. ⚠️ This article could not read Apple Hong Kong’s repair pricing page directly (it loads via JS, so the prices aren’t in the HTML), so both are second-hand in nature. - The Custom mode caveat — MyDrivers (快科技／驅動之家), “Honor of Kings Season S29 launches: 120 fps mode opens for the iPhone 13 Pro / 14 Pro series” (2022-09-22), original text: “It’s worth noting that this test was conducted in Custom mode only; frame rates in 5v5 matchmaking/ranked games should drop further as large numbers of skills are cast.” It was PConline’s news-channel version that cut that sentence (PConline’s own original version, the same day, kept it); ITHome ran a different piece that day which never contained the sentence at all.

Sources for the battery life section

• Per-model gaming battery life — GSMArena, Battery life test results v2.0 and the methodology page (2023-11-08; tables read 2026-09-28). Conditions: 200 nits all-white, location on, aeroplane mode, Wi-Fi, volume 15%, locked to 60Hz, SmartViser automation. The game is not named (officially described as “a popular 3D game with a high GPU load”), and it does not cover the iPhone 13 / 14.
• Apple’s official battery figures (video playback / video streaming) — Apple’s tech-spec pages for each model (17 / Air / 16 are current pages; for the 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 Pro, since Apple has 301-redirected them, these were read from Wayback-archived copies of Apple’s own pages). ⚠️ Apple’s spec pages don’t list the details of the test environment, and we could not obtain their test-condition footnote; the table above can only be compared within the same maker and the same metric.
• Game for Peace (iPhone 13 / 14 generations) — Phoenix Lab (凰家評測), “iPhone 14 full-line battery life test: did it really get optimised backwards? | One more point vol.9” (2022-09-30), read from a Baidu landing-page copy; we could not find a first-party ifeng URL, so this is a reprinted copy. Conditions: 350 nits, 25°C, Wi-Fi, HDR HD + Super High frame rate (40fps).
• Game for Peace drain rate (11%/h) — the NetEase account 北境不忘 (2022-07-18). This is a self-media account, not an established lab; conditions: 100% brightness, 100% volume, Wi-Fi, 24°C, aeroplane mode; the frame rate and graphics quality are not stated, so it can’t be treated as a 60fps figure.
• iPhone 17 series battery life — Xiaobai Review (2025-09-18, via a NetEase account). Database 5.0 model: 25°C ± 0.5, 350 nits, robotic-arm operation.
• 120fps battery direction — GSMArena’s methodology page (above; an editorial estimate); Xiaobai Review via Sohu / ITBEAR (2024-10-13); 3elife, “iPhone 15 Plus / 15 Pro Max full review: performance” (2023-10-20, temperature only — no battery figures).

⚠️ This article does not adopt the “120fps costs 30% more” figure. It comes from a CSDN content-farm page that describes itself as a “professional intelligent creation assistant”, i.e. AI-generated; its own two figures on the same page (“20-40%” and “around 30%”) contradict each other, and it names no model and no test conditions.

A few things to keep in mind:

• ⚠️ This article deliberately does not print a table of measured frame rates. Test conditions differ too much between sources (Custom mode vs real matches, graphics settings, room temperature, device age), and merging them into a table would mislead. In particular, the 120fps figures from the 13 / 14 Pro launch were measured in Custom mode, and real 5v5 will be markedly lower.
• ⚠️ No model has a measured absolute power draw at the 120fps tier. Every hard number was measured at the 60fps tier and cannot be compared directly.
• ⚠️ The support list on the game side changes with each season, and every item here carries its observation date. The historical opening dates in the tables are season announcement times; the “still not opened” iPhone Air is an observation from 2026-04-01. Before buying, it’s best to confirm with someone who owns the same model, or look at the actual in-game options.
• Apple’s Hong Kong support document “iPhone operating temperature” explicitly lists reduced brightness, a black screen, throttling and paused charging as designed overheating protection, with an operating temperature range of 0–35°C. This is behaviour, not a defect.
• As for what cooling material the iPhone Air uses, the circulating claims come from unreliable origins, so this article makes no assertion. All that’s confirmed is that it has no vapour chamber, and that it throttled first in the measurements.
• Prices were checked on our site in 2026-09, the starting price of each model’s lowest grade, and move daily — re-check before you transact.
• Memory figures are not published by Apple — they come from Xcode and third-party teardowns, and are background reference only.

Originally published on GiggleFone — certified graded iPhones for Hong Kong.