The Motorola Razr Fold proves skipping Elite silicon was a smart move

The new Motorola Razr Fold is an intriguing, if not quite perfect, ultra-premium foldable. A huge 6,000mAh battery and fast 80W charging give it some key advantages over its rivals, but not everyone is convinced by the phone’s weight, cameras, or value for money.

But during our hands-on time with the phone, we have been particularly impressed with the foldable as a multi-tasking powerhouse. Android’s taskbar and 90:10 split views help, and the Razr Fold prompts you to make regular use of them via an “Open in split-screen mode” pop-up, for example. But powering these multitasking capabilities is a highly performant Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5.

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed there’s no Elite moniker attached to this chip. It’s not the powerhouse 8 Elite Gen 5 you’ll find in top-tier flagships, but rather a trimmed-down and slightly more cost-effective premium-tier option with lower clock speeds and one fewer GPU slice. At first, this might seem like a significant downgrade for a super-premium $1,899 foldable. However, a closer look at the benchmarks reveals that this might have been a smart choice on Motorola’s part.

Motorola Razr Fold benchmarks

Eyeballing GeekBench 6’s CPU scores, we see results that are very competitive with other popular foldables in the US market. It bests the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold by a noticeable margin in both single-core and multi-core scores. It’s also hot on the heels of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 in both results, confirming just why this handset feels so nippy when multitasking.

Taking a look at our two key stress tests, 3DMark’s Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay, there’s rather impressive news on the graphics front as well.

The Motorola Razr Fold absolutely flies past the Pixel 10 Pro Fold again, which is not all that surprising given the lackluster graphics performance of the Tensor G5. More impressive is that the Moto is very competitive with the best scores of the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and actually wins out over long-term stress tests.

The key to the Razr Fold’s success is lower temperatures. It reached a peak of just 37.9°C and an average of just 33.5°C in the Wild Life Extreme test. That’s comfortably cooler than the Z Fold 7’s 39.2°C peak and 37.2°C average, and even runs cooler than the less powerful Pixel Fold, which peaked at 39.9°C and averaged 34.8°C in the same test.

The Solar Bay results are not quite as favorable but still points to a similar theme. The Razr’s ray-tracing performance takes a bigger hit due to the missing GPU slice, but the phone retains a temperature advantage that keeps it ahead by the end of the test.

The Moto foldable is reasonably slow to warm up, and with peak temperatures kept well below 40°C, Motorola’s latest foldable not only remains cool to the touch while gaming but also delivers more of its maximum GPU performance for longer. We’ve been able to play back-to-back rounds of COD Mobile with Very High graphics and Max frame rate settings without the phone warming up noticeably at all. That’s seldom realized in the foldable form factor.

If you want a rough approximation of the temperatures we’ve seen from the 8 Elite Gen 5, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra hits a toasty 41.5°C in Wild Life Extreme and a peak of 43.9°C in Solar Bay. More alarmingly, the OPPO Find X9 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra reach 48°C and 49.5°C, respectively, at their highest temperatures, which are too hot to handle. The 8 Elite Gen 5 is a hot chip when pushed to extremes.

A foldable phone with a thinner body and less room for heat dissipation would undoubtedly struggle to withstand temperatures approaching 50°C. Either that or Motorola would have to throttle back performance much harder to keep the phone cool.

While the Motorola Razr Fold won’t be topping the benchmark rankings, the fact that it performs at a comparable level to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite — already a powerhouse chip — while running cooler than rival foldables puts the phone in very good standing. Whether you’re powering through multiple apps or planning on a long gaming session, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 has you covered.

This data reaffirms what I’ve said before — we’re struggling to find use cases that can actually push today’s top-tier smartphone chipsets to the limit, anyway. Between ever-higher temperatures and increased power draw, today’s peak performance is often temporary at best. This is especially true in constrained form factors like clamshell and booklet foldables.

While futureproofing is nice to have, until we’re using our phones as desktop PCs or replacing our AAA gaming consoles, picking a chip with the best balance of performance, temperatures, and battery life is often the better bet. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 seems like a great pick in that regard, and it works out very well in the new Razr Fold.