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There’s a tablet launching this month with liquid cooling you can literally see flowing through it. And that’s not even the most interesting thing about it.
Meet the RedMagic Astra 2. It’s just launched in China as the Gaming Tablet 5 Pro, and RedMagic has confirmed a global rollout, with pricing details coming on July 17. The early-bird pre-order window opens on July 10. If you’re into portable gaming hardware, you need to pay attention to this one.
Quick specs: a 9.06-inch 2.4K OLED at 185Hz, up to 1,600 nits peak brightness, Snapdragon Elite Gen 5, and an 8,300mAh battery with two USB-C ports. It starts at around $549.
What does the AquaCore Cooling System 2.0 actually do?
Most tablets get warm. Some get hot. Gaming tablets get embarrassingly hot in ways that throttle performance right when you need it most. RedMagic is trying to solve that in its own way.
The Astra 2 uses industry-grade fluorinated liquid coolant for efficient heat transfer through an active micro pump. That micro pump is just 0.48mm thick, which is part of how the tablet stays as slim as 4.9mm at its thinnest point.
You can see the coolant moving through the transparent back panel, alongside RGB lighting and actual air bubbles drifting through the fluid. In the images, it looks like concept art. I genuinely can’t believe it’s a final product.
There’s also a Liquid Metal 3.0 layer and a large VC vapor chamber working alongside the active loop. Whether that’s enough to keep a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 from cooking itself during long gaming sessions is the question every review needs to answer.
Can the Astra 2 actually run Steam games?
This is where things get either exciting or exhausting, depending on your tolerance for “it should work in theory.”
A built-in x86 translation layer lets you install and play Steam titles at 2K resolution and up to 144Hz. RedMagic officially claims compatibility of this tablet with over 200 game titles. That claim needs real-world validation.
PC emulation on ARM hardware always involves trade-offs in compatibility and performance, and “over 200 games” is a very different number from “the games you actually want to play.”
I’m genuinely interested. But I’ve been disappointed by RedMagic’s software promises before, and a feature that sounds this good in a press release has a way of feeling a lot more limited once a reviewer actually sits down with it.
Its most direct competitor, the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5, starts at $849 and uses a 165Hz LCD instead of OLED. If the Astra 2 holds its price and the Steam emulation works as advertised, RedMagic will be winning on paper by a wide margin.
That’s a big “if.” But at the same time, it’s the most interesting “if” in the world of Android gaming tablets right now.
