OnePlus Nord 6 hands-on review
Software
The Nord 6 runs on OxygenOS 16 based on Android 16. The company has promised four major Android OS upgrades and six years of security patches. It's worth noting that Nord phones don't get software updates with the same urgency as the mainline OnePlus phones, so you will always be at the back of the line whenever new updates are released. For example, the Nord 5 got the Android 16 update after the OnePlus 12.
The software we had on the Nord 6 does seem to be a newer version of OxygenOS 16, which we haven't seen elsewhere yet. It had a few minor changes, such as the leftmost screen on the launcher now being taken by the OnePlus Shelf instead of Google Discover, and swipe-down opening notifications by default instead of local search. These are all welcome changes, and it's good to see OnePlus slowly ironing out some of the points of friction in the software.
However, not every annoyance has been addressed. There's still one too many pre-installed apps on the phone, some of which are third-party bloatware, and the rest just duplicate apps from OnePlus that replicate the behavior of the Google apps that also come installed alongside. The default display scaling still makes everything look massive, and a lot of the dialog boxes that pop up have odd localization for English, where the text doesn't seem to fit properly, and some of the translation also looks iffy.
Despite these minor issues, the overall software experience within OxygenOS 16 remains good. The latest version is filled with slick animations and really good lockscreen transitions. The OS remains as customizable as ever, and there is a lot of built-in functionality, including a bunch of AI features, that should negate the need to install additional apps to access. What is needed now is some trimming and polishing to make the software experience truly great.
Performance
The Nord 6 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip with up to 12GB of LPDDR5X memory and up to 256GB of UFS 4.1 storage. This is easily the most powerful chip available in this price range and by a country mile. OnePlus claims the phone has a graphene cooling pad, but the company has not mentioned the size of the vapor chamber, assuming there is one.
Starting with the benchmark scores, the Nord 6 absolutely smokes its competition. Whether you compare against offerings from Samsung, Motorola, Nothing, or OnePlus's sister brand Realme, the Nord 6 is usually leagues ahead. This is easily the most performance you can get for your money in this segment right now, and the only phones that can keep up are the Poco F7 and the iQOO Neo 10, which incidentally also have the same chip.
The real-world performance of the phone is just as impressive. OxygenOS is exceptionally fluid as is, but when you give it some horsepower under the hood, it can really come to life. Strangely, OnePlus has chosen to keep some of the transparency and background blur effects disabled on this phone, but you can easily turn them on from the Texture blur settings without seeing any impact on performance.
Gaming is where things get interesting. As mentioned before, you can only access the full 165Hz refresh rate of the display within a handful of titles. These currently include BGMI, CODM, Free Fire, Free Fire MAX, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and GTA: Liberty City Stories. We chose to try some of these titles, as not all of them are available in the Indian region.
In COD, we managed to achieve the full 165fps natively. The game lets you pick the refresh rate directly from its settings, but you can also opt for lower values if you like. In BGMI, the game can only do 120fps natively, which means to hit 165fps, you need to rely on frame generation. This has to be accessed from within the phone's gaming overlay menu, and once enabled, it will cause the game's internal refresh rate to hit somewhere around 82fps, as that's the only way it can double up to 165. This means you are getting worse input latency than if you just ran the game natively at 120fps.
We also decided to check out GTA: Liberty City Stories, which turned out to be quite amusing. This is one of the titles that can be run at 165fps, but it's also one of those times where running at a higher frame rate isn't ideal. Anyone who's into emulating or playing older titles on newer hardware will tell you that older games often had their animations, physics, and even game speed tied to the frame rate, and running those games at a higher frame rate than what they were designed for breaks all of those things. GTA: Liberty City Stories is one of those games where running it at 165fps causes it to run at a comically fast pace. To think, somebody at OnePlus saw this and thought it looked okay beggars belief. The only way to fix this is to go into display settings and manually set the display's maximum refresh rate to 60Hz.
Finally, we also tried some non-listed titles such as Genshin Impact, which does support native 60fps and frame generated 120fps, but most other games were limited to 60fps.
GeekBench 6
- Single-core
- Multi-core
Poco X8 Pro Max
Nothing Phone (3)
Galaxy S25 FE
OnePlus Nord 6
OnePlus Nord 5
Motorola Edge 60 Fusion
Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G
AnTuTu 11
Poco X8 Pro Max
OnePlus Nord 6
Galaxy S25 FE
Galaxy A57
Nothing phone (4a)
Galaxy A37
Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G
3DMark
- Wild Life Extreme (Highest)
- Wild Life Extreme (Lowest)
Poco X8 Pro Max
Nothing Phone (3)
OnePlus Nord 6
Galaxy S25 FE
Galaxy A37
Redmi Note 15 Pro 5G
Motorola Edge 60 Fusion
In terms of thermal performance, the Nord 6 does fine in GPU-demanding scenarios. The surface temperature remains in check, mostly because the plastic frame does not conduct heat as well as aluminum, but the throttling was also nominal and should not affect in-game performance.
The CPU throttling, however, was a bit erratic as the phone would constantly cycle between dropping to 60% performance and then back up throughout the test. Then again, there are hardly any real-world tasks that stress the CPU in this way, so it's mostly academic.
Thermal throttling test
