Infinix Note 40 5G — 18 Month Review

It's the phone that you've been betrayed by — a phone that looks new back in 2024 but hides a dark secret. This is everything you need to know about the Infinix Note 40 5G, written by someone who lived through 18 months of it.

Infinix Note 40 5G — looks good on paper, disastrous in reality

The Birthday Mistake

You're a gamer, but you're broke. You saw an MLBB collab Note 40 5G on the shelf with a tempting 512GB storage, enough to fill up your high-end games like Genshin, WuWa, and more. You took the opportunity because it's your birthday, and brought it home. Weeks later, you realized it's a piece of garbage, and you've been scammed. That birthday boy was me!

October 2024. ₱11,000 of birthday money. A phone that promised 5G, 512GB storage, AMOLED display, JBL speakers, and a Mobile Legends collab. It looked like everything a budget gamer in the Philippines could want. By April 2026 — just 18 months later — the battery drains 78% in 3 hours of normal use, the phone heats up like a stove under the Baguio sun, the GPU is being abandoned by major game developers, and the phone has developed a tiny battery bulge from sustained thermal stress. This is not a review of a phone that aged poorly. This is the story of a phone that was broken before it left the shelf.

That's right, the Note 40 5G was a disaster from day one. Many users complained about their Note 40 5G and ended up regretting their choice, including myself. So what made this phone… suck? It all comes down to its specs: The Infinix Note 40 5G uses the MediaTek Dimensity 7020, but here's the dirty secret you don't know: it's a rebadged Dimensity 930 from 2022. But that's just the beginning — it came bundled with a PowerVR IMG BXM-8-256, one of the worst GPUs ever put inside a midrange phone, offered by the British company Imagination Technologies. This chipset combo alone is the worst ever embedded in a 2024 phone. The Dimensity 930 launched in 2022 with that same dead GPU — and Infinix shipped it to you in 2024 with a new name.

Tempting right? 512GB for ₱11K with an MLBB collab — the perfect smokescreen

The Chipset Problem: Dimensity 7020 Explained

The Infinix Note 40 5G has genuinely impressive headline specs — MagCharge, JBL Tuned speakers, 108MP main camera, 512GB storage, AMOLED display, and a premium finish on high-end variants. For someone on a budget, that spec sheet looks like a deal. Performance-wise, it's a complete flop — and that's entirely the chipset's fault.

The PowerVR IMG BXM-8-256 GPU is the problem. Imagination Technologies, the British company behind PowerVR, lost Apple's contract in 2017 and never recovered in mobile. Their GPU architecture has had essentially no active developer support since then. Game developers optimize for Mali and Adreno — not PowerVR. This means games don't just run poorly on PowerVR. They run with glitches, shader errors, and compatibility failures that no amount of software updates can fix, because the fix requires the GPU to be something it fundamentally isn't.

Shader glitch in Zenless Zone Zero — taken on the Note 40 5G in 2024. This is what PowerVR looks like in 2024 games.

To put it simply: my dad's Samsung Galaxy S20 from 2020 can run Farming Simulator 26 in May 19, 2026. My 2024 birthday phone cannot. A six-year-old Samsung flagship outperforms a brand new "midrange" Infinix because honest hardware ages better than deceptive hardware.

Gaming Performance: Battery Drain, Heat Throttling, and the 5G Lie

The Dimensity 7020 was marketed as an efficient 5G chip — good for battery longevity. The reality is the opposite. Under gaming load, the battery drains fast from both heat generation and processing strain. But the real battery killer isn't gaming — it's the 5G modem.

In Baguio, Philippines, where I live, 5G coverage is essentially nonexistent. The phone's 5G modem searches constantly for a signal that never arrives, burning power 24 hours a day. The logical fix is switching to 4G-only mode. Here's the problem: you can't.

In the XOS 15 update, Infinix locked the 4G/5G Auto-Switch permanently ON. The setting exists in the menu. The toggle appears interactive. But even after disabling 5G in the SIM settings, the Auto-Switch overrides your choice and keeps the 5G modem active. Infinix built a setting that looks like user control while delivering none. The description of this locked feature reads: "Auto-switch between 4G and 5G to extend battery life." A feature that drains your battery is marketed as extending it.

The documented result of this design: 78% battery drained in 3 hours of normal use — browsing, messaging, no gaming. 52% battery lost overnight with the screen off. The phone charges to roughly 75% before thermal protection kicks in during Philippine lowland summer heat, even on Low Temperature charging mode. After 18 months, the battery has developed a small but visible bulge — physical evidence of sustained thermal stress from a phone that was fighting itself from day one.

The XOS 15 update brought additional problems beyond the locked Auto-Switch: UI lag, loss of 120Hz smoothness, increased heating, slower overall performance, and dropped camera quality — all confirmed by users globally on GSMArena. XOS 16 is coming as the Note 40 5G's final major update. Given what XOS 15 did to performance, and given that Android 16's Liquid Glass UI demands more GPU rendering on a PowerVR chip that receives zero driver updates, the final update may make things measurably worse before Infinix closes the file permanently.

MediaTek's Role: A Match Made in Hell

MediaTek created the Dimensity 7020 by taking the Dimensity 930 — a chip from 2022 — renaming it, adding a 5G modem, and selling it as a new 2024 product. The PowerVR GPU came bundled with the original 930. MediaTek simply carried it forward unchanged into the "new" chip. No GPU upgrade. No process node improvement. Same 6nm fabrication. Same dead architecture. New four-digit name designed to sound current.

This was not a technical limitation. MediaTek proved they could shrink existing chip architectures when competitive pressure demanded it — the Helio G99 is a genuine 12nm-to-6nm shrink of the Helio G96, delivering real efficiency improvements. They had the capability and manufacturing relationships to do the same for the Dimensity 930. They chose not to, because the budget 5G market — primarily developing countries in Southeast Asia and Africa — lacked the competitive pressure and regulatory infrastructure to hold them accountable.

Hoyoverse, the developer behind Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, and Honkai Star Rail, began dropping PowerVR support in 2024 and 2025. When the studio responsible for some of the world's most popular mobile games stops supporting your GPU architecture, that GPU is effectively dead for gaming. Infinix marketed the Note 40 5G specifically to gamers. The GPU inside it was being abandoned by major game developers at the time of sale.

The tech community documented this publicly. NanoReview, GSMArena, and various hardware forums confirmed the Dimensity 7020 rebadge before the Note 40 5G even launched. The information was available. Infinix read their own product reviews. They shipped it anyway.

Why Infinix Chose the Dimensity 7020 Over Better Options

Infinix had done this before. The Note 30 5G in 2023 used the Dimensity 6080 — itself a rebadged Dimensity 810 from 2021. The community identified the rebadge on launch day in GSMArena comments and predicted the Note 40 5G would repeat the pattern. They were right. Two consecutive generations of the same deception, same markets, same buyers.

Here's the bitter irony: the Note 30 5G's rebadged chip, despite being older, performed better than the Note 40 5G for gaming — because the Dimensity 810 came with a proper Mali-G57 GPU. Fewer compatibility issues. Better sustained performance. Developers actually supported it. Infinix's "upgrade" made gaming worse by swapping a functional GPU for a dead one.

Note 40 5G vs. Note 30 5G — the "upgrade" that was actually a downgrade in real-world gaming

The Dimensity 7200 — a genuine 4nm chip with Mali-G610 GPU — was available in 2024 at an estimated ₱700 more per unit in manufacturing cost. Infinix chose the cheaper rebadged option instead. That ₱700 saving per unit, multiplied across millions of devices sold across Southeast Asia and Africa, is the financial logic behind two years of buyer suffering. The Note 40 5G is a "Flagudget" phone — flagship features at budget prices — but the trade-off was never disclosed honestly. The 5G marketing, the 512GB spec, the Mobile Legends collab were designed to attract young gamers. The GPU inside guaranteed those gamers would be disappointed.

Infinix's own General Manager said in 2024 that their mission was to bring "young, tech-savvy consumers the very best products at attainable price points." The Note 40 5G was their answer to that mission. It shipped a two-year-old rebadged chip with an abandoned GPU to the exact demographic they claimed to serve.

How Infinix Betrayed Note 40 5G Buyers

The Note 50 series quietly fixed everything. Better chipset, proper Mali GPU, better thermals — no announcement, no acknowledgment of what the Note 40 5G got wrong. The Note 50 Pro+ 5G used the Dimensity 8350, finally delivering the upper-midrange performance the Note 40 Pro+ had promised.

Then came the Note 60 series. The Note 60 Ultra features the Dimensity 8400 Ultimate, a 200MP Samsung camera sensor, and a design by Pininfarina — Ferrari's legendary design house. The Note 60 Pro is Infinix's first-ever Snapdragon-powered phone, featuring the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 and Adreno 810 GPU in an official Qualcomm partnership announced at MWC 2026.

Note 60 Ultra — Pininfarina design, Dimensity 8400 Ultimate, 200MP camera. Built with the money Note 40 5G buyers spent.

The timeline is worth sitting with: October 2024, I bought the Note 40 5G believing it was futureproof. By April 2026, Infinix was presenting Pininfarina-designed phones at MWC Barcelona and announcing their first Qualcomm partnership. The buyers who funded that redemption arc were never acknowledged. The mall in my city that sold me the Note 40 5G no longer carries Infinix at all — they've been replaced by Tecno on the shelf. The brand moved on without looking back.

The Real World Consequences: An 18-Month Filipino Buyer's Account

Most reviews of the Note 40 5G were written within the first month of use. This section documents what 18 months of daily use in the Philippines actually looks like.

Month 1-6: The GPU incompatibilities appeared immediately. Shader glitches in Zenless Zone Zero. Racing Master lagging. Arena Breakout struggling. The 5G icon sitting in the status bar while connecting at 4G speeds in Baguio where 5G coverage barely exists.

Month 6-12: A grey screen event — the phone went completely black, lost signal, forced a restart, displayed a grey screen before recovering through a double restart cycle. This is a documented MediaTek hardware stress event indicating thermal or power delivery strain on the SoC. The same event has been reported by other Note 40 5G owners. The Huawei Y7 2019 I used before this phone, running a Snapdragon 450, never did this once in years of use.

Month 12-18: Battery degradation becoming severe. 78% drained in 3 hours of normal use — no gaming, just browsing and messaging. 52% lost overnight in standby. Charging heat becoming noticeable even at 33W. During visits to Pangasinan in Philippine summer heat, the thermal protection system stops charging at 75% even on Low Temperature mode — the battery generating more heat during charge cycles than the phone's cooling can manage in a 35-38°C environment.

Month 18: A small battery bulge discovered at the bottom of the device. Physical evidence of battery cell degradation from sustained thermal stress. The phone that was supposed to be futureproof has a swelling battery before its second birthday.

Every single symptom documented here has been independently reported by Note 40 5G users in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and across the Philippines on GSMArena. This is not one buyer's bad luck. This is a product behaving exactly as its compromised hardware design guaranteed it would.

Infinix quietly fixed the Note 40 5G's problems in the Note 50 series — without ever acknowledging them publicly

Should You Buy the Infinix Note 40 5G in 2026?

Hard no. The Note 50 series already fixes most of what made the Note 40 5G frustrating — better chipset, proper Mali GPU, better thermals. If you're on a ₱11,000–₱14,000 budget in 2026, look at the Infinix Note 50 5G, the POCO M6 Pro, or the Redmi Note 13 5G instead. You'll get a phone that won't embarrass itself running Genshin or WuWa.

If you're specifically looking for a second-hand deal, go for the Note 40 5G's 4G variant — it uses the Helio G99 with a proper Mali-G57 GPU, runs games correctly, and avoids the entire 5G modem battery drain disaster. The 4G version is the phone the 5G version pretended to be.

One more thing worth knowing: Infinix has no official trade-in program in the Philippines. When this phone reaches its end of life — software abandoned after XOS 16, battery degraded, GPU unsupported by an expanding list of games — there is no official path to recover any value from it. You bought it. They took the money. The relationship ends there.

Final Verdict

The Infinix Note 40 5G deserved better engineering than it received. Infinix had the option to use the Dimensity 7200 — a genuine 4nm chip with a Mali GPU — for an estimated ₱700 more per unit in manufacturing cost. MediaTek had the proven ability to shrink older chip architectures to newer process nodes, as demonstrated by the Helio G99. Both companies made deliberate choices that prioritized short-term profit over the buyers who trusted them.

Those buyers were young, tech-savvy gamers in the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Nigeria, and across Southeast Asia and Africa — exactly the demographic Infinix's own marketing identified as their target. They were also buyers in markets with limited consumer protection infrastructure, limited ability to pursue legal recourse, and limited access to the English-language tech journalism that documented the rebadging scandal before the phone even launched.

I was one of those buyers. I spent ₱11,000 of birthday money on a phone I chose specifically to avoid burdening my family with a more expensive option. I did the responsible thing and got burned for it. The lesson isn't simply "research before buying" — though that matters. The real lesson is more specific: GPU architecture matters more than storage size. Check whether your chip is genuinely new or a renamed older product. Snapdragon or Mali GPU — never PowerVR. And never trust a Mobile Legends collab to tell you what a phone can actually do.

The store in my city that sold me this phone no longer carries Infinix. My old Huawei Y7 2019 with its honest Snapdragon 450 still works. My dad's Samsung S20 from 2020 will run Farming Simulator 26 soon in May 19, 2026. The phone I bought new in 2024 has a bulging battery and a dying GPU before its second birthday.

That's the legacy of the Infinix Note 40 5G.

Written by Pi of Mann — a gamer, writer, and content creator from Baguio, Philippines, who learned all of this the expensive way.