Performance: Snapdragon 801 Power

The chief variant of the Samsung Galaxy S5 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, specifically the MSM8974AC with a quad-core Krait 400 CPU clocked at 2.45 GHz, an Adreno 300 GPU at 578 MHz, a Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP at 600 MHz, and a 32-bit dual-channel LPDDR3 memory controller. This is essentially the aforementioned SoC as constitute in the Asian variant of the HTC 1 M8, so I'm non expecting a major deviation in performance betwixt the two devices.

The Snapdragon 801 is paired with 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 16 GB or 32 GB of internal NAND, and a microSD card slot. Connectivity-wise in that location'southward LTE Category 4 rated at 150 Mbps downstream and 50 Mbps upstream, plus 42 Mbps HSPA+ and quad-band 2G. You'll as well observe Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/grand/n/ac with 2x2 MIMO, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and an infrared LED. Like the Galaxy Note iii, the Galaxy S5 has a USB 3.0 port on the lesser.

The other variant of the Milky way S5 is ane you lot probably won't be seeing too ofttimes, equally it lacks LTE networks and isn't destined for North America, Europe or Asia. It comes with a Samsung Exynos 5422 SoC, which is a 2.1 GHz quad-cadre ARM Cortex-A15 CPU paired with a ane.5 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU in a large.LITTLE configuration with heterogeneous multi-processing and global task scheduling. The SoC also packs an ARM Mali-T628 GPU clocked at 695 MHz, and a dual-channel LPDDR3e retentiveness controller.

This review focuses on the Snapdragon 801 model (the SM-G900F and others) every bit it'south far more mutual, merely I will deliver an update on how the Exynos model (the SM-G900H) performs when I get hands-on fourth dimension.

Below you'll find a spec comparison between the ii Galaxy S5 variants, and the three principal Galaxy S4 variants, including the Snapdragon 800-powered i9506 which was released several months after the original variants.

Specs Galaxy S5 G900F Milky way S5 G900H Milky way S4 i9506 Galaxy S4 i9505 Galaxy S4 i9500
Series Milky way S5 Milky way S4
SoC Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC Exynos 5422 Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 Snapdragon 600
APQ8064		 Exynos 5410
CPU 4x Krait 400 @ two.45 GHz 4x ARM Cortex-A15 @ 2.i GHz + 4x ARM Cortex-A17 @ 1.5 GHz 4x Krait 400 @ two.26 GHz 4x Krait 300 @ one.7 GHz 4x ARM Cortex-A15 @ ane.vi GHz + 4x ARM Cortex-A17 @ i.2 GHz
GPU Adreno 330
@ 578 MHz		 ARM Republic of mali-T628
@ 695 MHz		 Adreno 330
@ 450 MHz		 Adreno 320
@ 400 MHz		 PowerVR SGX544MP3
@ 480 MHz
Memory 2 GB dual-channel
LPDDR3 @ 933 MHz		 2 GB
dual-channel
LPDDR3
@ 800 MHz		 2 GB
dual-channel
LPDDR3
@ 600 MHz		 2 GB
dual-channel
LPDDR3
@ 800 MHz
Storage sixteen/32 GB internal + microSD
Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/one thousand/n/ac
Bluetooth 4.0
LTE Category 4 None Category four Category three None
Other NFC, Infrared LED, MHL, GPS, HSPA+, 2G
Brandish 5.one" 1080p Super AMOLED v.0" 1080p Super AMOLED
Battery 10.78 Wh (two,800 mAh) ix.88 Wh (2,600 mAh)
Photographic camera 16 MP 1/2.6" sensor with f/two.2 lens 13 MP 1/3.06" sensor with f/2.2 lens

At times I experience similar a broken record talking about the performance of a flagship handset like the Galaxy S5. Basic tasks – including opening and endmost applications, multi-tasking, powering on the phone, and using uncomplicated applications – are extremely fast to perform on the powerful Snapdragon 801. This is essentially the aforementioned story every bit we've seen from the last generation; lag is a thing of the past on high-end ARM devices.

The power of the Snapdragon 801 does assist with more intense tasks such equally spider web browsing, on-the-fly epitome editing and processing, likewise as gaming. The Adreno 330 GPU is very capable of rendering the latest games at 1080p without much difficulty, although loftier-stop titles like One thousand Theft Machine: San Andreas proceed to be too intense to run at their maximum graphics settings. This is merely one example though, and the majority of games volition run without a hitch on the Galaxy S5.

Surprise! The Samsung Galaxy S5 doesn't cheat on benchmarks. That'south right, at that place'southward no CPU clock speed boosting in certain applications, no aggressive governors, and no GPU speed increases. Massive kudos to Samsung hither for getting out of the dodgy cheating game, making these following results more than valid.

In general performance benchmarks, the Milky way S5 performs as expected: on-par with the Snapdragon 801-powered HTC One M8, slightly ahead of Snapdragon 800 devices, and nearly twice as fast equally Snapdragon 600 devices.

Once again, in graphics tests the Milky way S5 performed as I expected, with a slightly less aggressive governor resulting in lower scores (and likely better battery life). Below you'll find NAND benchmarks, where the S5 performs passably too.

The Galaxy S5 supports Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/one thousand/due north/air conditioning with 2x2 MIMO, making it easy to stream content to and from the handset. I had no problem streaming 1080p content from my home media server over my 5 GHz wireless N network, and obviously you'll get better performance if you have an 802.11ac router. The S5 is as well loaded with Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS+GLONASS and NFC, and all of them work well.

LTE Category 4, supporting downloads of up to 150 Mbps and uploads of 50 Mbps, is included as part of the Snapdragon 801 SoC alongside HSPA+ and 2G bands. On the software front, Samsung has packed in a Download Booster feature, which downloads files over thirty MB in size using both Wi-Fi and LTE. This is a handy characteristic if y'all want to speed upward large downloads, and seems to piece of work well, although exist careful not to go over your data limit on LTE with information technology enabled.

Storage-wise the Galaxy S5 comes with either xvi GB or 32 GB of internal NAND, complemented by a microSD bill of fare slot that can take cards up to 128 GB in size. In the sixteen GB model, effectually 11 GB is available to utilise out of the box, so if yous want to store a lot of music or videos on the device, you'll probably want to brand use of the microSD card slot.

The S5 features a micro-USB three.0 port behind the bottom cover, which normally facilitates much faster transfers to and from the internal storage. Interestingly, unlike with the Galaxy Note 3, there is barely any performance reward when using USB 3.0. I'm not quite sure why this is the case, although I did notice at that place's no USB 3.0 setting to enable, which on the Note three was critical to achieving USB 3.0 speeds.

Maybe the lack of a USB 3.0 cable in the Galaxy S5's box is Samsung saying they know USB 3.0 performance isn't nifty. Who knows?