A question we get asked a lot here at PC Pro is “What’s the fastest smartphone?” This is where we hope to answer that exact question once and for all.
Working out the fastest smartphone isn’t a simple task; you can’t simply time how fast a device turns on or how long it takes to load a webpage and expect to conclusively claim the winner to be the fastest smartphone of 2014. Instead we’ve adopted a more measured approach; each time a high-end smartphone comes in for review, we run a variety of benchmarks and then painstakingly compare the scores across different handsets.
To get the most reliable indication of performance, we use several different benchmarks – each focuses on different areas of the smartphone. To ascertain raw CPU performance, the benchmarking tools we use are the Sunspider and Peacekeeper browser benchmarks (we’ll be adding all the Peacekeeper results in a future update), and Geekbench 3’s suite of single- and multi-core benchmarks. For gaming, we run GFXBench’s T-Rex HD (onscreen) benchmark, which is a demanding 3D benchmark designed to push smartphones’ hardware to its limits.
Fastest smartphone 2014: SunSpider benchmarks
SunSpider is a benchmark that tests your smartphone and its chosen browsers’ ability to read core JavaScript language. It’s primarily a single-threaded benchmark, so that means it only uses one CPU core – there’s no benefit to having multiple CPU cores here.
For the purpose of this test we ran the SunSpider 1.0.2 JavaScript benchmark on each’s devices default browser and recorded the overall score. The result is the time taken to complete the test in milliseconds, so the lower the score, the better the performance.
1.
Apple iPhone 6
SunSpider score: 347ms
2.
SunSpider score: 348.9ms
3.
SunSpider score: 391ms
4.
SunSpider score: 404ms
5.
SunSpider score: 404ms
6.
SunSpider score: 590ms
7.
SunSpider score: 591ms
8.
SunSpider score: 692.4ms
9.
SunSpider score: 707ms
10.
SunSpider score: 718ms
Fastest smartphone 2014: Geekbench 3
Geekbench 3 combines a series of different individual tests designed to stretch every bit of a smartphone’s CPU to its limits, and it presents the result as an overall numeric score. Geekbench 3 asks your smartphone to carry out 22 different tasks that fall into the three categories of: Integer Workloads, Floating Point Workloads and Memory Workloads – demanding stuff, in other words.
Take a look at the Primate support website to discover what each individual workload entails.
Unlike SunSpider, Geekbench 3 tests both the single- and multi-core performance of your processor, and higher scores indicate better performance.
Geekbench 3 (single-core)
1.
Apple iPhone 6
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 1631
2.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 1628
3.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 1400
4.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 984
5.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 957
6.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 937
7.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 915
8.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 829
9.
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 700
10.
Motorola Moto X
Geekbench 3 (single-core) score: 682
Geekbench 3 (multi-core)
1.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2960
2.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2922
3.
Apple iPhone 6
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2913
4.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2843
5.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2713
6.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2693
7.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2437
8.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 2205
9.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 1806
10.
Geekbench 3 (multi-core) score: 1769
Fastest smartphone 2014: GFXbench 2.7 – T-Rex HD, onscreen (fps)
GFXBench is a cross-platform benchmarking suite that tests the graphics performance, render quality and power consumption of mobile devices. The score is presented as an average framerate in fps (frames per second), and this gives a reliable indication of a device’s pixel-pushing and gaming capabilities. #
We’ll also be adding the battery test results in a future update to this article – GFXBench’s battery test projects a phone’s gaming stamina by looping the T-Rex HD test for half an hour and estimating the total runtime.
1.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 52fps
2.
Apple iPhone 6
GFXbench 2.7 score: 51fps
3.
Apple iPhone 5s
GFXbench 2.7 score: 37fps
4.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 34.9fps
5.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 29.3fps
6.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 29fps
7.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 27.9
8.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 26fps
9.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 24fps
10.
GFXbench 2.7 score: 20fps
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