Performance: Exynos five Octa 5430

The internal hardware of the Galaxy Alpha is a familiar story: Samsung has produced two models, one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, and one with a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5430 SoC. Both models come with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage, plus the usual connectivity features including Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/thousand/north/ac, GPS+GLONASS, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.

The Snapdragon 801 model uses an MSM8974AC SoC, which packs a two.45 GHz quad-core Krait 400 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 578 MHz, a dual-channel LPDDR3 controller providing 14.ix GB/s of bandwidth, and Category 4 LTE. I've spoken in length near the Snapdragon 801 in previous smartphone reviews, and then it'south no longer an exciting new SoC.

The more exciting version of the Milky way Alpha packs the Exynos five Octa 5430, a new bit from Samsung that (and then far) has only been used in this device. It's an upgrade on the Exynos 5422 used in the Galaxy S5, simply doesn't use the new 64-bit ARMv8 architecture of the Exynos seven Octa 5433 found in the Milky way Annotation four. In other words, this is yet a 32-scrap only chip.

The Exynos 5430 is the start flake from Samsung to exist built using a 20nm HKMG manufacturing procedure, the very aforementioned process used for the Note iv's Exynos 5433. This ways we can expect ameliorate energy efficiency compared to previous Exynos processors, which is of import for the Blastoff with its small battery. It'south as well a step ahead of Qualcomm, whose latest SoCs (the Snapdragon 805 and 801) are even so 28nm.

The 5430 comes with 4 ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores at one.8 GHz paired with iv Cortex-A7 CPU cores clocked at i.3 GHz in a big.Piddling configuration with global task scheduling. The A15's clock speed has been reduced by 100 MHz compared to the Galaxy S5's Exynos 5422, though the GPU is more than powerful: it's a Mali-T628MP6 clocked slightly higher at 600 MHz.

Also included with the Exynos 5430 is a dual-channel LPDDR3 controller clocked at 1066 MHz, delivering 17.0 GB/s of bandwidth. Every bit at that place is no congenital-in cellular connectivity with any of Samsung'south current Exynos SoCs, the 5430 is paired with Intel'south XMM7260 modem that provides Category six LTE. At this point in time you lot won't benefit from the faster LTE standard as most countries haven't deployed the relevant technology just yet, but it's skillful hereafter proofing.

For this review I received the Exynos 5430 model, which is splendid every bit I have already performed many benchmarks on Snapdragon 801 devices. If y'all want to decide how the Snapdragon model performs, cheque the benchmarks below for the Milky way S5 (Snapdragon) which packs an identically-clocked Snapdragon 801. If you're more curious about the Exynos model, the benchmarks for the Alpha will be more relevant to you.

In our CPU-bound benchmarks, specifically those which are run in the browser, the Blastoff performs uncommonly well, beating out both variants of the Note 4. These results are surprising, considering the CPU cores are supposedly more powerful in the Annotation iv, but were consistent and repeatable. Information technology'southward not a browser version difference either, which left me puzzled.

In the CPU benchmarks not run in the browser, the Exynos 5430 performed around same level as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801. This is good news for buyers of the Alpha: there is no significant advantage to getting the Exynos model over the Snapdragon when it comes to CPU-bound performance. Every bit expected, the device is polish and snappy to use in basically all situations.

The Alpha is an interesting handset considering it has a monstrously powerful GPU paired with a lower-than-usual 720p brandish resolution. This leads to the SoC recording impressive onscreen performance results, which interpret into solid frame rates in games, higher than what yous'd get if the aforementioned SoC was paired to a 1080p display.

The stiff onscreen performance is noticeable in some intense games: in Grand Theft Car: San Andreas, for example, the game is hands playable on well-nigh-maximum settings; something which is not possible on handsets with higher brandish resolutions.

The raw performance of the GPU in the Exynos 5430 is college than GPU in the Exynos 5422, which corresponds with how the Mali-T628MP6 is clocked college in the 5430. It falls below the Snapdragon 801'south Adreno 330, though the gap has closed between the 2 SoCs since the launch of the Galaxy S5. Based on these operation numbers the Exynos 5430 is capable of gaming at 1080p, and certainly so for 720p gaming.

One thing to note about our benchmarks that I performed to a higher place is that they correspond to the height performance that the SoC can give. In real-earth situations it'southward unlikely that yous will consistently see peak performance, and that's because the Milky way Alpha aggressively throttles the SoC after about two minutes of employ. The Alpha throttles back so much that after five minutes of intense 3D gaming the SoC will be delivering effectually half the operation that it was at the outset; inappreciably an ideal situation.

I suspect that this is due to both thermal constraints (the Blastoff tin get quite hot during use), and battery concerns. Once more, the Blastoff has a minor battery and throttling the SoC tin help prolong its life.

The Galaxy Blastoff has high quality NAND soldered to the mainboard, delivering speeds slightly below the Snapdragon Galaxy S5. 32 GB of storage can exist a bit limiting – especially if you want to copy across a large media library – considering there's no microSD menu slot, but at to the lowest degree you're not stuck with a paltry xvi GB.

I had a few issues with establishing reliable LTE connections, particularly afterward moving abroad from a Wi-Fi signal. Occasionally it would take a very long time to regain a 4G data connection, sometimes requiring a device restart to work properly. I also wasn't overly impressed with signal strength, which was often lower than other devices I've used in the same areas. This is more likely due to the handset's design, rather than the Intel XMM7260 modem.

Other aspects of the Alpha's connectivity performed as expected, and when LTE was working reliably, I managed to go decent download speeds on Australia's fast 4G networks.