What’s the Fastest Phone? (2015)

Every year phones are getting quicker and quicker but which one is fastest? The specsare the easiest place to start. The iPhone 6 is definitely down on paper with only adual core processor and one gigabyte of RAM compared to a six core chip and three gigsof RAM on the LG G4 and a whopping eight cores on the Galaxy S6 edge. Things aren’t quiteso simple however. Kicking things off we have the graphics benchmarks. These are mostlyhelpful for measuring gaming performance but also affect how smooth the phones run in everydayuse. First off we have the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test and here all three are reasonablywell matched although the Galaxy S6 edge is the clear winner. Move over to GFXBench Manhattanand things change up slightly with the iPhone beating out the G4 in the off-screen testand easily winning over both in the on-screen test. Both the Galaxy S6 and LG G4 have TeamCrispy approved Quad HD screens that while great come with a performance penalty, thephones have to drive a lot of pixels. The iPhone needs to push less than one third asmany pixels which can give it an advantage in some situations but there’s no doubtthat the Samsung Galaxy S6 pulls out the win in the graphics department. Next let’s takea look at the processors. The Octane benchmark is a good test of CPU and browser performanceand here the Galaxy S6 edge easily wins out over the G4 and iPhone which end up beingsurprisingly close. Next we have Geekbench 3 which is a pure test of the processors. In single threaded performance the iPhone wins however the Galaxy S6 is really ableto stretch its’ legs in the multi-core part of the test. This doesn’t seem to make muchsense on the surface, the iPhone should be way less powerful. What’s going on? It mighthave a big disadvantage on paper but the iPhone actually has the most powerful CPU cores ofthe bunch. Both the G4 and Galaxy S6 take advantage of what’s known as big. LITTLEwhich pairs a set of powerful CPU cores along with less power hungry ones. This allows theweaker cores to handle most basic usage while being able to switch to the bigger cores whenyou need more performance. The G4 has only two of the more powerful A57 cores where theGalaxy S6 has four but in real use it’s rare to need four cores much less eight. Allthat tech jargon means that for most tasks the iPhone is slightly faster but having theextra cores when you need them gives the slight edge to the Galaxy S6. Having lots of performanceis great but if your battery immediately dies it’s not doing you much good. Here I turnedto the GFXBench Battery Test which loops a complex 3D scene 30 times. Here the iPhoneand Galaxy S6 come up short where the LG G4 wins out thanks to it’s bigger battery andslightly less powerful specs compared to the S6. There’s another side effect of havinga lot of power packed inside a phone and that’s heat. Not only can this make phones uncomfortableto hold but it can also hurt performance. Using a thermal camera you can see that there’sa pretty major difference in how each phone is able to cope under a gaming load. The iPhoneevenly disperses the heat at around 31 degrees Celsius which is only slightly warm to thetouch. Move over to the G4 and it tops out at 36 degrees which is warm but the heat iskept to the top making most of the phone perfectly fine. The Galaxy S6 edge is even warmer at38 degrees and this is spread throughout the phone making it slightly uncomfortable tothe touch. It might not have the most raw power but the iPhone is clearly the winnerhere. So at the end of the day how do these phones stack up? The iPhone and G4 both performwell and have advantages but it’s safe to say that the Samsung Galaxy S6 is the fastestphone out, well for now anyway.