The Samsung Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ Review
by Joshua Ho on October 2, 2015 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
While subjective judgments of performance may be possible to make when the delta is significant, when the gap gets increasingly close within the range of perceivable performance differences it becomes important to rely on more precise and accurate methods of measuring the overall performance of the mobile device. For the most part, when we’re discussing system performance the single biggest factor is often the SoC, which makes sense given that an SoC contains the CPU, GPU, video encode and decode blocks, memory bus, and DSPs. There are other aspects of the device that determine the overall perception of performance and things that can have a meaningful effect on performance, but the SoC is often the gating factor.
In order to test this we run mobile devices through our standard suite of benchmarks. In the case of the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+, there shouldn’t be too many surprises given the commonality in components with the Galaxy S6.
If you guessed that performance in these benchmarks would be similar to the Galaxy S6, you'd be right. Given the shared SoC and general commonality in components performance remains as high as it is with the Galaxy S6. In some cases we see improvements, likely a combination of changes to Chrome and changes to areas like the frequency governor to respond faster to changes in load. It's probably fair to say that the Exynos 7420 will continue to be the best SoC for Android mobile devices in 2015, although it's likely that we'll see significantly increased competition for 2016.
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kspirit - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Display and battery numbers, etc are on par with the iPhone 6 which is a year old now. The 6S looks like it'll wreck this thing.RMSe17 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Except for the GFX battery, judging by how quickly the 6 ran out.kaidenshi - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Maybe I just don't use my phone enough, but typically at the end of the day I still have around 40-50% battery life on my iPhone 6. My previous device was a Moto G, which was supposedly great with battery life but it would die on me around dinner time even on a light use day.Of course, I'm actually getting work done during the day instead of screwing around on Facebook or Bejeweled clones for 8+ hours at work, so there's that.
LoganPowell - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
Both phones are good. But between the two, the Galaxy S6 Edge is way better receiving a higher review (see http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-phones/ for instance...) than S5.farhadd - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
The reason the iphone 6 runs down fast is because it doesn't throttle the frame rate. It doesn't have to throttle because the metal enclosure can dissipate the heat efficiently enough to keep up.Oyeve - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Isnt the display on the 6 and 6s basically the same?close - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
iPhone 6s has basically the same battery lifetime in real life experience because the battery is a bit smaller. So I really think "wreck" is a way to strong word.tipoo - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
The 6S has nearly identical display and battery properties (slightly worse) as the 6...?kspirit - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
It has presumably has a very fast chipset and storage though. Let's see how the camera stacks up to this, as well. I love how they designed the Note 5 but I'm so hesitant to go back to Samsung software after reading all those threads about people running into issues, on reddit :(abrogan - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
In my family, 2 S4's died quickly after being purchased. My brother has a perfect Note 4, but my neighbor's sister bought an S6. Even after a fresh reformat, it always has the "google play services has stopped responding" error. No way to fix as far as I can tell... it's useless for her, and all the money wasted... My Nexus never has any software bugs, so I'm sticking with Nexus myself. I've had 3 perfect Nexus phones, so I'll buy another Nexus. Not very scientific, but....