The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review
by Joshua Ho on September 17, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
CPU and General Performance
By now, the choice of SoC has become a major focus in every smartphone. While it may not be clear how to use more compute with every generation, it’s generally accepted that stronger CPU and GPU performance is better, especially if it means that there is a power advantage in race to sleep tasks. In the case of the new Moto X we see a Snapdragon 801 SoC with CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz and a GPU clocked at 578 MHz. At this point, there's really not too much to talk about in this SoC as we've reviewed multiple devices with the same exact part.
Currently, our test suite relies upon a combination of browser and gaming benchmarks to get a good idea of total performance. However, it’s important to note that the Android results are only comparable to other Android phones as the stock browser will have specific optimizations that aren’t found in Chrome. We’ll start with the browser benchmarks first.
In the browser benchmarks, we see that the new Moto X falls right where we expect it to for the Snapdragon 801. It's plenty fast, and I don't expect any differences in CPU performance between Snapdragon 801 and 805 devices. This is unlikely to be a point of differentiation until Snapdragon 810 and beyond come into play. We'll take a look at Basemark OS II next, which is a general system performance benchmark.
Here, we once again see that there's not much different in terms of performance. We'll turn to the gaming benchmarks next to get a good idea of what to expect from the GPU.
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darwinosx - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
This MotoX won't be remembered by anyone.The iPhone 6 makes it a nonstarter.
2kfire - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Am I the only one that noticed the HTC E8 in some of the charts? Does that mean there's an upcoming review?!? How I'd love for that to get NAM bands...aman.agx - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
This is a bechmark review. Nowhere in quality as compared to the last year moto x review. Anyone can run benchmark and post the results.And i find it a bit hard to believe that samsung galaxy s5 running with the same soc will give better performance than a stock android phone in real life. Which leads me to think that tests here are working on individual components. Like shutting down everything else and running a browser. You dont do that in real life. So thats not a fair assessment.
Battery life also turns out different in real life where there are multiple resources vying for the battery. Nowhere that assessment.
This review seems tilted to me. New apple networking of the website trying to kill the most eligible competition? Its possible.
Impulses - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
Killing background stuff is the only way to make results easily repeatable tho, and Samsung bakes in a lot of optimisation despite the bloat they also shovel in.Morawka - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
What app is that your using for GPS / GNSS accuracy? anyone?JoshHo - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
GPS Test by Chartcross.John Gordon - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Great in depth review, thank you.DeathBecomesMe - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
We've found the successor to the 2013 Moto x, and it is the iPhone 6johnny_boy - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
I still think 1080p on a 5" screen is a dumb waste. This phone should be shipping with no less than 3GB RAM (every flagship should by now) and there's no excuse for any flagship android phone not to have a microSD card slot. Also, why didn't they go with Snapdragon 805? I know the difference isn't that big a deal right now, but Amazon's 8.9" tablet is already using it.DeathBecomesMe - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
16gb and 32gb is idiotic. I have the 16 now and hover around 2 gigs free. Dear phone manufactures: most people don't have unlimited data anymore!!