The Huawei Ascend Mate 7 Review
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 2, 2014 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Ascend Mate 7
- HiSilicon
GPU Performance
The graphics processing unit in the Kirin 925 remains unchanged from the one in the Kirin 920. It's the same ARM Mali T628MP4 running at 600MHz. What did change though, is the software. HiSilicon no longer employs such an aggressive GPU governor logic for the DVFS scaling, but adopted this time a more linear approach that scales from one frequency to the next, making it much less aggressive than the one found in the Honor 6.
In 3DMark 1.2 Unlimited, we see no change compared to the Honor 6, as one would expect. The Physics score, which is dominantly CPU-bound, is more or less also unchanged. The Physics score here is rather low because the GTS mechanism limits the load onto the A7 scores, which have less performance headroom than the A15 cores. I don't see this as too much of a problem in real-world usage as the A7 cores should be able to handle most existing games without much issue, and it's in my opinion even a good thing as it brings down platform power down by quite a bit to avoid using the A15 cores.
Checking in on BaseMark X 1.1, the Mali continues to be underwhelming. The MP4 configuration of the T628 is simply not enough to be able to compete with Qualcomm and Imagination's current high-end GPUs.
In GFXBench 3.0, the Mali is again dragging its feet and is barely capable of competing here. A lack of fill-rate performance is what is limiting it in the T-Rex benchmark, and a bottleneck in ALU power is what is stopping the Mali from performing better in the Manhattan test.
The biggest change I've seen between the Mate 7 and the Honor 6 is the way the GPU throttles. I've mentioned that I've had a hard time to get the Honor 6's GPU to throttle at all, and thus it performed quite well in our performance degradation metric. The Mate 7 seems to have changed its thermal policies and brings with it one of the worst scores we've every seen. It throttles very fast and limits itself to roughly half the frequency, resulting in only 8.8fps from the 15.8fps instant performance score. The result is that the Mate 7 performs much better in the GPU battery test, but before we get to that, let's characterize the screen of the Mate 7 so we can get a good notion of what we should expect in terms of battery life.
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GTRagnarok - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The only interesting thing to me is the fingerprint scanner. Samsung should get rid of their heart-rate sensor and put one of these scanners in its place.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Andrei, I've been experiencing a significant amount of light bleed whenever I use black backgrounds on my Ascend Mate 7. The problem is located on the left side where the SIM and microSD are located. Have you noticed any similar issues?Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
My unit sports virtually no light bleed - the least I've seen on any LCD screen and why I was also impressed with the blacks of this IPS-Neo screen.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Hmmm…I received another one in the mail today. Both have pretty bad light bleed problems. I'm thinking it's a manufacturing or design problem that happens often. Here they are next to an iPhone showing the same black wallpaper.http://i61.tinypic.com/2jb1729.jpg
http://i61.tinypic.com/imv51y.jpg
http://i60.tinypic.com/142603k.jpg
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Wow that looks bad. My unit is uniformely dark. This unit was handed out by Huawei at the official release so it might not be a representation of full production models.DestroyThaNet - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Dang, how disappointing. Thanks for your input, Andrei.Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
hey man which pone u won ?? i bet iphone :DDDzodiacfml - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
Terrible especially considering the cosst of this thing.johnny_boy - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
The Honor 6 is better if you don't need a huge screen and don't mind the plastic housing at significantly cheaper pricing. In my 3 weeks experience with the Honor 6, I too haven't noticed any oerformance issues with flash memory performance. But I still wish they would use some slightly higher quality stuff. Since I don't game, this phone has performed like a beast. 3GB RAM is definitely a new minimum for me, especially as a Firefox with adblock user.sandman74 - Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - link
I would never trust this brand. Too closely aligned with the Chinese government .. and whilst China may be "the factories of the world", I can't help but think of China as a stealthy enemy of the state hell bent on taking over the world !As for the phone .. It's a piece of over priced junk with the odd glimmer of innovative software and I think your review concludes that. But sadly they , along with other low price China brands are going to shift millions of android phones due to low prices which even Samsung can't compete with.
Hopefully the more people become aware of their phones being junk tech, the less they will sell... in any country.