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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Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
Here at AnandTech we post objective and reproducible benchmarks, this includes the battery test.Of course the phone will last 3-4 days if you use it lightly, but this all depends on your personal usage, your environment, the brightness of the screen and a plethora of other variables.
Bondurant - Friday, December 5, 2014 - link
Interesting to note also that phonearena's battery test results puts Mate 7 to be better than Note 4HUAWEI ASCEND MATE7 9h 3 min (Excellent)
SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 4 8h 43 min (Excellent)
SONY XPERIA Z3 9h 29 min (Excellent)
HUAWEI ASCEND MATE 2 4G 11h 26 min (Excellent)
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 8, 2014 - link
The Mate 7 also leads the Note 4 in our tests, but only by 12%. Considering the Note 4 powers a QHD screen and has 900mAh higher battery capacity, means that the Mate 7 is much less efficient.Ethos Evoss - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
because they like slagging chhinese mobiles and they ar isheeps so they dont want look bad bcos they own all iphones..Bondurant - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
With regards to the UI, you mentioned the theme also customized the buit in apps, but if you notice carefully even by a basic change of the wallpaper, the whole UI and in built apps cleverly adapts to the color of the wallpaper in an elegant way. I love that aspect on the Emui3.0 and is way advanced then the amateurish theme implementation to come on Samsung.There are a plenty of other aspects you UI you didn't mention, like swiping down from anywhere in homescreen you get a indepth search option, or the double click vol down on screen off for 0.6 second quick shot photo or the pretty gallery interface and other minor aspects like the addition of a button on navigation bar to bring down notification panel, their one hand UI unique implementation of moving keypad to a side by motion gesture, long press of multitask navigation button to switch quick between last two used apps (they have also added split screen functionality in their latest update of Emui3.0 in China).
Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
EmUI 3.0 has a huge amount of features like the one you mentioned, but I can't allocate several pages just to mention every small feature found in the phone. Things like the configurable navigation buttons are for example visible on my screenshots, and much more if you look at the UI gallery.Hrel - Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - link
"5.9” Stopped reading.Stupid phablets, can I get a 5" phone again? PLEASE?!
Ethos Evoss - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
yeah get honor 6Arbie - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
Especially on a big-ticket item like this, I see a non-replaceable battery as a major negative. I don't mean non-swappable; I mean not user-replaceable at all.There are years of experience with such things by now, especially among the folks on this forum. What are people doing when their tablets or high-end phones won't charge anymore and they can't replace the battery themselves? Send it in to the manufacturer? Throw away a $500 item? Are there reliable US third-parties that do it quickly and cheaply?
spixel - Saturday, December 6, 2014 - link
So did you actually do a real gaming test on this phone, or just basemark? Because I don't play basemark and neither does anyone else.You should put more emphasis on the real life performance of the phone and not results from benchmarks.