Nokia Lumia 830 Review

CPU Performance

Performance is where the “flagship” name falls apart. The internals of the Lumia 830 are essentially identical to that of the Lumia 635, and that model is cheaper. The Lumia 830 does have 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of onboard storage, but the MSM8926 cannot be the SoC in any device labeled as a flagship.

The Lumia 930 with the 2.2 GHz quad-core Krait CPU is very fast, and changes the way you expect Windows Phone to operate. Microsoft has done a great job with the UI and animations of Windows Phone to make them fast and without the jitter of some platforms, even on low end hardware. But that does not help in-app performance, nor the app loading times. The Lumia 930 was a breath of fresh air in regards to performance of a Windows Phone, and unfortunately the Lumia 830 lags behind.

To test CPU performance, we use some standard web based benchmarks as well as BaseMark OSII from Rightware. This gives us a comparison across operating systems. For the graphs, I have tried to get a representation of devices that might be shopped against the Lumia 830 in order to keep the graphs reasonable and meaningful, but if you are curious to see how it compares against any other device we have tested, please check out our benchmark comparison pages in Bench.

Performance is poor across the board. The Snapdragon 400 with quad-core Cortex A7 just cannot compete with many other phones in a similar price range.

Next up, we will take a look at the GPU performance. This is measured with Basemark X 1.1 and GFXBench numbers, and with a caveat – the current GFXBench version is 3.0, but only 2.7 is available on Windows Phone at the moment (3.0 is listed as coming soon) so we do not have as large of a list of comparable devices for the GPU results.

GPU Performance

The Lumia 630 with only 512 MB of RAM is unable to install GFXBench, but we can still compare the 830 to the 930, 1020, and a couple of other devices. The Adreno 305 GPU in the Snapdragon 400 can be compared to the Adreno 225 in the Lumia 1020, but regardless is quite a step down from the Snapdragon 800’s Adreno 330 GPU found in the Nexus 5 and Lumia 930. Apple has consistently pushed for a better GPU in their products and that shows again here even though these are not the current flagship models from Cupertino.

The biggest disappointment with the Lumia 830 is performance. The Lumia 1020 outperforms the 830 in Basemark X 1.1, but both devices fall well short of the Snapdragon 800 Nexus 5. With a device marketed as an “affordable flagship” it would have been nice to see a step up in performance here. The Snapdragon 600 for sure seems like it would have been a perfect fit to fill out the Lumia lineup.