The "Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders" vs ROG5 Preview: Branded vs Original
by Andrei Frumusanu on August 16, 2021 10:00 AM ESTBattery Life - A Horrible Downgrade
Battery life for the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is interesting for one fact alone: Qualcomm and ASUS’ decision to equip the device with a much smaller 4000mAh battery. While that figure alone isn’t particularly small for a regular device, the industry has seen steadily growing battery capacities over the years. 4000mAh is actually the same size battery that ASUS is employing in the small form-factor Zenfone 8, and the ROG Phone 5 has a massive 6000mAh unit, so naturally we’re expecting quite a massive difference in the battery performance.
As expected, the 60Hz web browsing scores of the SSI are just horrible and massively disappointing. At 10.38 hours runtime, this is only 62% of the battery life presented by the ROG Phone 5 under the same test conditions. The SSI’s battery is 66% of the sibling device’s size, and the further difference could be explained by the more aggressive performance characteristics of the SSI.
At 120Hz, which I opted for instead of the 144Hz maximum of the phone just for apples-to-apples purposes, the device ended up as the shortest lasting high refresh phone we’ve recently tested. At only 60.9% of the ROG Phone 5’s battery life, we’re seeing two polar opposites in terms of the runtime in our chart.
In PCMark, it’s again the same story. Besides the Exynos 2100 regular small S21, the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders ends up as the worst performing device in recent testing.
Overall, the SSI is just a perplexing phone. For the little weight difference and 0.4mm thickness differences, we’re getting a phone that’s really only less than two-thirds of the ROG Phone 5 when it comes to the battery life. This puts it amongst one of the worst performing Snapdragon 888 devices on the market when it comes to battery life, which is abysmal.
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Spunjji - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Willing to bet that the image samples on that DXOMark review won't gel with the official rating...Kangal - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Came here to say the same thing.I expect QC to be worse than ASUS in photography, or at the best; not much better.
The ASUS RoG 5, gets so much right that it is one of the best phones of 2021. My only suggestions would be to make it smaller and lighter, better ergonomics, durability upgrades, perhaps IP68 certification, more available/affordable, and have better software support (AndroidOne? Bootloader?). Overall, its great and only outdone by the Sony phones.
s.yu - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Actually they may well do, I think they're cherry-picking the samples in recent years, at least for certain devices. Perception could be manipulated by manually discarding samples with minor focusing errors, vibrations, AWB issues, questionable lighting etc. and that could matter more than the actual performance of the device.Of course anybody could do that, but it's DXO we're talking about.
Mil0 - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link
Review is posted https://www.dxomark.com/smartphone-for-snapdragon-...It seems like dxomark reviewed the phone themselves, and they did find some issues with the algorithms.
BAllen - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Most people don't know that the Adreno 660 is just a 5nm overclocked Adreno 650. They both have the same 1,024 ALU count and design. The Adreno 650/+ runs at 540MHz-670MHz depending on the phone. The Adreno 660 runs at 840MHz. With these SOC's performance scales almost perfect. Each 100MHz clock bump gives the GPU a 100GFlops of FP32 compute. The Adreno 650/+ is rated at 1.2TFlops-1.38TFlops FP32. The Adeno 660 is rated at 1.78TFlops FP32. So you see the picture. And yes i said TFlops. Phones now have 1Teraflop+ GPU's. What's even better is a SD865 device with an Adreno 650 that holds a sustained clock can basically match a overheating, throttling 660.BAllen - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Also, the ROG 5's 2Vrms 3.5mm headphone jack uses the latest 32bit ESS SABRE qDAC and can push 700Ω 🎧. That with a 6000mAh battery and dual USB-C 3.1 has HDMI and MicroSD storage. So, its basically an upgrade for LG users. Though, i'm plenty happy with my modded LG v60 running A11 and Note 20 U5. The SD865/+ is all anyone would actually ever need for the next 5 years. That's why i bought 2 of each. With the v60 only costing $350-$400 new and the Note 20 UG at $600, who could pass on those deals. I got one v60 basically running at a HTPC hooked up to my LG OLED with a 512GB MicroSD loaded up.Kangal - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
It's been a while since I've looked into the iGPU performance of phones.But with figures like that, it's pretty close to the power of the XB1 and PS4. Impressive. Not to mention, it getting access to newer software/hardware features, and using a more powerful CPU, you could argue they're even closer to that mainstream-2013-benchmark. Well, that is if you actually dock the phone and give it a steady supply of electricity and use some sort of Active Cooling to regulate it.
Then you have Apple. They might actually be more powerful (slightly) than last-gen console's performance. Add the SteamDeck to the conversation, and it's a good time to be a mobile gamer.
zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
dont know whats going with Q these days. they should have Apple M1 like hardware by now but no, we get this 🤮abufrejoval - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
Looks like you're trying to get somebody fired.Just sure hope it's not you!
CyborgAlienRay - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link
I wouldn't waste $1500 on an alpha device that's not even remarkable by any means, let alone one with no 3.5mm jack or can remain cool, or have removable memory, the additional headphones are worthless for me, so what about 16GB DRAM, the fact it's got 512GB of ReadOnlyMemory is great but, still not for the additional $500. Wishy-washy camera, overheating, and complete 5G networks doesn't add up to $1400, the rest are boring stats, it even doesn't have the next gen of processors in it, which may have gone a long ways but, still not worth that. Even looks cheap, not sure if that's a Qualcomm decision or an Asus one but, someone dropped the leaded loaded iron ball on someone's head on that one for sure.