The Samsung Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ Review
by Joshua Ho on October 2, 2015 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
While subjective judgments of performance may be possible to make when the delta is significant, when the gap gets increasingly close within the range of perceivable performance differences it becomes important to rely on more precise and accurate methods of measuring the overall performance of the mobile device. For the most part, when we’re discussing system performance the single biggest factor is often the SoC, which makes sense given that an SoC contains the CPU, GPU, video encode and decode blocks, memory bus, and DSPs. There are other aspects of the device that determine the overall perception of performance and things that can have a meaningful effect on performance, but the SoC is often the gating factor.
In order to test this we run mobile devices through our standard suite of benchmarks. In the case of the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy S6 edge+, there shouldn’t be too many surprises given the commonality in components with the Galaxy S6.
If you guessed that performance in these benchmarks would be similar to the Galaxy S6, you'd be right. Given the shared SoC and general commonality in components performance remains as high as it is with the Galaxy S6. In some cases we see improvements, likely a combination of changes to Chrome and changes to areas like the frequency governor to respond faster to changes in load. It's probably fair to say that the Exynos 7420 will continue to be the best SoC for Android mobile devices in 2015, although it's likely that we'll see significantly increased competition for 2016.
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lilmoe - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link
Samsung is selling Exynos to anyone willing to buy...Tech_guy - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Why weren't 6s benchmarks included? This is stupid, and misleading. You're trying to make Samsung look good. It'll embarrass the Note 5, like iPhone 6s is about 4 times the onscreen graphics performance lol. Did Samsung increase their advertising on Ananadtech.com?freeskier93 - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link
Dude chill out, these phones were released before the 6s/+. The full 6s/+ review isn't even out yet so it only makes sense.thedons1983 - Sunday, October 18, 2015 - link
What a pathetic faggot. Please don't breed, as the world has enough ill-informed morons as it is!!secretmanofagent - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
No mention at all of it dropping multitasking? This is an important question.randomlm - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
A few errors in this review,1 . At the front page, Note 4 rear camera's aperture is stated as F/2.0, it is actually F2.2
2. At the battery life page it is stated that note 4 has a "planar 20nm process". This is only true for Exynos Note 4 which has the 5433, but it appears on the front page that the Snapdragon Note 4 is being compared instead, which has a 28 nm process.
3. On the camera architecture page, the front camera's aperture of Note 4 is stated as F2.4. It should be F1.9.
4. I disagree with the line "Samsung has actually managed to implement low light image processing that's good enough to beat" ( Lightroom's noise reduction ability). Not a fair comparison. In JPEG shots, samsung has been known to always activate "night mode", which uses a sort of "image stacking" process by combining (my guess is 3) images taken in quick succession to reduce noise (and improving the SNR of an image). By using raw, only one image of shutter speed 1/7 is taken. With only 1 image worth of data to process, the lightroom processed image will definitely lose out! But your point is there, that samsung's really good at JPG processing for night photos.
Still a pretty good review, thanks.
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Thanks randomlm. I've taken care of 2 and 3. As for item #1, in my notes I have it down as 2.0, but I will get Josh to check this.beck2448 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Note 5 is awesome. Moved up from the 3. Screen is clearly the best in business including the iphone.Fast and great camera. Low light pix much better. It's a winner.
nerd1 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link
Okay now I absolutely hate anandtech reviews. THEY INTENTIONALLY OMITTED ANY COMPARISON THAT MAKE APPLE DEVICES LOOK BAD.-Display review lacks contrast and outdoor contrast (both AMOLED dominates)
-Browser benchmark uses terrible mobile chrome, not stock browser which is way better.
-Processor benchmark lacks any multithread benchmarks (like geekbench multi)
-NAND R/W results makes absolutely sense at all, compared to this http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-galaxy-s6-storage...
-Camera comparison only shows the focus lag comparison and no resolution / noise / dynamic range that actually matters
I'm really surprised to see this low level of journalism at anandtech. Why cherry pick test results to make apple device look the best? Even worse thing is that most people will take those graphs as 'unbiased and technical'
Yanic - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link
If this is the case, then this will be the last Anandtech review I ever read. Really sad.