The Huawei Honor 5X Review: Mid-Range Meets Maturity
by Brandon Chester on February 29, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Android
- Snapdragon 616
- Honor 5X
System Performance
At this point, the performance of Snapdragon 616 is pretty much a known quantity. Nothing much has changed from Snapdragon 615. On paper, you have Snapdragon 615 with a peak clock speed of 1.7GHz on one of the Cortex A53 clusters, and a peak clock speed of 1.0GHz on the other. In practice, we've seen other implementations where one cluster goes up to 1.5GHz and the other goes to 1.11GHz. Snapdragon 616 in the Honor 5X is essentially the same as those implementations, with a small 90MHz boost on the second cluster.
Since pretty much all of Qualcomm's mid range and low end SoCs act as a quad core A53 CPU in practice, the differences in performance tend to come from the small frequency differences between them, as well as software differences from device to device. With the Honor 5X one would hope that it's able to match the Huawei P8 Lite for performance, and pull ahead of the 2015 Moto E and Moto G models by a small margin.
In our web browser benchmarks I would say that the Honor 5X performs right around where you'd expect. Scores are very close to the Moto G (2015) and the P8 Lite, which is where they should be when one considers that all the devices are basically bound by the performance of a single Cortex A53 core running at 1.4 to 1.5GHz. The gap in Octane does strike me as interesting though, as that Snapdragon 615 ran at the same 1.5GHz frequency as the Honor 5X's Snapdragon 616. Unfortunately, I no longer have the P8 Lite to take a look at this.
In pretty much all of BaseMark OS II's tests the Honor 5X is very close to the P8 Lite. The web test shows a larger gap between the two, with the Moto G actually performing closer to the P8 Lite than the Honor 5X does. Where the Honor 5X really pulls away from Snapdragon 400 series devices is the graphics performance sub test. Adreno 405 is simply much faster than Adreno 305/306 which we see in the Snapdragon 400 series SoCs, and that's just one of the benefits you get when paying the premium to move up from the $100-150 price bracket.
The Honor 5X doesn't make as strong of a showing in PCMark as it does in our web tests and BaseMark OS II. It ends up sitting behind the Moto G in all but one test, and often by a noticeable margin. Once again we see that there's a gap with web browsing performance, which in light of the similar gaps in Octane and BaseMark's web test makes me wonder if there's something on the software side reducing performance compared to Motorola's fairly "stock" firmware. One thing to note is that Huawei has addressed the problems they were having with the writing sub test, and we haven't been seeing the triple digit scores of devices like the P8 Lite for some time now.
Apart from the curious case of the Zenfone 2, Snapdragon 615/616 offers the best performance that you're going to get in a $200 smartphone. The Honor 5X does appear to have some odd reductions in web browsing performance compared to other Snapdragon 410 and 615 smartphones, including Huawei's own P8 Lite, but it's difficult to say exactly what could be causing this beyond it probably being something different in the software between all these devices.
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blzd - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link
The key difference being you can actually buy a Honor 5x device for it's MSRP with a valid warranty. It even supports North American carriers, quite the selling feature if you ask me.It's easy to compare Xiaomi phones by price only and ignore all the other factors that make it a non-choice for 99% of North Americans.
mmsmsy - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
I don't know how this is a no choice for North Americans or any other? The reception is there, You can surf the web no problem. Both of my parents have Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 for a month now and they live in Chicago. I have it in England and 4G reception as well. About the warranty... I prefer to buy cheaper a better all-round phone and wait a month or two for replacement if something happens, which never happened for me. Lucky, but also my phones rarely break... never to be precise actually.LukaP - Saturday, March 5, 2016 - link
Not everyone in the world is a north american ;) Here in europe we can get xiaomi for a very decent price with warranty, and have LTE connectivity.Mikuni - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
inb4 $300 in Europe.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
WHO CARES if this thing has a metal back? it's going to go into a case either way. Id rather see more competent internals than a "premium" back.mmsmsy - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
Well, I do since I would never put my phone in a case to make it a chunky brick. I see no point in damaging the feel in hand and overall ergonomics with a case, since I take good care of my devices.Sunbya - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link
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ViperVisor - Saturday, March 5, 2016 - link
Big disagreement with this..."Huawei also includes some features like the ability to quick launch apps when you scan a certain finger, but I think this is completely overcomplicating the entire interaction. On top of that, the scanner is quite small and the position of it makes it difficult to use with any finger other than your index finger, so I don't see that feature as being very useful."
It's a great feature I use all the time. Picking it up and placing on the sensor my Pointer or Middle of my left hand Unlocks and pops open Pandora or Metal App. Pick up and hold the phone with my left hand and scan my right pointer finger at a right angle to the sensor *because that is how I registered the fingerprint* opens up Twitter.
And I still got 2 more prints I need to decide on what to use for.
Plus the back touchscreen type little features it allows. Back Button, Home Button, Shortcut menu pull-down.
jacksonjacksona - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
welcome toW_W_W_._a_j_k_o_b_e_s_h_o_e_s._C_O_M
n i k e $38
gggggggggg
sany666 - Monday, March 28, 2016 - link
How is google maps performance & gps accuracy?? as it lacks gravitation sensor and doesnt support beidou