The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 comes with a Snapdragon 400 chipset, which is not up to par with the current flagships but performed very well against last year's flagships. It packs two Krait 200 CPU cores clocked at 1.7GHz and Adreno 305 GPU, plus 1.5GB of RAM.
The Huawei Ascend Mate relies on a homebrewed chipset, the K3V2, which uses four Cortex-A9 cores at 1.5GHz and a 16-core GPU of unknown design. It has more RAM, 2GB of it. Basically, it's very similar to a Tegra 3 or Exynos 4 Quad.
Single-core performance on the Krait core is better before even accounting for the clockspeed advantage, so it's no surprise the Galaxy Mega 6.3 easily takes this round. But Android has reached a point where it can successfully leverage multiple cores.
Despite the 2:1 core count advantage of the Ascend Mate, it can't score a multithreading victory. In fact, the Galaxy Mega 6.3 pulls well ahead in Linpack and has a slim lead in Geekbench 2.
Lower is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Moving on to full system tests, AnTuTu and Quadrant, the Huawei Ascend Mate and Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 trade victories. Both are towards the bottom of the pack, but even the year-old flagship Galaxy S III has slid down in the rankings.
Higher is better
Higher is better
We're not quite sure what the GPU inside the K3V2 chipset of the Ascend Mate is, but it didn't do too hot in GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt and it failed to run 2.7 T-Rex properly (both in 1080p off-screen mode). The Mega 6.3 isn't far ahead in the Egypt benchmark, but it's on par with the Galaxy Note II and it did run the T-Rex bench.
Higher is better
While neither GPU offered playable framerate at 1080p, they were designed for 720p screens, like the ones on the Galaxy Mega 6.3 and the Ascend Mate. Here the difference in performance is almost double in favor of the Mega 6.3, which was very close to the 60fps software limit. The Huawei Ascend Mate, however, offered a 33.2fps average, meaning it dropped below the 30fps mark on several occasions.
Higher is better
Finally, we get to web performance. With an advantage in single-threaded performance, the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 easily takes the win in SunSpider. Throw in some HTML5 stuff to render and the distance to the Huawei Ascend Mate gets smaller, but it's still ahead.
Lower is better
Higher is better
Winner: It's a clear-cut win for the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3. The only time the Huawei Ascend Mate came close was in the multithreaded CPU benchmarks, but even then it wasn't very convincing.
The two phablets are quite evenly matched in the first part of our audio quality test - when attached to an active external amplifier. The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 holds a tiny advantage with its cleaner output and is also a bit louder even if both devices are average at best in that regard.
When we plugged in a pair of headphones, the gap between the two increased as the Huawei Ascend Mate allowed some intermodulation distortion to creep in, whereas the Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 remained almost perfectly clean.
Here are the results so you can see for yourselves.
Test | Frequency response | Noise level | Dynamic range | THD | IMD + Noise | Stereo crosstalk |
Huawei Ascend Mate | +0.34, -0.14 | -86.8 | 86.9 | 0.0068 | 0.023 | -84.7 |
Huawei Ascend Mate (headphones attached) | +0.42, -0.15 | -86.1 | 86.0 | 0.022 | 0.403 | -44.3 |
Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 | +0.02, -0.19 | -90.4 | 90.3 | 0.0098 | 0.015 | -91.7 |
Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 (headphones attached) | +0.16, -0.08 | -91.9 | 90.7 | 0.011 | 0.030 | -53.8 |
Huawei Ascend Mate frequency response
You can learn more about the whole testing process here. Winner: The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 snatches the victory here with its slightly cleaner output and somewhat louder output. The differences are pretty minor, though, and many won't be able to detect them with a naked ear.
Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 frequency response
Tip us
1.7m 126k
RSS
EV
Merch
Log in I forgot my password Sign up