Samsung I9105 Galaxy S II Plus preview: First look

Synthetic benchmarks

One of the major differences between the Samsung Galaxy S II Plus and the classic Galaxy S II lies in the chipsets that power the two smartphones. While both feature dual-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A9 CPUs, the Plus version has a Broadcom GPU, whereas the regular Galaxy S II employs a Mali-400MP.

Different may not always mean better, but given that the Galaxy S II Plus comes with Android 4.1.2 out of box, it should have an edge in that department over the Galaxy S II, which hase yet to be upgraded to Jelly Bean.

The BenchmarkPi single-threaded CPU calculations test lands the Galaxy S II Plus towards the bottom of the pack, but that's expected against mostly higher clocked processors. Besides it does notably better than its predecessor, so it's a pretty solid performance indeed.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  279
• HTC One S
  306
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  338
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  344
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  408
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  409
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  452
• Sony Xperia S
  536

Strangely, multi-core performance sees some altogether unimpressive results from the Galaxy S II chipset. It does markedly worse than the Exynos on the original Samsung Galaxy S II and leads us to suspect that the Linpack benchmark has its issues with 4.1.2 devices.

Linpack

Higher is better

• HTC One S
  210.0
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  196.0
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  177.1
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  126.1
• Sony Xperia S
  86.4
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  77.6
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  77.1
• HTC Sensation XE
  50.4
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  41.8

Quadrant is an altogether different story, as the Galaxy S II Plus handily beats out the Galaxy S II, and falls in just behind the quad-core devices we have tested.

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5365
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  5146
• HTC One S
  5047
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  4842
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  3542
• Samsung Galaxy Note
  3531
• Sony Xperia S
  3173
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  3053
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  2316

GLBenchmark runs offscreen at 1080p resolution - putting all our tested devices on equal footing. The Broadcom VideoCore IV HW GPU failed to beat the Mali-400MP inside the Galaxy S II, but stayed pretty close to it, nonetheless.

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  29
• Apple iPhone 5
  27
• Nexus 4
  26
• Samsung Galaxy Note II
  17
• Samsung Galaxy S III
  15
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  13
• HTC One X+
  12
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  11
• HTC One X
  9

Finally, the SunSpider and Browsermark benchmarks gave us some great results. Given all the recent Jelly Bean optimizations to the web browser this was almost expected, and we suspect the Galaxy S II will jump up closer to the Galaxy S II Plus once the imminent Jelly Bean update gets released.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  1447
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  1460
• HTC One S
  1708
• New Apple iPad
  1722
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  1757
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  1834
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  1849
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  1863
• Apple iPhone 4S
  2217
• Sony Xperia S
  2587

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• Acer CloudMobile S500
  1877
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• Samsung Galaxy S III (JB)
  1247
• Samsung Galaxy S II Plus
  1079
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  714
• Sony Xperia J
  587