The ZTE Nubia Z9 is powered by a Snapdragon 810 chipset - the best that Qualcomm currently has, even if it's troubled by heating issues. It houses four Cortex-A57 cores (2GHz) and four Cortex-A53 cores (1.5GHz) and Adreno 430.
The GPU has to push "only" 1080p (nearly half the pixels of QHD), so we expect some great gaming scores. However, the chipset definitely gets steamy with heavy usage.
As some makers (like LG) have opted for the Snapdragon 808, which often gets close in terms of performance while keeping cooler. Still, in total performance the two extra A57 cores give the Nubia Z9 and other S810-powered devices (like the One M9) a performance edge in some multi-core setups.
Geekbench 3 places the Nubia Z9 ahead of the LG G4, but Basemark OS 2.0 rates it lower.
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For whole system performance, AnTuTu 5 places the Z9 above many current flagships other than the Galaxy S6. Samsung's in-house chipset has a manufacturing process advantage that allows it to take the same CPU core setup and push it higher.
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Qualcomm fumbled the CPU section, but the new Adreno 430 GPU is on point. Measured on level ground (1080p offscreen) it beats the Mali-T760MP8 in Samsung's Exynos. ZTE even squeezed out better performance than HTC managed.
On-screen the performance is essentially identical since the ZTE Nubia Z9 uses a 1080p screen, unlike the QHD units on the S6 edge and G4.
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Basemark X leans towards the Samsung, but the Nubia is still one of the best-performing phones in that chart.
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So far, so good but we come upon a trouble area for the Nubia Z9. It comes with the QQ Browser (more on that later), which just isn't as highly optimized as the Android or iOS browsers. We'd recommend installing a different one for a better browsing experience.
Kraken, which measures JavaScript performance, gives a very low score, far below what the chipset achieves with optimized browsers. The Browsermark result is not great either.
Lower is better
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The ZTE Nubia Z9 provides true flagship performance for general app usage, gaming especially is a strong suit. The web browsing was a letdown, but we tried Firefox which greatly improved the score - more befitting of the fast chipset.
As expected, Snapdragon 810 gets steamy under sustained load - more than the Samsung Exynos 7420 - but not to unusable levels.
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