For the ZUK Z1 Lenovo chose the tried and true Snapdragon 801 chipset. Once a flagship chip, it offered great performance with good battery life, though things in the high end have progressed since last year. In Z1's price range, however, it's mostly octa-core processors based on Cortex-A53 and low-power GPUs. Plus, the ZUK has 3GB of RAM, more than most of its competition. Overall, we're quite satisfied with the ZUK Z1 equipment.
Let's start with the processor - four Krait 400 cores at 2.5GHz should have the lead over Cortex-A53 cores, but as it turns out that's not the case. Basemark OS 2.0 gives it good marks for overall performance - below the OnePlus 2 and Meizu MX5, which have four powerful A57 cores and four A53s - but above the all-A53 crowd.
Single and multi-core performance is nothing spectacular though, even for this price range.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Geekbench and AnTuTu 5 are not impressed either, putting the ZUK Z1 at or near the bottom. Krait was a great core in its day, but its time has passed.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Moving on to graphics, the Adreno 330 should ace the 1080p test, though mid-range chipsets pack GPUs that are a generation ahead of it. That's Adreno 430 (OnePlus 2), Mali-T760 (Lenovo K3 Note), PowerVR G6200 (Xiaomi Redmi Note 2). These GPU names should be familiar if you've looked into the specs of current flagships.
For older games (OpenGL ES 2.0) and newer games (OpenGL ES 3.0) the GPU on the Snapdragon 801 should offer a similar performance to the newer mid-range GPUs. Only the OnePlus 2 showed competitive scores (no surprise, it uses Adreno 330's successor though at the same 1080p resolution).
Note that OpenGL ES 3.1 is not supported on the Adreno 3xx series.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Basemark X gives the ZUK Z1 fairly high scores, but puts it behind the Adreno 430-powered OnePlus 2 (because this test would account for the difference in screen resolution).
Higher is better
The Cyanogen Browser is still very new (added in CM12.1) so we decided to use Chrome for the benchmarks instead. Kraken 1.1 shows very good JavaScript performance, ZUK obviously picked a well-tuned engine.
Lower is better
General web browsing, as measured by BrowserMark 2.1, is fairly close to the modern chipsets, beating the Meizu m2 note by quite some distance, losing to the OnePlus 2 by a smaller margin.
Higher is better
To summarize, the Snapdragon 801 was a decent choice for the ZUK Z1. True, the new mid-range chipsets offer similar performance to this former flagship chipset and they even take the lead in CPU tests with their multiple cores. In the graphics department however the Snapdragon 801 was able to show the whippersnappers a thing or two. It can't play OpenGL ES 3.1 games though, so you'll miss out on the cutting edge gaming tech but that's hardly a thing at the moment. Browsing performance is solid for the class.
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