Oppo Find 5 Review: A Phone Of Firsts From A Brand To Watch

Results: System Tests

AnTuTu

AnTuTu is a benchmark designed to test the performance capabilities of four major aspects of mobile devices: Graphics (encompassing 2D, UI and basic 3D), CPU (fixed, floating-point, and threading), RAM (read and write), and I/O (read and write).  

AnTuTu provides an apt demonstration of the Snapdragon SoC's performance, with the Find 5 being surpassed in all five categories by the more recent Snapdragon 600 and 800 processor included in the HTC One and Sony Xperia Z1, respectively. What comes as a surprise is the Nexus 4's lower performance, in particular the 4000-point gap between it and the Find 5. This may be attributed to the Nexus 4's known throttling context. Or perhaps our Find 5 has a higher-binned Snapdragon S4 Pro. It's hard to be sure beyond the devices we have seen and tested ourselves, but either scenario seems plausible.

CF-Bench Pro 

Chainfire's CF-Bench Pro is designed to characterize the performance of multi-core systems by simulating Java loads, both in terms of natively-compiled and managed code. It tends to be a decent indicator of the tweaks that vendors make to Android hoping to eke out extra performance by optimizing for specific hardware features. 

The results from CF-Bench Pro are very predictable, with Qualcomm's brand new Snapdragon 800 SoC comfortably outperforming its predecessors. It's also worth noting that the Nexus 4 seems to perform substantially slower on the Java side, which would seems to indicate that Oppo has optimized for Krait beyond the stock Android experience.

GeekBench 3

Primate Labs’ Geekbench is somewhat of an industry standard due to its comprehensive database and cross-platform compatibility, supporting x86 Windows, PPC and x86 Apple OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. While Geekbench is more of CPU performance benchmark, it also covers some general memory performance. Geekbench’s approach is based on real-world applications and simulations of regular tasks, such as file/data manipulation, compression, encryption, and image processing.

Limited to a single core, the Oppo Find 5 perplexingly achieves the lowest overall score in GeekBench. With that said, the score is within five percent of the Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy S3, which is a reasonable margin of error for a mobile benchmark, in our experience. As always, when it comes to single-core performance, the A7's double-wide registers allow it to take a substantial lead in every test category.

Predictably, when multi-core performance is being tested, the dual-core A7 is bested by the quad-core Snapdragon 800. Meanwhile, at the lower end of the spectrum, the Nexus 4 and Find 5 find their legs, taking a comfortable lead over the Samsung Galaxy S3's older dual-core Krait-based CPU. The test also echoes the results from the single-core benchmark, with the Find 5 being marginally slower than the Nexus 4.

MobileXPRT

Principled Technologies’ MobileXPRT is not dissimilar to certain aspects of GeekBench in that it simulates real world applications and use cases. It differs in two ways: first, it’s Android-only, and second, it simulates more modern workloads that GeekBench doesn’t, namely Biometrics (Facial Recognition), UX (List Scroll, Grid Scroll, Gallery Scroll, Browser Scroll, Zoom, and Pinch to Zoom), and Photo Management (Apply Photo Effects, Create Photo Collages, Create Slideshow, and Organize Photos).

The Find 5 is once again outperformed by the Nexus 4 in both categories of the MobileXPRT test. The most likely explanation for this is that whilst both phones run on Jelly Bean, the Nexus 4 is on Android 4.3, and can therefore take advantage of the Project Butter performance improvements included in that update. It’s also worth noting that the inclusion of HWCompose in Project Butter allows the Xperia Z1 to maintain a significant lead due to its Adreno 330 GPU.