Test Results: Battery And Throttling
Basemark OS II Full (Anti-Detection)
The Basemark OS II battery test scores are derived by repeatedly running the devices until enough data has been collected to determine the drain rate of the device.
The iPhone 6 sees a modest 8% improvement over the 5s and falls just shy of the 5-inch HTC One (M8), which has a much larger battery. The 6 Plus posts an impressive score, besting the bigger battery in the Galaxy Note 4 by 29%.
Looking at the Battery Life vs. Score graphs, we see no hint of thermal throttling from the iPhone 6. The 6 Plus however, shows a slight 5% dip in performance. This drop persists across multiple runs, occurring at slightly different times but never changing in magnitude. With a much larger aluminum chassis to soak up and dissipate heat, the 6 Plus should exhibit less opportunity for thermal throttling than the iPhone 6, not more. This counter-intuitive behavior, together with its small, but consistent, performance advantage over the iPhone 6, seems to suggest a higher GPU clock in the 6 Plus.
GFXBench 3.0 Corporate
GFXBench's battery test measures battery life and performance stability by logging frame and battery discharge rate as the on-screen T-Rex test runs for 30 consecutive iterations. The results are given in two scores: estimated battery life in minutes, and the number of frames rendered on the slowest test run (to gauge if a device is throttling).
The iPhone 6 lasts a half-hour longer than the 5s when stressing the GPU, which is good news for iPhone gamers. The 6 Plus provides a full three hours of gaming bliss, but the “fun” continues for an extra half hour on the Note 4.
Comparing the battery performance numbers, where the T-Rex on-screen test loops 30 times, to the single run T-Rex values confirms no thermal throttling for the iPhone 6. The 6 Plus shows a 4% drop, similar to the the Basemark OS II battery test.
On the other hand, the frame rates on the Note 4 plummet from 26 to 12 FPS, indicating excessive thermal throttling. That extra half hour of battery life suddenly doesn’t seem so great.