Nexus 7 early benchmarks: full Tegra 3 performance on the cheap
Are you totally, utterly and irrevocably impatient? Then head past the break for some very early benchmarks we grabbed from a pre-production (hand-built) Nexus 7 in London. Our full review will have far more complete and reliable stats, but in the meantime we've seen just enough evidence to be sure of one thing: neither the tablet's low $199 price point nor its slightly reduced (1.2GHz) clock speed throttle its Tegra 3 engine in any obvious way. Read on for more.
Nexus 7 | Galaxy Tab 7.7 | Transformer Pad Infinity (max. perf.) | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If we compare the Nexus 7 to a top-end Tegra 3 device like the 1.7GHz, 1920 x 1200 Transformer Pad Infinity (set to its 'Performance' mode) the pre-production Nexus 7 more than keeps up -- thanks in some part to its lower (1280 x 800) resolution. The SunSpider score for web-browsing speed is especially healthy and hammers home the point that this is in a different league to the Kindle Fire -- which scores a poor 2,440ms in this test. Meanwhile, only the GLBenchmark for GPU performance shows that the Nexus 7 may be slightly held back compared to Tegra 3 supremos.
Next, we can throw the Nexus 7 into the ring with a Galaxy Tab 7.7, which represents the family of Samsung devices powered by the last-gen dual-core Exynos processor (also including the Galaxy Note, for example). In this tussle, the Google slate wins by just the type of wide margin that we'd hope for given its quad-core 40nm silicon. In other words, when it comes to raw speed, the Nexus 7 looks like a proper 2012 Android device that can currently only be beaten by expensive flagships running off an Exynos Quad or a Snapdragon S4.
