Benchmark and Gaming
When one speak of the Snapdragon 810 SoC, the first thing that usually comes to mind is not the impressive performance that it has to offer, rather its widely-publicized overheating issues.
Most companies that used the top-of-the-line processor for their flagship devices tried to work around the SD810’s impediment by coming up with their own solution to lessen the heat that the processor produces when the going gets tough. Meanwhile, some companies like Samsung took a different route and avoided the said chip altogether for their next flagship device.
Sony was one of those companies who gambled on the Snapdragon 810 despite the reported heating issue. The Japanese firm used the said chipset on its flagship smartphones, the Xperia Z5 and Xperia Z5 Premium, as well as on other devices such as the Xperia Z5 Compact.
The company’s solution to dissipate as much heat away from their SD810-powered device is to use thermal paste and add extra heat pipes. Unfortunately, the said solution was only implemented on both the Z5 and Z5 Premium, leaving the Xperia Z5 Compact to carry on without a much-needed help in heat dissipation.
We’ve experienced first-hand the overheating issues of the Snapdragon 810 on the Z5 Compact. Although the majority of the handset got really warm when we were playing graphics-heavy games on it, it is the top portion of the smartphones that got really toasty.
And when things got really out of hand, the handset would momentarily lag pretty bad and would sometimes lock up entirely.
AnTuTu: 49,124
GeekBench: 3,455 (Multi-core) | 1,209 (Single Core)
Quadrant Standard: 16,825
Vellamo: 1,805 (Multi-core) | 1,281 (Metal) | 2,822 (Chrome Browser)
PCMark Work Performance: 5,005
Thermal issues aside though, the Z5 Compact is easily one of the most powerful smartphones in the sub-5” category. It is very evident on the impressive scores that it recorded on the synthetic benchmark tests that we’ve ran on it.
On real world use, the handset performed remarkably. There’s barely any lag when we used the Z5 Compact for mundane tasks, and the performance scaled relatively well when ran more demanding apps on it.
Asphalt 8: 28 fps
Angry Birds (Star Wars): 60 fps
EA Sports UFC: 30 fps
Temple Run 2: 60fps
The same can be said when playing games on this smartphone. The frame rates rarely dips below 25fps even on titles that rely heavily on the GPU performance. The rare times that the FPS did drop, the slight lag was only momentary and the handset was able to get back on its feet to bring the frame rate back up.
Needless to say, it’s really not a question of whether this smartphone can provide top-notch performance at any given time, rather if you’re willing to put with the drawback (overheating) that comes at the expense of its impressive performance.
Battery Life and Charging Time
The Sony Xperia Z5 Compact runs on a non-removable battery pack that has rated capacity of 2,700mAh. The capacity is not as high in contrast to the 3,430mAh battery found on the Z5 Premium, but considering that Z5 Compact has a more modest feature set compared to Sony’s flagship smartphone, we expected a decent mileage from it.
Indeed, the Z5 Compact delivered quite well on the PC Work Battery Life test. It managed to clock in an impressive 9 hours and 19 minutes when we ran the test on it.
What is rather peculiar, however, was the mileage that we got we put the battery to its paces using our video loop test. On our initial testing, the Z5 Compact only lasted for 5 hours and 42 minutes before it shut down – a far cry from the result that we got from the other test.
After draining the 2700mAh battery bone dry, it took 2 hours and 23 minutes to fill the smartphone’s battery to its full capacity. We decided to give the Z5 Compact another go with the video loop using the same parameters to validate our initial test and to see if it will yield a better result.
We noticed a dramatic improvement on the mileage compared to the first attempt as the handset lasted for 7 hours and 28 minutes on the second run. We ran the test again for the third and final time without changing the settings and got a mileage of 6 hours and 51 minutes.