In ideal world conditions, a phone should have the exact same parts or have similar performance and act the same way in every situation. This is not so in the case of Samsung who are lately being pointed for the same. Samsung is selling its flagship Galaxy Note 20 Ultra in different regions of the world with a different processor and cooling systems. So, is there any difference in performance for both devices?
JerryRigEverything got down to testing the two variants – the international version which has the Exynos 990 processor and the US version which comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus SoC. He checked the phones for two variables – the processor and the cooling ability of the devices. For this, he used the Geekbench 5 benchmarking tool.
The US-based device finished the benchmarking test 15 seconds faster than the Exynos version. That is 87 points higher for single core score and 456 points higher for the multicore score. That’s almost 16 percent difference in the two models. So, actually the Exynos version has a score just more than the Note 10 model from last year, which is startling.
The temperatures of the phones however are quite similar, so the cooling systems work almost comparable. That said, the Exynos is a bit hotter than the Snapdragon version – 1-2 degrees more than the US variant. Since the test is processing-intensive, the battery consumption is also better in the Snapdragon model.
Thereafter, Jerry gets down to swapping the cooling systems on the phone by opening-up the two – kind of a teardown there. The graphite cooling system of the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor is exchanged with the copper cooling system for the load testing. Still, Qualcomm wins considerably as there is 20 percent difference in performance during the test.
After the comprehensive testing, the two Note 20 Ultra variants have a 5 percent battery difference which also comes as a disappointing surprise. Things are clear as Exynos version is not that powerful owing to the weaker processor. The phone acts differently, so why is it sold to the unassuming buyers as the same device which has the superior Snapdragon chip for the same price?
