The Samsung Galaxy K zoom is powered by an Exynos 5260 Hexa developed in Samsung's own labs. It's based on ARM's big.LITTLE design with two fast Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.7GHz and four lower-power Cortex-A7 cores at 1.3GHz. All six cores can work simultaneously.
The K zoom was allotted 2GB RAM, great for a mid-range device, and the processor is coupled with a relatively fast Mali-T624 GPU. Another plus is that the device is running a fairly recent Android 4.4.2 KitKat, plus the screen is 720p so the GPU doesn't have to work as hard as on 1080p phones.
We're starting off with the cheat-detecting benchmarks. Neither Basemark OS II (testing mostly the CPU) nor Basemark X (testing the GPU) found big discrepancies meaning there's no cheating going on.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
We've included some flagships and a mid-range phone like the Galaxy Grand 2, which uses a Snapdragon 400 chipset (4x Cortex-A7 plus Adreno 305). The two additional Cortex-A15 cores have a big impact and in multithreaded performance the Galaxy K zoom is closer to the LG G3 flagship than it is to the Grand 2.
In the full system test AnTuTu 4 the K zoom practically matched the likes of LG G3 and Sony Xperia Z2.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Interestingly, the GFX 2.7 T-Rex test shows quite poor performance from the Mali-T624. However in the newer benchmark, Manhattan, the Galaxy K zoom surprisingly tops the Adreno 330-packing flagships by quite a margin. That's even in the off-screen test where the difference in physical screen resolution doesn't matter.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
We're not sure if this is a problem with the test or if Manhattan is the best case scenario for the Mali-T624. Using Epic Citadel at Ultra quality as a tie-breaker we're going to call the good GFX 3.0 score a fluke. Running at just over 30fps on screen (that's 720p resolution) isn't great performance.
Higher is better
Samsung's highly optimized browser gets along great with the Samsung-made chipset and it posts the best Kraken 1.1 score among the selected phones, including the Galaxy S5. The browser test result is also excellent even when you consider that the 720p screen resolution lightens the load of rendering web pages.
Lower is better
Higher is better
The processor of the Galaxy K zoom proved surprisingly fast getting in competition with Snapdragon 801-powered flagships. With 2GB RAM the phone handles multitasking with easy and browsing the web is as fast as on a Galaxy S5 (save for the resolution difference).
Gaming performance proved to be a bit of a weak spot for the Galaxy K zoom and Mali-T624. 3D games will run even at high quality settings but you'll have to sacrifice framerate (for action games running at 60fps rather than 30fps is important). Still, that's a great performance coming from an essentially a mid-range smartphone.
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