In typical fashion, the first thing we did when we got hold of the new HTC Desire 816 was put it through its paces with a full on benchmarking session – standard geek behavior around here. The Desire 816 is a mid-range phablet device that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 platform, so the main point of interest for us is to see how the 400 SoC and its Adrano GPU would perform compared to other processors currently out there.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 platform became available to manufacturers in Q4 of last year and comes in a number of different models with both dual and quad core SKU options configured at various clock speeds. The HTC Desire 816 is kitted out with the MSM8928, a quad-core 1.6GHz system-on-chip supporting LTE 4G telephony standards. The all important GPU is the Adreno 305, a lesser variant of the Adreno 330 that we are familiar with on Snapdragon 800 and 801 chips.
It is fairly clear from the benchmarks results we are seeing today, that the Snapdragon 400 is certainly no match for the top dog in the family, the Snapdragon 801. If we compare the results of the Sony Xperia with those of the Desire 816, the difference is very stark. The AnTuTu benchmark puts the Z2 way ahead of the Desire 816 with 32,732 points compared to 21,705. It is a similar story throughout the benchmark suite, with 3DMark revealing an even more prominent difference in performance where the graphics processing is concerned – approximate scores of 18 thousand compared on the Sony device, compared to just under 5 thousand on the HTC.
If we compare the HTC Desire 816 with the Xiaomi Redmi Note, an aggressively affordable 5.5 inch device that runs on an Octa-core processor from MediaTek, we see the Snapdragon 400 taking the lead in Geekbench single core, Sunspider and Quadrant benchmarks, but losing again in 3DMark, Anomoly 2 and Geekbench multi-core.
Xperia Z2 / HTC Desire 816 / Xiaomi Redmi Note: Benchmark Comparison
| Sony Xperia Z2 | HTC Desire 816 | Xiaomi Redmi Note | |
| AnTuTu | 32732 | 21705 | 24007 |
| GFX Bench T-Rex | 26.9fps | 5.9fps | NA |
| Geekbench 3.0 | 756 | 443 | 364 |
| Geekbench Multi-Core | 2374 | 1463 | 2033 |
| 3DMark - Ice Storm | 18753 | 4839 | 6008 |
| Anamoly 2 | 1056986 | 222100 | 247030 |
| Sunspider (lower is better) | 762.4 | 910.2 | 1316.9 |
| Vellamo HTML | 1583 | 1407 | NA |
| Quadrant | 17913 | 13014 | 13884 |
These benchmarks leave us under no illusions regarding how much sheer grunt the HTC Desire 816 has in its locker. Although, we will know more about the real world experience after we have installed and played a few games. Watch out for the our HTC Desire 816 gaming video which will be published soon.
