Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus review: Widening the lead
Performance benchmarks & Battery life
Performance benchmarks
The Xiaomi Redmi 5 Plus’s budget roots are exposed in yet another area with the choice of processor, albeit a venerated one: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625. Eight fast 2.0-GHz Cortex-A53 cores, coupled with a power-thrifty 14nm architecture, have proven a recipe for success employed by everyone from BlackBerry to Motorola to Samsung.
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Accordingly, the Redmi 5 Plus served up performance that has become par for the course, even for devices in this price range. While playing graphically demanding games would of course result in a thrashing against faster Snapdragon 8-series devices, and you can expect web page loading and scrolling to be slightly slower and more jerky as well, you realize this is really nitpicking when you remember its price tag.
That said, we’d seem to be doing the benchmarks for curiosity’s sake, rather than expecting to crow about any improvement, incremental or otherwise. Let’s start with SunSpider, our favourite test that measures the browsing performance of a device when processing JavaScript. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience:
The Redmi 5 Plus didn’t surprise us here, even though its SunSpider score showed a pleasing improvement of some 24% - the changes are probably attributable to improvements in its Android 7.1 Nougat OS base over the 6.0 Marshmallow found on the other phones at the time of their tests.
Nothing new with 3DMark Sling Shot Unlimited 3.0 either. In this test, which uses a mix of graphics and physics tests to measure hardware performance, the Redmi 5 Plus keeps pace with its Mi A1 and Redmi Note 4 stablemates:
What did raise our eyebrows was the inferior BaseMark score. BaseMark OS measures overall system performance over a number of different metrics. In fact, we ran it a number of times to be sure there was no mistake, and could only get as high as 1249. We’re not sure quite why - perhaps the Redmi 5 Plus uses different RAM, or this particular build of MIUI 9 had some bugs.
Finally, we did our standard battery test, which involves:
- Looping a 720-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
- Constant data streaming through email and Twitter.
Another surprise. The Redmi 5 Plus lags the pack by quite a bit - we repeated this test as well, and obtained an even shorter time! Again, this has to be put down to poorly optimized software, or perhaps just that 18:9 display consuming more power:
In real-world use, the battery performance was very good, but not the best considering the large battery capacity and efficient Snapdragon 625 chip; we could certainly eke out an entire long day (8am-10pm) of usage if web browsing, social media, and messaging were kept to reasonable levels.