Performance
For a lot of people, including me a good portion of what makes a phone great you can’t see in any photo. What is on the inside is important. In the case of these two phones they both have Snapdragon processors but the MotoX has an 801 running at 2.5GHz where the Turbo has an 805 running at 2.7 GHz. In addition the MotoX has a Adreno 330 @ 578 MHz GPU where the Turbo has an Andreno 420 running at 600MHz. The biggest difference between the two other than the obvious speed increase is the Snapdragon 805 was designed with 4k processing in mind. The Droid Turbo isn’t running at 4k, but at 1440p it is running at a higher resolution than the MotoX, so I’m sure it will help it keep up. To put both processors to the test I ran both phones (and the original MotoX) through our benchmark suite. Lets check out how well they performed.
To start things off I ran the phones through a few CPU specific benchmarks to see how well the slight bump in clock speed would help out. In two out of the three the Turbo pulled ahead but I was a little surprised with the Browsermark 2.1 results. Looking back I suspect that our MotoX running the new 5.0 Lollipop could account for a little better efficiency when testing the browser.
Next I ran through our 3D testing to test the gaming performance. Here the Droid Turbo pulled ahead by a large margin, past both the MotoX and everything else we have tested in the past. The 3DMark results show a smaller improvement than the individual tests, but in all of them there is no doubt that the Andreno 420 is much faster than the Andreno 330.
For this test I ran both phones through the new PCMark Work benchmark. I was so surprised by these results that I ran them multiple times to be completely sure. I’m not sure if the Turbo is throttling back during this test as it is a longer test or if 5.0 made this noticeable of a difference.
My last test is the PCMark battery benchmark. It runs through the PCMark Work Benchmark along with other tests over and over to test the overall battery life when under load. This is important because lots of phones can last a long time when they are under a light load, putting a heavier load pushes past some of the tricks that manufactures use like throttling CPUs down to save power. In this case I was seriously blow away by the results from both phones. For reference the MotoX 2014 has a 2300mAh battery where the Droid Turbo has a 3900mAh battery. Going off those numbers alone you would expect to see the MotoX fall in line with standard phones where the Turbo will perform in line with past MAXX phones. Well that didn’t happen. As it turns out, the upgrade to 5.0 on the MotoX swayed these results by a large margin. After researching things more, the MotoX 2014 averages a little over a 4 hour benchmark typically but when running 5.0 it has jumped up to almost 7 hours, 10 minutes short of what the Turbo did. This might look like a bad thing for the Droid Turbo, but lets remember that the Droid Turbo will be getting 5.0 just after the first of the year, imagine what kind of results it will see then! SO for the next month the MotoX will be on par with the Turbo in battery performance but after that its much larger battery will pull ahead when they are on an equal ground.