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Lab noteFrom the leaderboard

One setting doubled this phone's CPU score

Same HONOR 600 Pro, same app, 12 minutes apart. The only thing that changed was a switch in the phone's settings.

ThermoHammer ·

The HONOR 600 Pro runs a Snapdragon 8 Elite. On our own leaderboard it was losing the CPU section to a Samsung Galaxy S25 FE and its Exynos 2400: 6,026 points against 8,781. That is the wrong way round, and when a benchmark says something that surprising, the first suspect is the benchmark.

Not the build, not the heat

That first run had come from a test build of the app, so we ran it again with the released version. Same phone, same answer: 6,082 for the CPU, within 1% of the first run. Heat wasn't it either, because a benchmark run only counts if the phone starts cool.

The stress test had the clue. This is one of the same phone's sustained-load runs:

Throughput ribbonHONOR 600 Pro · stress run #1039 · 5 min · multi-thread
HONOR 600 Pro: throughput over a stress test25%50%75%100%0:001:002:003:004:005:00FAIRHONOR 600 Pro: throughput over a stress test25%50%75%100%0:001:002:003:004:005:00FAIR
The run opens at 89% of its peak and within seconds settles near 60%, with short bursts back up. The phone's thermal state reads nominal until 3:05. Over the whole run it holds 56.4%.

A drop that arrives in seconds, long before anything has had time to heat up, is not a phone protecting itself from heat. It looks like a policy: a decision about how much speed an app gets.

The switch

HONOR ships this phone with its Power Mode set to Balanced. We changed it to Performance and ran the benchmark again, 12 minutes after the last run. Same phone, same app version (2.0.4), nothing else touched.

CPU · Balanced6,082run #4, 10 Nov 2026
CPU · Performance12,628run #5, 12 minutes later
Difference2.1×the same chip, the same tests
SectionBalancedPerformanceChange
CPU6,08212,6282.1×
Memory6,0598,8901.47×
GPU5,9486,2471.05×
Everyday UX5,5907,7001.38×
AI6,1097,3281.20×
LLM6,7516,2870.93×
Total36,53949,0801.34×

The CPU section went up 2.1×. Memory rose with it, almost all of it in the database test, which is bound by the processor: updates went from 30,402 tx/s to 184,160 tx/s. Everyday UX and AI gained too. The GPU and the LLM, which lean on the graphics chip here, moved by single digits.

What it means

The benchmark was right both times. In Balanced mode this phone hands apps about half of what its processor can do, and that is the phone most owners have, because it is how it ships.

So we changed nothing. 6,000 points per section is still a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone as it ships, in its default mode. The leaderboard keeps each device's best verified run, which is why the HONOR 600 Pro now stands at 49,080, #2 on the board: that is the Performance run.

If your phone has a performance mode, your score depends on it. Run the benchmark once in each mode and compare the two runs in the app: the gap is what the default costs you. And when two phones on a leaderboard look the wrong way round, find out which mode each was in before deciding which chip is faster.

Check it yourself

What does your default mode cost you?

Run the benchmark in each power mode and compare the two runs side by side.

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