Hardware Overview and System Performance

The LG G6 is a lackluster hardware upgrade on the LG G5, primarily as LG hasn't moved to upgrade the SoC in any meaningful mode. The telephone uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 SoC, which is largely the same SoC as the G5'due south Snapdragon 820, while 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage are however standard.

The Snapdragon 821 contains a quad-core Kyro CPU with two cores clocked at 2.34 GHz, and two cores clocked at two.19 GHz. The clock speeds are college here than the Snapdragon 820 – in fact the depression power cores have received a hefty 600 MHz heave – but the fundamental architecture remains the aforementioned. There's also an Adreno 530 GPU clocked up to 653 MHz and an LPDDR4 retentiveness controller providing 29.8 GB/south of bandwidth.

Those expecting the G6 to perform significantly amend than last year's ingather of flagship phones will be disappointed for the most role.

Wireless connectivity besides remains mostly the aforementioned every bit last year. The G6 still includes Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/m/north/air conditioning, Bluetooth iv.two and NFC. LTE capabilities have been upgraded from Category 9 to Category 12, providing a crash-land up to 600 Mbps downstream and 150 Mbps upstream. Some Snapdragon 835 handsets like the Milky way S8 support Gigabit LTE Category xvi, so the G6 is still behind the pack hither.

When comparing the G6 with the G5 in a head-to-head boxing, the clock speed improvements in the S821 do provide 16 per centum meliorate CPU operation on boilerplate. That falls closely in line with what I expected to see because the S821 is clocked higher than the S820. It'due south a small-scale but respectable upgrade on last year's model.

The G6 is around 15-16 per centum faster than the Pixel XL, which uses the variant of the S821 that's clocked identically to the S820 (yep, confusing naming there Qualcomm). The G6's variant is a faster S821 variant, hence in that location is a much smaller gap between it and the HTC Ultra, which uses the same SoC.

Unfortunately, though, the LG G6 can't concur its own confronting current-generation SoCs. The Milky way S8+ with the Exynos 8895 inside is seven per centum faster on average in CPU limited workloads, while the Huawei Mate nine with its Kirin 960 pulls away by 17 percent. The Snapdragon 835 should outperform the G6 by a similar margin.

These performance differences won't make a huge difference in today's Android workloads, though information technology'south ever nice to know that you're holding the fastest smartphone out there when you purchase a new flagship. The experience provided by the G6 is not bad today, though it may not exist as capable as other devices towards the end of its lifespan.