While we love to see comparisons between Qualcomm Snapdragon and Apple’s A-series processors, there’s more to a smartphone than just powerful processors. Heat dissipation and cooling techniques are essential for maintaining smartphone temperature and determine how often your smartphone is throttled. Under heavy workload, many smartphones fail, and when there are heavy task sequences in succession, smartphones tend to disable the main cores. So, if you want to test the smartphone restriction and find out the durability of your smartphone, follow our guide below.
Testing Smartphone Restriction (2021)
There are usually two easy ways to test smartphone restriction on smartphones. On Android devices, you have a special app called CPU Throttling Test that lets you check how your CPU is performing and managing cooling over time. There’s also the AnTuTu benchmark app for both Android and iOS devices that, after a series of continuous testing, gives you a good overview of the throttling. We have discussed both methods in detail, so let’s start with the CPU Throttling Test first.
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CPU Throttling Test on Smartphone
First of all, go ahead and install CPU Throttling Test applet (Free) on your smartphone. After that open the app. Note that the app recommends that the phone be in a cold state, so be sure to leave your smartphone for 10 minutes to avoid heavy operation on the device. After that, just tap on “Start Test”.
The chart here provides a complete overview of how your smartphone has performed over time. The rule of thumb is if your smartphone can handle the stress and workload, over time performance will be linear so the line will not go down. If the performance line drops, it means that your smartphone is starting to slow down and will lower its clock speed to dissipate heat. Sometimes, it can also completely disable prime kernels. In the image below you can see that the performance on my OnePlus 7T was linear even 6 minutes after starting the test.
As I progressed through the test, performance after 11 minutes did not significantly decrease and the CPU was able to handle about 20 thread-intensive workloads. FYI, if the app graph is showing in yellow that means it is starting to speed up and when it is red it means your smartphone has disabled almost all cores to lower the temperature of the smartphone.
In my tests, the app automatically stopped the workload after 15 minutes, but the smartphone showed no signs of throttling. To make things interesting, thread number 40 Restarted the test from the “Options” menu and without any delays. I did this to check the sustained performance of the CPU when the smartphone temperature did not drop to normal.
And this time, I saw larger drops in the graph, which after increasing the thread count and starting the test at a higher temperature, CPU throttled a bit. While it’s not a significant drop, it continues to show that every smartphone is throttled regardless of the flagship specs you have. Also, no one can stress enough how important cooling and heat dissipation are in the smartphone world.
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AnTuTu Smartphone Restriction
We all know AnTuTu as a benchmarking app, but it can also offer great insights into smartphone restrictions. you can download AnTuTu for both Android and iOS from him official website. After that, open it. On first run it will download some plugins to run the pretty intense test.
Once you have everything set up, simply click “Start”. It will start putting heavy workloads on both the CPU and GPU to test the overall performance of your smartphone. On the first test, you’ll probably complete it in a few minutes and you’ll likely get the highest score. The situation was similar on my OnePlus 7T. Scored around 459337. On my second test, the score was around 459310.
However, after consecutive tests with the phone still at a higher temperature, the score started to drop. In my 5th test, I finally found that the OnePlus 7T was lagging and unable to withstand the workload. On the 5th test, he scored 395721.. Again, it goes to show that after successive workloads, smartphones tend to throttle their CPU and GPU to maintain overall temperature. That said, it’s great to know that flagship chipsets turn out to be pretty powerful and can survive many torture tests without breaking a sweat.
Stress Test CPU and GPU of Smartphones
So these are two ways to easily stress test your smartphone’s CPU and GPU. As I mentioned above, every smartphone throttles, but it’s all about how long a smartphone can sustain the workload while maintaining the temperature before throttling the CPU.
From my testing, it’s clear that flagship smartphones can very well withstand several rounds of overload, and that’s commendable. Anyway, that’s it for us. If you want to know the best tools for stress testing desktop CPU and GPU then check out the linked articles. And if you found the article helpful, let us know in the comment section below.
