Samsung recently launched the Galaxy A7 (Rs. 23,990) in India, a premium mid-range device that sets itself apart from other mid-rangers from the company by offering a subtle design refresh, a triple camera setup and a uniquely placed fingerprint scanner. The device packs in an Exynos 7885 SoC, coupled with 4/6GB of RAM and its performance is exactly in accordance with other premium mid-rangers available at this price point. If you’re in the market for a mid-range device and have been pondering over the Galaxy A7’s performance then allow us to help you make a well informed decision. Here’s our performance and gaming review of the all-new Galaxy A7:
As mentioned earlier, the Galaxy A7 packs in an Exynos 7885 SoC which, for the unaware, falls somewhere between the mid-range Snapdragon 636 and Snapdragon 660 processors from Qualcomm. In order to get a fair reading of the processor’s performance, we first ran the usual slew of benchmarks on the device, including AnTuTu, Geekbench 4 and 3DMark.
So, in order to check the benchmark results we installed AnTuTu, Geekbench 4 and 3DMark on the Galaxy A7 as soon as we pullet it out of the box which gave us a clear idea of how the device performs at its best. The scores delivered by the Galaxy A7 are quite in line with what you’d expect from a device of this calibre. The Galaxy A7 managed to score 122609 on AnTuTu, lagging behind the Snapdragon 660 powered Vivo V11 Pro which scored 128304, but managing to stay well ahead of Snapdragon 636 powered devices like the Redmi Note 5 Pro, the Nokia 6.1 plus, ZenFone Max Pro and the Motorola One Power.
Taking into account the synthetic benchmark results we just mentioned, you’d expect the Galaxy A7 to be terrible when it comes to gaming, but that isn’t the case. While the device doesn’t necessarily perform as well as the Vivo V11 Pro in graphically intensive games like PUBG Mobile, it is capable enough to handle most Android games with relative ease. In order to test the device’s gaming performance, we played PUBG Mobile, Mortal Kombat X and Shadowgun Legends and here’s what we found:
On top of that, due to the 4GB RAM, the device took far too long to load artifacts around the map, which meant that jumping out of the plane I could only see misshapen blobs of different colors on the ground right until I landed. The RAM constraints were also visible while multitasking as the device took some time to switch between heavy apps and wasn’t able to keep more than two heavy games in memory at the same time.
Overall, the gaming performance of the Samsung Galaxy A7 wasn’t as good as I’d expected it to be and I wouldn’t recommend the device to people who wish to play games on their smartphones. If you’re one of those people, then you can opt for the Poco F1 or the Vivo V11 Pro, both of which are great for gaming.
Priced at Rs. 23,990, the Galaxy A7 doesn’t offer the absolute best performance that you can get from a smartphone in this price range. It doesn’t even offer decent performance in graphically intensive titles like PUBG Mobile, unless you’re okay with turning down the graphics to low. However, I faced absolutely no issues with the device while playing lighter titles or in my day to day use, which means that the device isn’t all that bad.
