Benchmarked: This phone can outpace the Pixel 9 Pro for a fraction of the price

The new Poco  X7 Pro Iron Man edition sports a MediaTek Dimensity 8400-Ultra processor, a mid-range companion to the chip maker’s flagship Dimensity 9400. The Ultra aspect of this version is simply any software optimizations or customizations Redmi has made. The clocks and specs are otherwise the same as the standard Dimensity 8400.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 8400 is an interesting chip, aping a fair bit of its “all big core” design from the latest flagship silicon. There are no little CPU cores here, something we’ve seen in the Dimensity 9400 and Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite. In fact, it’s built entirely from eight of the latest mid-tier Arm Cortex-A725 cores, with clock speed and cache differences allowing them to scale across performance and efficiency points. One A725 has a 1MB L2 cache and 3.25GHz peak clock, three cores have a 3.0GHz clock and smaller 512kb cache, and four lowest power cores peak at 2.1GHz with a smaller 256KB L2 cache.

For the GPU, there’s an Arm Mali-G720 MC7 — a last-gen high-end GPU that’s newer than the G715 core in Google’s premium Tensor G4, arranged in a familiar seven-core layout but this time with ray-tracing intact. While this isn’t going to top the graphics charts, it should lend the chip rock-solid gaming capabilities for most of today’s most demanding titles. Let’s find out exactly how this chip compares with the best in the affordable phone price bracket.

Dimensity 8400 benchmarks

For today’s comparison, we’ve picked the high-performing Google Pixel 8a (powered by the Tensor G3), the ever-popular Samsung Galaxy A55 (Exynos 1480), and budget staple Motorola Moto G Stylus (Snapdragon 6 Gen 1). Let’s jump into our traditional GeekBench 6 and 3DMark Wild Life tests.

The lack of a Cortex-X big core means the Pixel 8a and its Tensor G3 have faster single-core capabilities in GeekBench 6, but the Dimensity 8400’s biggest A725 isn’t far off. This setup lends the Realme a huge multi-core advantage (helpful for real workloads) over popular phones in this price bracket. Both of these phones are well beyond the performance levels offered by other big-budget brands.

Similarly, with graphics, last year’s flagship-tier Tensor G3 found in the Pixel 8a is the closest competitor for the Dimensity 8400, as you’d expect from their specs. MediaTek’s chip scores a 6.6% advantage but also offers superior sustained performance when temperatures rise in 3DMark’s Wild Life Stress Test. Poco’s cooling for this special edition model no doubt helps here, but MediaTek’s recent flagship chip has also showcased far better temperature control than rivals. While this stress test is beyond the demands of today’s mobile games, it bodes well for protracted gaming sessions and playing in warmer climates.

If you’re looking for a budget handset with robust gaming performance, you can’t go wrong with the Poco X7 Pro. But given it competes well against Google’s last-gen flagship chip, how does the handset and its mid-range processor stack up against today’s more expensive competition? Let’s find out.

Again, the Poco’s lack of a powerhouse CPU core means it won’t feel quite as responsive as today’s flagship phones on rare occasions where beefy CPU throughput is required. However, its multi-core CPU score in GeekBench 6 beats the far more expensive Pixel 9 Pro and its Tensor G4, ensuring bountiful performance for today’s primarily multithreaded applications. It’s still a long way behind the Galaxy S24 and its more affordable Galaxy S24 FE sibling, however.

Graphics and gaming are the Dimensity 8400’s biggest claim, and the Poco again beats the Pixel 9 Pro over a prolonged stress test. The two models are neck-and-neck at the start, but lower temperatures from MediaTek’s chip ensure that performance remains rock solid when Tensor struggles. The handset also runs much cooler than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Exynos 2400 in Samsung’s flagship phones (36.7°C average versus 42.2°C and 41.2°C). While its mid-range GPU can’t match these two chips for peak performance, by the end of a prolonged period of high temperatures, the Dimensity 8400 is right on its heels. Of course, there are the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 flagships that offer a bigger performance gap than nearly year-old models.

Dimensity 8400 and Poco X7 Pro performance verdict

Of course, MediaTek’s Dimensity 8400 is not the fastest chip that money can buy. However, with performance in the region of Google’s latest Tensor and a significantly lower price point, it’s a winner in affordable handsets like the Poco X7 Pro, which costs just £309 (~$380). The “all big core” CPU setup makes for robust app performance and has proven to be solid enough for battery life as well. However, while it might be the more interesting aspect of the chip, the 8400’s gaming performance is probably the biggest win for budget customers. It can take on and even beat much more expensive phones under stress, plus it supports ray tracing, which even Google’s latest flagships do not.

There’s more to a top-tier processor than just performance, of course. The Dimensity 8400 sports MediaTek’s 50% faster 8th-generation NPU and new Dimensity Agentic AI Engine for the latest machine learning use cases. The chip also boasts a new ISP with a 12% reduction in power use for 4K HDR video recording, a 5G-Advanced modem with 5.17Gbps peak downlink speeds, Wi-Fi 6E capabilities, and speedy LPDDR5X and UFS 4.0 memory options. That’s a pretty robust feature set that won’t be outshone by many chips found in phones below the $699 mark, let alone below $400. We’ll just have to hope to see MediaTek’s mid-ranger in a few more affordable handsets.