Most powerful smartphones available in South Africa

Honor’s Magic6 Pro and Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro are the most powerful smartphones available to South African customers, with the Honor smartphone achieving the highest AnTuTu 10 score and the Apple handset getting the best Geekbench 6 score.

MyBroadband compared AnTuTu 10 and Geekbench 6 benchmark scores for higher-end smartphones that officially ship to South Africa.

For reference, the Honor Magic6 Pro scored 2,038,952 on AnTuTu 10 and 2,218 and 6,749, respectively, on Geekbench 6 single-core and multi-core tests.

The iPhone 16 Pro scored 1,747,550 on AnTuTu 10, while it scored 3,318 and 8,115 on Geekbench 6’s single-core and multi-core benchmarks.

This effectively means the Apple A18 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro offers better performance than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip packed into the Honor Magic6 Pro.

However, the Honor Magic6 Pro performs better overall.

This is because Geekbench purely focuses on CPU performance by using realistic workloads to simulate everyday tasks.

In comparison, AnTuTu 10 tests a device’s overall performance in various benchmark tests. It tests the performance of a smartphone’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage.

However, it should be noted that AnTuTu 10 is more optimised for Android devices and can extract more performance from the system-on-chip (SoC) in an Android device than it can from an iOS device.

Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold and Flip devices also performed well on AnTuTu 10, with scores of 1,932,987 and 1,852,243, respectively.

However, their Geekbench scores were significantly lower than those of the iPhone 16 Pro. The Fold6 achieved a single-core score of 2,244 and 6,876 on the multi-core tests.

The Flip6 performed better on the single-core tests. However, the difference is negligible. It scored 2,247 on the single-core tests and 6,857 on the multi-core benchmarks.

Curiously, Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro performed better than the more expensive iPhone 16 Pro Max in Geekbench. The Pro Max achieved single-core and multi-core scores of 3,285 and 8,021, respectively.

However, the more expensive device scored higher in the AnTuTu 10 benchmark tests.

The standard iPhone 16 also scored higher than the iPhone 16 Pro on AnTuTu 10. However, its Geekbench scores were the lowest in the iPhone 16 line-up.

It scored 1,764,170 on AnTuTu 10 and returned scores of 3,278 and 7,995, respectively, on Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core tests.

Samsung’s latest flagship, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, placed fifth in terms of AnTuTu 10 benchmarking scores. It achieved a score of 1,770,105, roughly 4,500 points less than the iPhone 16 Pro.

However, the iPhone 16 line-up beats it convincingly in Geekbench 6 tests, with the Samsung device achieving single-core and multi-core scores of 2,208 and 6,752, respectively.

Its Geekbench scores align pretty closely with those achieved by the Honor Magic6 Pro.

This comparison highlights Apple’s edge with its in-house SoCs. Even the older generation iPhone 15 line-up scored higher than the competition in the CPU-centric Geekbench 6 tests.

The table below lists the ten most powerful smartphones available in South Africa with their respective AnTuTu Benchmark 10 and Geekbench 6 scores.