Helio G70 Review: Great Performance in Budget

Are you planning to buy a phone that has the MediaTek Helio G70 Processor?

Then you’ve come to the right place.

Helio G70 is a part of MediaTek’s Gaming focused ‘G-series’ and it is exceptionally good at this price segment. Realme C3 is the first smartphone that uses this chip and it can even outperform mid-range SOCs like the Snapdragon 665.

This SOC is manufactured using TSMC’s 12nm FinFET Process which is the same fabrication node MediaTek has used in the majority of their mid-range and budget chips in the last couple of years.

The highlight of this processor is the powerful CPU & GPU pair that we have never seen before in this price segment.

Helio G70 boasts the powerful Cortex-A75 CPU Cores & Mali-G52 MC2 GPU. This pair outperforms the Kryo 260 (Semi-custom Cortex-A73) Cores & Adreno 610 GPU of Snapdragon 665 by a decent margin.

But how powerful is it in real-world performance? Let’s find out.

If you’re short on time and can’t go through the entire article, just see the pros. and cons. and then skip to the review section.

    Helio G70 Specification

Name	Helio G70
Brand	MediaTek
Fabrication Process	TSMC’s 12nm FinFET
CPU Cores	8 (Octa-Core)
Core Configuration	2x Cortex-A75 at 2.0 GHz + 6x Cortex-A55 at 1.7 GHz
GPU	ARM Mali-G52 MC2 at 820 MHz
Max. Display Resolution	2520 x 1080
Memory	Dual-Channel LPDDR4x
Storage Type	eMMC 5.1
VoLTE Support	Yes, Dual VoLTE
Bluetooth version	5.0
Max Camera	48MP

This SOC has two Cortex-A75 cores as the ‘big CPU cores’ and six Cortex-A55 cores as the smaller CPU cores. This is a similar configuration as the one in Snapdragon 710 & 712. However the clock speeds of these Snapdragon chips is higher.

This is the first time we have seen a budget SOC with the powerful Cortex-A75 Cores. And the same can be said for the GPU as well. The Mali-G52 MC2 is even better than the Adreno 610 GPU of Snapdragon 665. You can check the comparison between these two GPUs on this page.

The rest of the specification is on-par with most of the modern mid-range SOCs and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. You can get the rest of the specs on MediaTek’s website.

It also supports MediaTek’s HyperEngine Technology which improves the resource management of the chip in order to improve the gaming experience.

    Benchmarks

While we never recommend relying exclusively on synthetic benchmarks, we do post them for all the curious tech enthusiasts out there.

Antutu

On Antutu, the Realme C3 scored a really high-score of 190,165 which even outperformed the likes of Snapdragon 675. That is an excellent score for a budget chipset.

Geekbench 5

On Geekbench 5, it managed to edge out the Snapdragon 665 in Single-Threaded test but it fell a little short in Multi-Core performance. Snapdragon 675 outperformed both of them due to its faster Cortex-A76 based CPU Cores.

    Comparison

In this section, let us do a small comparison of G70 with other popular SOCs in low-budget and mid-range.

Helio G70 vs Snapdragon 665

The power effiency of both the chips is on par but G70 has a slight edge in the GPU department. In CPU Performance, G70 is significantly faster due to faster CPU Cores based on ARM’s A75 architecture.

Snapdragon 675 vs G70

Snapdragon 675 outperforms it in all the departments with the help of its faster CPU and GPU.

Snapdragon 439 vs G70

Helio G70 is significantly faster than Snapdragon 439. It wrecks it in all the departments.

Helio G70 vs G90T

The Helio G90T uses a better CPU architecture (Cortex-A76) and has a better GPU (Mali-G76 3EEMC4) as well.

    Review & Centurion Mark

The Realme C3 was undoubtedly the fastest budget phone (~$100) we have used till date. The Helio G70 is a game changer in the budget segment. I certainly expect more smartphone brands to launch new phone based on this chip.

Here’s what you should expect in real-world usage:

Performance in Light Tasks

While navigating through the phone’s UI, Social Media Apps, and browsing, you can expect an extremely responsive device with no lags or jitters whatsoever. The budget segment in the industry just got a whole lot better with the introduction of this chip.

If you fall in the criteria of users that only use the basic apps, you’re absolutely going to fall in love with the devices based on this chip.

Performance in Gaming

The gaming performance of this chip is exceptionally good. The Mali-G52 MC2 GPU was as impressive as most of the budget and mid-range Qualcomm chips with Adreno GPUs.

If you’re someone who likes to PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty Mobile, this is undoubtedly the best chip for gaming in the low-budget.

Remember, all these conclusions are being drawn from Realme C3 which has a 720p Display. While I expect the gaming performance at 1080p to be good as well, I can’t conclude the same before testing a device that has this processor alongside a 1080p display.

Battery Efficiency

This chip is fabricated using TSMC’s 12nm Node which is very similar to Samsung’s 14nm Node in terms of power efficiency. While I did criticize the G90T for using the 12nm Node, the specification and the pricing of G70 makes it acceptable this time around.

You can expect a decent battery life similar to the existing budget chips. But there’s nothing to get excited about like the CPU and the GPU departments.

Centurion Mark

In our scoring system, the MediaTek Helio G70 has scored 105 points which is a notch above the Snapdragon 665 & Exynos 9611. However, the Snapdragon 675 & 712 outperform it in all the departments.

You can find the ranking of all the Smartphone Processors on this page.

List of Phones with MediaTek Helio G70 SOC:

• Realme C3