Nokia Lumia 930 review: Iconic once again

Benchmarks and performance

The Nokia Lumia 930 has a Qualcomm MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 chipset with four Krait 400 cores clocked at 2.2GHz, Adreno 330 graphics, and 2GB of RAM. It's one of the most capable smartphones Nokia has released next to the Lumia 1520, so we're expecting good numbers compared to other Nokia flagships.

We've updated several of the competing Nokia devices to the latest Windows Phone 8.1 build to make sure the playing field is even.

The first test measures the single-core performance by calculating the Number Pi. The Lumia 930 is the best-performing Lumia we've tested in calculating Pi, on par with the similarly-clocked Lumia 1520.

Pi Benchmark

Lower is better

• Nokia Lumia 930 (WP8.1)
  140
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.1)
  146
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.0)
  146
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.1)
  215
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.0)
  215
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.1)
  336
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.0)
  336
• Nokia Lumia 630 (WP8.1)
  699

Then we got to the compound test AnTuTu. The Lumia 930 again aced this test, showing off some great numbers in overall performance.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Nokia Lumia 930 (WP8.1)
  26206
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.1)
  25659
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.0)
  24797
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.0)
  12064
• Nokia Lumia 630 (WP8.1)
  12035
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.1)
  11567
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.1)
  7135
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.0)
  7319

Finally, we used the popular cross-platform BaseMark OS II compound benchmark. The Nokia Lumia 930 again scored towards the top of the charts.

Basemark OS II

Higher is better

• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.1)
  1116
• Nokia Lumia 930 (WP8.1)
  1067
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.0)
  1012
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.1)
  526
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.0)
  495
• Nokia Lumia 630 (WP8.1)
  465
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.1)
  332
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.0)
  319

Windows Phone 8.1 comes with an updated Internet Explorer 11 web browser that brings lots of new goodies and... you guessed it, performance improvements.

SunSpider measures the JavaScript rendering performance of the web browser. The Lumia 930 again comes in at the top alongside the Lumia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.1. The latter performed better after the update than before, which shows that the optimizations Microsoft added in Windows 8.1, and the updated Internet Explorer make a difference.

SunSpider 1.0.2

Lower is better

• Nokia Lumia 930 (WP8.1)
  510
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.1)
  514
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.0)
  543
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.1)
  912
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.0)
  965
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.0)
  1430
• Nokia Lumia 630 (WP8.1)
  1448
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.1)
  1756

Finally, we put the phones through the standard HTML5Test and the entire gang showed similar bump in its HTML5 capabilities, courtesy of IE11.

HTML 5 Test

Higher is better

• Nokia Lumia 930 (WP8.1)
  372
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.1)
  372
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.1)
  368
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.1)
  368
• Nokia Lumia 630 (WP8.1)
  368
• Nokia Lumia 1520 (WP8.0)
  328
• Nokia Lumia 1020 (WP8.0)
  328
• Nokia Lumia 720 (WP8.0)
  328

Our benchmarks show that the Lumia 930 is undeniably the best-performing Nokia device to date, even topping the Lumia 1520 in certain tests.