With the release of the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, we got the devices early and began testing them relentlessly. Since we have the Galaxy S26+ with the Exynos 2600 equipped, it’s an opportune time to test it out and compare with the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy too. And Samsung made some changes to how the chipsets behave, making it a rather… interesting event.
The saga started with a gaming test. Of course, at that time, we knew nothing about the Exynos 2600 at all, so we went in blind and tested it out. Then, I realized that One UI 8.5 changed the UI and how things behave, and hence, the “performance mode” was not turned on for some of the games tested initially.
Then comes the second gaming test – and that’s for the new Galaxy S26 Ultra that is equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. This time, we turned on performance mode for all the games – and the performance is… well… not that good. The result that we get is pretty much in-line with other Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices that we’ve tested too.
So then, we returned to the S26+ with the Exynos 2600 and redid one specific test – Wuthering Waves at the maximum settings with performance mode turned on and see how things went. Here’s the full video.
And that showed us the true potential of the Exynos 2600. While the CPU is not as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, the Xclipse 960 GPU is supremely powerful.
Finally, we can now compare both the chipsets in Wuthering Waves as we have the same render resolution on both devices, and they’re both running in performance mode too. The results are very interesting. It is mainly summarized in these two images.
From here, we can see that the Exynos 2600 is giving us an amazing experience with a really high FPS. However, that’s going to be a problem as it is indeed pulling a lot of power. Sometimes, it can pull upwards of 23W of power – which is somewhat similar to what my ROG Xbox Ally X’s Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme pulls.
However, this also shows that the Exynos 2600’s performance mode functions differently compared to what we had before. When we turned on performance mode, it truly is unlocking the wattage ceiling and lets it pull however much wattage it needs.
That will definitely make the chipset heat up a lot quickly, and then thermal throttle. However, even when the Exynos 2600 throttles – the performance is similar to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy before it was throttling. It’s insanely good.
And now, finally understanding the true potential of the Exynos 2600, we tried slapping on a peltier cooler on the S26+ with the Exynos 2600 to see what happens. And honestly, we can get great sustained performance. That cooler can tame the temperature no matter what temperature it’s pulling in. That’s crazy good.
On a sidenote, benchmarks are really dumb. That’s why we always do gaming tests instead of benchmarks – because benchmarks are easily cheated and there are phone brands that literally “optimize” for those benchmarks just to get a high score. And those numbers also don’t mean anything. Worst of all, it’s not representative of what the chip can actually do.
So, gaming tests are always better.
And if you do like all these types of tests, then please to check out our YouTube channel and subscribe too. It’s much easier to show these things in video form instead of cherry-picking screenshots to show you in this article. We’ll see you on our YouTube channel.
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