The Galaxy S20 is one of the fastest phones ever and should be one of the best phones of the year, thanks to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor. So why are the newly leaked benchmark results so underwhelming?

According to GSMArena, the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20 Plus, and Galaxy S20 Ultra all passed the Geekbench 5 benchmark, designed to measure overall performance. And the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max seem to have nothing to fear.

The highest score produced by the Galaxy S20 in this test was the Korean version of the Galaxy S10 Plus, which scored 925 in the single-core portion of Geekbench 5 and 3,230 in the multi-core test. Compare these numbers to the iPhone 11 Pro, which scored 1,334 and 3,517, respectively. [The difference in scores between the Galaxy S20 Plus and its main rivals is quite large.

The regular Galaxy S20 reportedly scored just 922 in the single-core Geekbench 5 test and 3,103 in the multi-core, while the Galaxy S20 Ultra recorded similar scores of 919 and 3,193.

What is curious is that the scores of the presumed U.S. versions of these phones are unstable, with only the Galaxy S20 Plus approaching the performance of the Korean version of the phone.

The U.S. Galaxy S20 and S20 Ultra scored low in both the single-core and dual-core Geekbench 5 tests, with the regular S20 scoring only 561 and 2,358. All of these devices also have 12 GB of RAM, according to their listed specs.

We saw better results when we tested the reference design in our first round of Snapdragon 865 benchmarks. The device we used scored 934 in the single-core test and 3,463 in the multi-core test. At least the latter score is quite close to the iPhone 11 Pro.

Of course, Geekbench 5 is just one of many tests we run to measure a phone's performance, including real-world tests like video editing. However, Geekbench is still considered one of the leading synthetic tests for cell phones.

The Galaxy S20 will be available on February 11, so we hope to bring you official benchmark results in the not-too-distant future. Until then, stay tuned to our Galaxy S20 hub for the latest news and leaks about Samsung's upcoming flagship.