The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is quite something to behold. While it makes the odd compromise to reach just 5.8mm thin, particularly in terms of battery capacity, it’s still very much a flagship-calibre phone. It even packs the same Snapdragon 8 Elite processor as the rest of the Galaxy S25 series.
However, we’ve learned this year that Qualcomm’s latest chip is a hot little number, demanding serious cooling to sustain its peak performance beyond brief bursts. Pair that with the Edge’s slim metal chassis, and you’ve got a recipe that raises some red flags. To see if it can still deliver what Samsung fans expect, I compared the Galaxy S25 Edge against Samsung’s top-tier models and rival flagships in the same price range.
The good news? There are no signs of performance throttling or underclocking in everyday use. The Galaxy S25 Edge’s CPU and memory configuration match the rest of the series, delivering ample burst performance exactly when needed. That said, we did notice the phone became warm even during moderate use. Still, it breezed through CPU-heavy benchmarks like Geekbench 6 and PCMark Work without breaking a sweat.
Things take a turn, however, when simulating extended gaming sessions or running sustained, demanding workloads. To push it further, we turned to 3DMark’s Wild Life Stress Tests, tracking GPU performance over a grueling 20-minute run.
Unfortunately for the Edge, performance dips below the Galaxy S25 Ultra right out of the gate, and it only worsens from there. The phone quickly falls below the smaller Galaxy S25, making it undoubtedly the worst in the series for longer, or even moderate gaming sessions. The performance discrepancy varies depending on the timeframe you’re looking at, but at their worst, the Edge is 8.5% slower than the S25 and a considerable 24.8% slower than the Ultra. That’s potentially the difference between smooth and choppy frame rates in very demanding games or emulator tasks. Not great for a phone that costs $1,100.
Everyday performance is great, but the Edge throttles hard under sustained stress.
The culprit here is clear: thermal throttling. Like every phone in the series except the Ultra, the Edge quickly hits Samsung’s self-imposed upper limit of 40-45°C, triggering an aggressive drop in performance. While it doesn’t run hotter on average than its siblings, it pulls back more aggressively, dropping to just 45% of its peak score at worst, compared to 50% for the Galaxy S25 and 52% for the better-cooled Ultra. That’s more in line with Samsung’s clamshell foldables; last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 managed 47% stability.
So no, sustained performance isn’t the Edge’s forte. But let’s zoom out and consider the bigger picture.
Despite costing significantly less, the OnePlus 13 demonstrates what the Snapdragon 8 Elite can do with a more robust cooling setup — it’s a far better pick if performance is your top priority. Instead, the Edge quickly slides toward the same performance as the very affordable Galaxy S24 FE.
That’s not to say the Edge is a total letdown. Most real-world games aren’t as punishing as synthetic stress tests, so maintaining a steady 60fps should still be within reach without dialing down too many settings. Even at its worst, the Edge hovers around the performance of the similarly priced iPhone 16 Pro Max and stays ahead of the Pixel 9 Pro XL when under heavy load, albeit while pumping out much more heat.
Are the Edge’s performance trade-offs worth the slim design?
0 votes
You’d probably already guessed that the Galaxy S25 Edge was not built for performance enthusiasts — Samsung already has the Ultra for them. But it still delivers more than enough burst performance for day-to-day tasks. The real issue is that a $1,100 phone lags behind the $799 Galaxy S25 in stress tests and can fall to a level closer to the $649 S24 FE. It’s a stark reminder of the performance limits that ultra-slim designs impose. Perhaps most frustrating of all, that sleek metal build doesn’t just throttle performance, it makes the heat much more noticeable during extended use, especially while gaming on the go.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is clearly designed to turn heads, but it makes plenty of sacrifices in the name of style. If you prize form over function, those tradeoffs might still be worth it. If not, your money will stretch a lot further elsewhere.
