Cherry Mobile’s M1, the first locally available phone that has MediaTek’s vaunted Helio X20 deca-core processor, has officially landed in our review labs. We’ve been dying to know what kind of performance the new processor brings to the table, especially since the device is the first phone outed by a local company that has the Helio X20 processor AND 4GB of RAM.

Now that we have the device, we’ve decided to run a few preliminary performance tests on the phone. Aside from the regular AnTuTu benchmark test we put in the device, we’re also going to take a look at the overall performance of the phone using three games: Asphalt 8, Modern Combat 5 and Mortal Kombat X. But instead of just running the games on taking video of them, we’ll be taking a bit of a more scientific approach to measuring the performance by using GameBench, an Android app that measures the overeall frame rate of the demanding games. What’s nice about it is that it gives you an FPS overlay while you’re playing a game, giving you real time information on how the phone is performing.

Just a note on GameBench – it’s a rather new app on recording performance on games, and as such we’re not exactly sure if the app hinders the performance of the phone while it accumulates data. For now we’ll be using it for this test for until we get more information on how exactly it impacts overall performance.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the numbers from the app:

• Mortal Kombat X 52 FPS average
• Modern Combat 5 35 FPS average
• Asphalt 8 29 FPS average

From what we could see during our tests, Cherry Mobile’s M1 is quite capable in Android gaming. While there were a few lag spots in some of the games, overall the experience was pretty fluid. It’s no exaggeration to say that the M1 might just be the phone for hardcore Android gamers on a budget, though we’ll have to see first how the rest of the phone performs in our other tests before we can pass our verdict.