Performance

How good is the iPad Mini 5’s performance?

• The iPad Mini 5 has the same A12 Bionic 7nm chipset as the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR
• There’s 3GB RAM and either 64GB or 256GB storage
• It’s a very fast tablet and one that’s idea for gaming

Performance is one of the major updates for this iPad and it’s an area it really shines. It’s quick in every area – from scrolling through webpages to flipping between apps – and an absolute pleasure to use. It comfortably beats the cheaper £319 iPad 9.7-inch in benchmarking tests and isn’t too far behind the far more expensive iPad Pro.

As is typical with Apple tablets there’s no expandable storage so you’ll need to choose wisely. I’d suggest paying that bit extra and jumping up from the default 64GB to the roomier 256GB if you plan on using the Mini for lots of video watching.

iPad Mini 5 processor: Geekbench 4

Geekbench is a CPU-focused benchmark, and is arguably the most well-known and commonly used benchmarking tool. We run it on all tablets to give a general overview of performance.

• Here are the best tablets

The results comprise of scores for single-core and multi-core performance. Single-core scores used to be the most important metric of a phone’s performance, and Apple always impresses in this area.

We’ve compared the iPad Mini 5 to other Apple tablets and it sits impressively: not too far behind the far pricier iPad Pro and comfortably ahead of the cheaper iPad 9.7-inch.

iPad Mini 5 overall system: AnTuTu

AnTuTu is a generalist benchmark that synthetically tests everything from theoretical gaming performance to picture editing and basic web browsing. As is the case with Geekbench, the iPad Mini 5 scores impressively, but it can’t match the graphical oomph of the Pro.

iPad Mini 5 graphics: 3DMark Extreme

3DMark’s Extreme benchmark focuses on checking a phone’s GPU performance. As you’d expect there’s a lot more graphical power here when compared to the cheaper iPad 9.7-inch and it does a good job at competing with the iPad Pro.