Back when we tested HTC’s One X we found out that the phone tends to experience a performance drop when it heats up to about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) or more.

We suspected this was an isolated Tegra 3-in-slim-case incident, but later we proved that the Samsung Galaxy S III as well as HTC One S powered by Qualcomm S4 28nm dual core MSM8260A suffer from the same issue.

We were on to something and in the middle of our Samsung Galaxy III review powered by we got some numbers that we can share with you. The S III is powered by Samsung's Exynos 4 SoC containing, a 1.4GHz quad-core A9 chip stamped out in 32nm.

Like all other superphones, the S III doesn’t take too long before it hits 40+ Celsius. Just a few minutes of intensive gaming like Shadowgun or any benchmark will do the trick. After a few benches, it scored 9650 in AndEBench native and 185 in Java test. However, after letting it cool down to 25 Celsius or less (77 Fahrenheit) the same benchmark scored 9960 and 280 in Java score. As you can see, Java performance suffers a significant drop when the phone is pushed to its limits.

In CF-Bench v1.2 the phone scored 23966 in native test, 5266 in Java and 11724 in overall score when hot. After letting it cool down it scored 23473, 6776 in Java and overall 13454, once again a noticeable difference.

The same pattern is evident on HTC’s One X and One S phones, with similar performance differences. It’s interesting that we got to the point when our phones get too hot and throttle clocks down in order to stay stable. We can confirm that Samsung’s Galaxy III, HTC One X, HTC One S and LG Optimus 4X exhibit the same behavior and you can truly feel the difference when they start throttling due to excess heat.