Google finally announced its second seven-inch Android tablet, just a few weeks after forum users and random OfficeMax employees and Best Buy all beat them to the punch. Just because the tablet has been thoroughly leaked doesn't mean it looks like a bad device, though—its components aren't all cutting-edge, but the new Nexus 7 seems like it will bring a sizable performance bump for just $30 more than the $199 asking price of the original.

We're already hard at work on our full review of the new tablet and of Android 4.3, but to tide you over we've run our standard suite of benchmarks on the new tablet. This should show you just how much faster it is than the previous Nexus 7 and where it fits in compared to the smaller Nexus 4 and the larger Nexus 10.

First, a refresher on the internals: the new Nexus 7 is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, which includes one of Qualcomm's Adreno 320 GPUs. The S4 Pro (and its Krait 200 CPU architecture) has already been superseded by the Snapdragon 600, and the even-faster Snapdragon 800 is right around the corner, but both CPU and GPU are a substantial step up from the Nvidia Tegra 3 used in last year's tablet. The S4 Pro is also included in the Nexus 4, so we expect the two devices to perform pretty similarly from a CPU perspective.

As expected, the CPU benchmarks and JavaScript scores for the new Nexus are similar to the Nexus 4, and they're much higher than the Tegra 3's 1.2GHz Cortex-A9 CPU cores can manage (this Tegra 3 can only run at 1.3GHz speeds if one of the four main CPU cores is active). The Nexus 7 does slightly edge out the Nexus 4 most of the time for one or more of three reasons: Android 4.3, which was introduced on the new Nexus 7, may bring under-the-hood performance improvements not present in the version of Android 4.2.2 running on the Nexus 4. Also, since the Nexus 7 is much larger than the Nexus 4, it stands to reason that the SoC would be less thermally constrained, allowing it to stretch its legs a bit more compared to the same SoC in a phone. Finally, notice that in Geekbench the memory score is way up, suggesting that the new Nexus 7 is using faster memory than the Nexus 4. This will greatly affect the performance of memory-dependent tasks.

Let's move to the graphics side. While the new Adreno 320 GPU is going to be quite a bit faster than the Tegra 3 GPU in the old Nexus 7 (see the Offscreen tests, which render the scenes at the same 1080p resolution on all GPUs), remember that the new GPU also has to push a much higher resolution 1920×1200 screen than the old Nexus 7's 1280×800 panel (see the Onscreen tests, which render the tests at the built-in panel's resolution). Even so, the new Nexus 7 boosts gaming performance way up over last year's model, and it's often playing in the same arena as the Nexus 10's GPU.

Finally, let's talk about storage. The old Nexus 7, especially in its original 8GB revision, uses relatively slow storage that makes that tablet's performance inconsistent. The 16GB (and later, 32GB) versions improve that somewhat, but it's still a bit of a performance bottleneck. We ran the AndroBench storage benchmark to test how quickly the tablet can read and write smaller (4KB) and larger (256KB) files, and in both cases the new Nexus 7 is once again a sizable improvement.

While moving small files, the new Nexus 7's read speed isn't much higher than the old 32GB version's, but its write speed is up considerably. Things get even better when you're working with larger files, though.

In this case, the new Nexus 7 can't quite touch the Nexus 10, but it's around twice as fast as the fastest speeds that any of the old Nexus 7s could post. Hopefully this will mean more consistent performance over time, though we'll have to dig into this a little more in our full review.

Overall, the new Nexus 7 moves performance ahead by a sizable margin, especially given that it costs only $30 more than last year's model, and it has come out only a year later. We'll be digging more into performance as well as other aspects of the tablet in our full review, which (fingers crossed!) should be going up some time next week.