After pulling the same dirty trick with the Galaxy S4, Samsung has been caught rigging the Galaxy Note 3 to perform better in benchmark tests than it does anywhere else. It’s like all Samsung phones are on performance enhancing drugs or something.
Ars Technica found that the Note 3 can inflate benchmark scores by as much as 20 per cent. That means though the Note 3 looks like it’s 20% faster in some tests, it’s real life performance will hardly show that speed difference. Ars first noticed the speed discrepancy because the Note 3’s 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor smoked the LG G2’s 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 in benchmark tests. That shouldn’t happen to identical SoCs.
How does Samsung do it? A lot of juicing. Ars discovered that certain benchmark tests would trigger maximum 2.3GHz CPU speed on all four cores of the Snapdragon 800 processor while that same benchmark test just re-named would show three of the four cores completely shut off and the other running at 300MHz. Samsung had made the CPU push the pedal to the floor in specific tests just to look good. That’s just one aspect of the cheating.
Here’s the difference in speed that Ars found:
As you can see, when rigged, the Note 3 outperforms the LG G2 handedly even though the G2’s guts are similar to the Note 3. When not rigged, it falls to a similar level of the G2. We didn’t find the Note 3 to be particularly zippy in day-to-day use in our review (in fact, we thought it should be faster) but still thought there was much to like. Samsung needs to stop embarrassing itself with these fake benchmark performances. We know it’s common in the PC world but cheating is cheating. Read more about how Samsung games benchmark tests here. [Ars Technica]