OnePlus and Meizu Reported CHEATING IN BENCHMARKS - DOES IT ACTUALLY MATTER?

Greetings Smartphone Enthusiasts,

Yesterday, my colleagues from XDA developers published results, that claimed popular smartphone manufacturers MEIZU and ONEPLUS cheated in popular benchmarks like ANTUTU, GEEKBENCH, and others, but is it relevant?

Are we being told the whole story?

I wasn't going to do this article, but just got so pissed that people left and right was being made to believe that they got scammed when buying OnePlus or Meizu devices, and supposed journalist from sites don't elaborate on the whole story, but just copy and paste from one another.

Before we dig into this, I will remind you of a different cheating that was exposed last year.

Last year there was a huge controversy when Geekbench 4 came out, as results from Qualcomm Snapdragon chips dropped significantly, and other chips like MTK's Helio, Samsung's Exynos and especially Huawei's Kirin chips saw the increase, instead of decrease.

To demonstrate Geekbench 3 showed Snapdragon 820 and 821 as the best chips on the market, when it came to single-thread performance,

With scores over 2000 for single core performance, but when Geekbench 4 came out, that score dropped significantly! Did Qualcomm cheat - YES?

The only chips that saw increase in scores, instead of decrease after geekbench 4 were Samsung's Exynos 8890 and Huawei's Kirin 950,955 and 960!

I've had a Snapdragon 820(OnePlus3) and 821(Xiaomi Mi5S Plus) phones and they ran everything without breaking a sweat.

I'm currently using Kirin 950(Honor 8) and is also a great phone, but thanks to slower storage and RAM speed it is maybe just a  tiny tad slower than Mi5 and Mi5S Plus when multi-tasking.

I notice this, but I'm a trained professional, 99% of users won't be able to tell the difference at all, since it's that negligible!

So, Qualcomm cheated by 10-15% in a benchmark - BIG DEAL!

Let's now get back to the situation at hand, OnePlus3T and Meizu's accused "cheating" scandal!

When people read the topic of the article they are lead to believe that the results were tempered with by a significant margin, well reality is very different!

Here is the chart from OnePlus 3T

they cheated by a WHOPPING 2.6%! Wow, that really makes a difference,

  no wait, it actually doesn't!

So all phones with Snapdragon 821 perform almost the same, that is to be expected, and yes OnePlus did pimp their score just to get an extra 2%, to top Antutu's performance charts, but I'm sorry, this makes absolutely no difference in real use and the OnePlus 3T remains perhaps the best value for money phone on the market.

There is a bigger difference in multi-core scored after the 10th Antutu run, but it's still within 5% margin, so again, absolutely irrelevant to actual performance!

Now, Meizu is a different story, and again the alleged cheating in their case is simply laughable, since the software in Meizu phones tweaks them to perform WORSE IN BENCHMARKS!

Why might you ask?

Well, Meizu is perhaps the only company in the world that doesn't care for silly benchmark scores but aims to deliver a phone, that doesn't overheat and has a long life!

In actual usage, their phones run great and chips perform as they should, whether this is multi-tasking or gaming related because this is what matters, not silly benchmarks.

Media Pro 6 Plus uses MTK's Helio X25, which has very good CPU performance but tends to get a bit hot if pushed to its limits, and benchmarks do that, push a chip to its limits!

Meizu feel that frying the chip inside just to get 50-100 points more or less in benchmarks is not worth it, hence they treat some benches like hazardous apps and don't allow the BIG CPU CORES to work at all, which is only logical, since benchmarking is for fun and is not an app that you need at all.

On top of all that Antutu has been accused lots of times to secretly send data from your phone, so some companies actually see it as malware.

In the end, let me reassure current and future Meizu and OnePlus owners, you are still getting great devices that are worth your money.

To all of you who treat benchmarks more seriously than real usage performance, that you might want to think twice when a phone that scores less actually runs all the apps you really use in your day better, since phones from Meizu and OnePlus probably do that and cost less.

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