Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a $10 monthly subscription

issue0315@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 547 points –
Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a $10 monthly subscription
tomshardware.com
84

This is a net win. Now they won’t be recommended to everyone trying to do hardware comparisons. The bias in their results has pretty much made them worthless as a source since Ryzen released.

Unfortunately the subscription appears to be for their benchmarking tool only, not for website access.

Aren't these the people that straight up manipulated data to make AMD look worse than Intel or something wild?

Yeah that's the guy. Hilarious to see he thinks his garbage biased opinion is worth any amount of money.

Yup. They've always done it, both on the CPU and GPU side, but especially on the CPU side.

Aren't these the same guys that have a stick up their ass about AMD and/or they get paid by Intel to be biased?

I know the admins have unquestionable integrity (they certainly pretend as much) so surely they are going to retroactively pay every user who contributed their benchmarks for free. Right? When should I expect my first royalty check?

Ah, yes, the guy that obviously put a lot of money into intel shares or attempting to short AMD right around the launch of Zen architecture and got so butthurt about his poor investment that he started actively falsifying data and writing ridiculous unhinged reviews of amd products to make intel look better.

Hopefully this will hurt them up to a point where they go out of business. Just look at their review of the 5800X3D, it's so unreal.

The 5800X3D has the same core architecture as the 5800X but it runs at 11% lower base and 4% lower boost clocks. The lower clocks are in exchange for an extra 64MB of cache (96MB up from 32MB) and around 40% more money. For most real-world tasks performance is comparable to the 5800X. Cache sensitive scenarios such as low res. canned game benchmarks with a 3090-Ti ($2,000 USD) benefit at the cost of everything else. Be wary of sponsored reviews with cherry picked games that showcase the wins, conveniently ignore frame drops and gloss over the losses. Also watch out for AMD’s army of Neanderthal social media accounts on reddit, forums and youtube, they will be singing their own praises as usual. Instead of focusing on real-world performance, AMD’s marketers aim to dupe consumers with bankrolled headlines. The same tactics were used with the Radeon 5000 series GPUs. Zen 4 needs to bring substantial IPC improvements for all workloads, rather than overpriced "3D" marketing gimmicks. New PC builders have little reason to look further than the $260 12600K which, at a fraction of the price, offers better all round performance in gaming, desktop and workstation applications. Users with an existing AM4 build should wait just a few more months for better performance at lower prices with Raptor Lake or even Zen 4. The marketers selling expensive “3D” upgrades today will quickly move onto Zen 4 (3D) leaving unfortunate buyers stuck on an overpriced, 6 year old, dead-end, platform. [Mar '22 CPUPro]

Jesus

What's scary is that I think the owner of userbenchmark actually believes that statement. Which might explain how he's so out of touch that he thinks his own crap doesn't stink and deserves to be locked behind a subscription. I'm just sad that there might be a not insignificant number of people that pay for it.

I'm certain he must've lost a lot of money betting against amd on the stock market right around the time of zen1 and he never got over it.

The real Neanderthal social media account is the one writing that review.

Instruction and data caches have a real, tangible benefit. Although there is a point of diminishing returns, more L3 cache is absolutely worth a 10% clock speed trade-off for consumer systems. Fetching memory from the bus is an order of magnitude slower than fetching from cache, and the processor has to perform other work or stall while it's waiting for that.

But, knowing the bias of the reviewer, they're probably running DDR4 at 5200 MT/s (2000 over JEDEC specs) on their Intel systems to make up for the lack of cache while thinking, "just buy a more expensive processor and RAM, you brain-dead cretins."

I mean it’s kinda amazing that there’s someone looking at a 14th gen Intel CPU sucking back 200+ watts, while it gets spanked by a 7800X3D running at 65 watts, and thinking “AMD is hurting consumers”. That’s some next level shit.

Well said. The only thing hurting consumers is the reviewers omitting information or spreading misinformation.

Ok so I am about to build a new rig, and looking at the specs the X3D does seem less powerful and more expensive than the regular 7950.

While I completely agree that this guy seems extremely biased and that he comes off like an absolute dickbag, I don’t think the essence of his take is too far off base if you strip off the layers of spite.

Really, it seems like the tangible benefit of the X3D that most people will realize is that it offers similar performance with lower energy consumption, and thus lower cooling requirements. Benchmarks from various sources seem to bear this out as well.

It seems like a chip that in general performs on par with the 7950x but with better efficiency, and if you have a specific workload that can benefit from the extra cache it might show a significant improvement. Higher end processors these days already have a fuckton of cache so it isn’t surprising to me that this doesn’t benchmark much better than the cheaper 7950x.

Why are you talking about the 7950, the review is about the 5800X3D, when it released AM5 amd Ryzen 7000 chips were not released.

Seems a bit silly to say the (lainch) review is right and then use a piece of hardware that didn't exist at the time as proof.

How about you compare the 5800X3D to a 5800X and a 5900X instead?

I was comparing the 7950x and the 7950x3d because those are the iterations that are available right now and what I have been personally comparing as I mentioned. I apologize if I wasn’t clear enough on that point.

My point was that the essence of the take, which I read to be, “CPUs with lower clocks but way more cache only offer major advantages in specific situations” is not particularly off base.

I still fail to see how comparing an AM5 chip is in any way shape or form a good addition for discussing an objectively terrible review of a late addition the AM4 product family. What you say might be true... for AM5. Which is not the subject of the review everyone is talking about. Nor is anybody except you talking about what X3D currently offers, we're all talking about a review that, at the time it was written, was horribly researched, full of bias and false facts.

You coming in and suddenly talking about the 7950X/X3D adds nothing of value to the topic at hand. Because the topic at hand isn't "Is X3D worth it" it's specifically "look at how badly Userbenchark twisted this 5800X3D review".

So sorry to interrupt your circlejerk about this guy’s opinion on 3d V-Cache technology with a tangentially related discussion about 3d V-Cache technology here on the technology community.

I fully understand the point you’re trying to make here, but just as you think my comments added nothing to the discussion, your replies to them added even less.

The only reason I can think for a site to do this is that they were about to go under already. This will absolutely tank them as there are free alternatives.

Also watch out for AMD’s army of Neanderthal social media accounts on reddit, forums and youtube, they will be singing their own praises as usual.

Wat

Fellow AMD Neanderthal Army soldiers: any idea when I get my cool uniform and ...paycheck?

Zen 4 needs to bring substantial IPC improvements for all workloads, rather than overpriced "3D" marketing gimmicks.

...

... the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D performs reasonably consistently under varying real world conditions.

Uhh.... Aren't... Aren't these two statements kinda contradictory?

Not if you remember that the writers are being paid by Intel. Then, it all comes together.

You're expecting rationale from someone who just made crazy statements because their feeling are hurt.

Uhh.... Aren't... Aren't these two statements kinda contradictory?

No no, you see; it performs reasonably consistency under varying real world conditions but for a CPU to truly shine it needs to handle all workloads, including unrealistic synthetic ones.

I'm sure there are niche users for who paying the price of admission is acceptable, but for myself and I assume a vast number of other users, when I'm comparing performance of hardware I'm already checking reviews on multiple other sites, so this will only mean I don't bother to check their site.

I haven't visited their site in a long time though, so I'm not sure what value-adds they offered that might make the price more palatable.

None.

The actual "single core", "multi-core" were basically fine last I was aware, but they went so far into apeshit meltdown about the fact that AMD was offering better value than Intel with Ryzen (which is kind of back and forth since, but AMD is the reason I could get a 16 (real, capable of demanding single core loads too) core for $500 a couple years ago, not too long after Intel was selling 6 cores for more than that.) that it undermined everything else.

Anyways, UB's owner didn't like that AMD had good shit so he kept changing the "gaming/desktop/whatever" grade formulas to tilt the comparisons to Intel using more and more hilarious mechanisms. It started with a reasonable "you don't really benefit from games past 4/6/8 cores" and de-emphasizing super high core counts that hadn't really been an issue before, but it quickly degraded into obviously cheating hard by whatever means necessary to punish AMD, with even worse diatribes in the descriptions to match.

The value-add is the comedy of a man pretending an Intel Q6600 is better than a Ryzen 3600X.

Of all the things to try and monetize with a subscription…

Who’s more brain damaged, the site owner or the people that actually pay for it?

Nothing of value has been lost

Right so clearly userbenchmark is trash, but where could one, hypothetically, go, to, hypothetically, compare the performance of various cpus, hypothetically?

The phoronix testing site can be alright, if a little haphazard and spotty

Phoronix is excellent in that not only does it document all of the testing procedures, they provide instructions on how to replicate everything, and using the Phoronix Test Suite allows you to replicate all the tests locally.

It's much more comprehensive than most of the other sites.

I don’t mean actual phoronix articles, I mean their user score aggregator thing that is a little hard to understand

Yes, their scoring tool. Which is dead simple to use and explains the rest set up so it can be replicated.

Why on earth do they have a monthly subscription on something people maybe use once every 1 or two years?

Who is actually going to pay a netflix sub to see marginally bad data that often?

Like Netflix I understand if you cannot help yourself.

But is there a band of computer nerds out there, that I don't know about, that want play by play updates on how a graphics card is preforming compared to others? On a monthly basis?

Being a number nerd, I can see the appeal for something like this (extremely bad quality of data aside), or at least I do frequently visit OpenBenchmarkin.org (similar concept than UserBenchmark, but open source).

I also know 1 person who is obsseded with constantly buying/selling parts for their PC, and for whatever reason still uses UB after I told them how shit it is.

My guess is that this will also resonate with some Intel fanboys.

All of this is more of an exception to the rule, but they need just a few bunch of people subscribing to generate more profit than before.

The enshitification will continue until all are poor and desolate.

This site was grossly misleading at best, and commonly actively hostile to accurate information. Making it so less people can read the bad information has made the world better.

Can't enshitificate what was already shit to begin with

Oh no! I won't be able to see crappy biased comparisons and benchmarks...

That don't actually work. My system can tell what memory I have, but you can't? Fuck that website

My system can tell what memory I have, but you can’t?

Wait, I'm confused about this. Are you upset the site can't tell what RAM you have. Because I'm pretty certain there is no way a site could tell that.

You give it permissions to scan. It can tell what processor, MB, and GPU I have. But not memory? Or can't clock the speed? It's a crap matrix to measure your computer's performance and useless. It's just an elitist score board. A working rig is good enough. We all want the next big thing.

The fee is only for their benchmarking software, whose results get uploaded to the website.

only a limited unspecified number of users can test for free at any one time, and if no slots are open, then only subscribers to the $10-per-year Pro plan can test

When there are free slots, users will have to complete a 3D captcha minigame where the goal is to shoot down 13 ships. The minigame isn’t particularly difficult on the surface, but it can get very tedious as there are very few opportunities for users to actually shoot down any ships. We attempted to complete the captcha ourselves but gave up after a few minutes

The ship minigame actually isn't too hard. You do have to realize that the side panels are radars. However, it requires at least 15 minutes of time at first sight, just for a benchmark?

Once we reach the second threshold, to confirm you're not a bot and submit a benchmark you need to beat Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Once we reach the third threshold, to confirm you are a sadistic gamer and submit a benchmark, you need to play through all 326 paths of Shadow The Hedgehog on an online GameCube emulator in this window.

...why the fuck does a program running a benchmark on my PC need a "free slot" to function?

It's crazy I had to scroll down this far to see a comment from someone that actually read the article.

You guys read the articles? I just read the comments. Scrolling to here I've learned that:

  1. The founder of userbenchmark apparently started the site to allegedly manipulate stocks. Specifically Intel and AMD stocks.
  2. There's other sites than my goto sites from passmark.
  3. Some lemmings actually read the articles abd
  4. The website isn't really getting paywalled.

YAY FREE ADVERTISEMENT LETS GO LOSERBENCHMARK!!!!11111

In all seriousness, these guys are ONLY the top google result because of all the "controversy." They do it for a reason. Every time i've seen a thread talking about them i've literally downvoted it because the only way to stop the cycle is to just let them die a slow death which as far as I can tell is never going to happen. Their business model is better than anybody talking about them, posting about them, or generating ad revenue from making articles about them. We're the clowns.

10 dollars a month to be told AMD is behind its competition based on vibes

That was the only reason to use the site lol other paid options are way better. All userbenchmarks was good for was giving you a rough idea that your hardware was performing as it was expected to.

Is anyone else bothered that the URL of this article turns the $ into the word "pound"?

It was kind of shitty but it was also useful for making sure that you didn't have some sort of configuration error that was negatively affecting performance. I'm sure they'll be replaced by something else though.

Uh, I used it two times in the past, am shocked reading the replies here lol, where can I compare two cpus then?

Go watch tech channels on YT, there are many great channels. Gamer's Nexus also has a website (completely ad free too) that has all of their benchmark results.

Also, Phoronix although it is Unix centric

Go watch tech channels on YT

Having to sift through who knows how many videos to get information that could be a graphic with numbers? Yeah, no, thanks.

I find this site useful, it's part of Passmark - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

YouTube has a search function you know

Just search GN channel for the part you want to buy

It's much better than a narrow benchmark like PassMark and they show actual real world performance

If I want to compare part X with 3 others, I'll have to "watch" 4 videos. Give me the benchmark of each, plus the high/avg/low fps for a number of games and their settings, something Ars Technica does, and it'll take me less time to compare than it'll take to find the videos I "need" to watch.

... The videos have comparison charts, have you actually never watched one

And Ars is also a very good source

1 more...

That's a bold move cotton, let's see how it plays out for them...

Ah that's funny. Anyways, time to go back to forgetting that site is a thing.