The OnePlus 5 was recently launched and based on the specs of the phone, it appears that it is a pretty powerful handset. It packs the latest processors and comes with a whopping 6GB of RAM, but yet despite these powerful specs, it seems that OnePlus has decided to game the benchmarks by making its phone seem more powerful than it is.
Or at least that’s what the folks at XDA are accusing the company of. In the report on XDA, it seems that the OnePlus 5 is targeting specific benchmarks by name, in the sense that if it detects that it is being run on specific benchmarks, it will then try to boost its performance to the max in order to gain a higher score. For example in some instances the smaller cores of the Snapdragon 835 used in the phone were capped at 1.9GHz for 95% of the benchmark, versus normal use where they might only hit their max frequency about 24.4% of the time.
This is actually not the first time that OnePlus has been accused of trying to game the benchmark system, but it seems that they’re not too fussed about it. Note that OnePlus isn’t alone in this as other companies have also been found to be “cheating” benchmarks. OnePlus has since issued a statement which reads in part, “We are not overclocking the device, rather we are displaying the performance potential of the OnePlus 5.” The company’s co-founder Carl Pei has also weighed in on the issue in a post on Reddit.
That being said, benchmarks don’t necessarily reflect how good or bad a phone is. There are plenty of other factors that need to be considered, such as user interface, optimization of software for hardware, camera, display, etc. That being said, initial reviews of the OnePlus 5 appear to be largely positive, so we’re not sure if OnePlus really needed to bother gaming the system to begin with, but what do you guys think? Do you take benchmarks into account when deciding on which phone to get?
