The HW sites are analyzing synthetic benches and technical data and post the results in graph form.
Most of those graphs will never be useful for 99.9% of the PC users but the HW enthusiasts take them like gospels. A little shorter bar is a disaster. The dudes never question if they really need that longer bar, they just see the obvious difference and act accordingly to the Pavlov conditional reflex.
Then the HW enthusiasts write on the forums convincing the people without knowledge that they
really need that Intel CPU or that other piece of HW that's so much better. I 've seen countless gamers on a budget being convinced to buy an expensive CPU (see the charts) and not having enough money left to buy a decent video card.
Insert Anand or other HW site benchmark here
The HW sites themselves are proud to be highly technical and give no hint about the usefulness of those benches and results in the real life. I doubt they even know it.
For instance in MS Excel Monte Carlo simulation the Ph II 955 has a score of 20. 20 what? The 2500K has a score of 15.4. Is 20 a disaster? Is it good enough? Will my Excel table stall and crash my PC?
The most ludicrous thing is that
they have to tell you if lower is better or higher is better proof that we don't know what they're talking about. But do they?I have yet to see a HW site that tells you:
- The CPU "X" is slower in this bench than the CPU "Y" but don't sweat over this. You will never need that extra performance whatsoever. Actually a score of 20 in the MS Excel Monte Carlo simulation is like 10x the performance you will ever need. Scratch that, forget it.
The thing is
any modern quad can be very well used for gaming, especially at the new standard 1080p resolution and the difference between an expensive CPU and a cheap quad are minimal once you get a decent video card and use that resolution. But no, in the
benchmarkland the Phenom II or Bulldozer are crap. They can't even play flash games, see those tiny bars?
Here's the torque graph for two modern cars
See? The Focus is no good, the Golf has a longer bar. Don't buy the Focus, it's a disaster I tell ya.
The HW sites should explain the benches and tell us when the result in bench is
good enough for a regular user and what kind of users would really need a higher score in that bench. This doesn't happen.
It should be a red line in those benches, above it every single CPU is fine for a regular user, below is bad.