Did OnePlus 5 Review units cheated Benchmarks? XDA thinks so

Just a few hours ago, OnePlus announced their flagship device OnePlus 5 and it has got into some serious trouble over the issue of faking the benchmark scores. As per an XDA developers report, OnePlus 5 review unit supplied to them came with “benchmark cheating mechanism” which suggests that OnePlus 5 is back to the same old tricks that they have been accused of before. Androidpure has no reason to distrust the XDA report as they have the required expertise and credibility for coming out with such analysis on the benchmarks issue.

As per XDA, OnePlus 5 cheating mechanisms intends to maximise benchmark scores even though there is no governor switches when a user enters a benchmark, the minimum frequency of the little cluster jumps to the maximum frequency as seen under performance governors. All little cores are affected and kept at 1.9GHz, and it is through this cheat that OnePlus achieves some of the highest GeekBench 4 scores of a Snapdragon 835 to date –  and likely the highest attainable given its no-compromise configuration with its specific configuration. A more detailed report be read on XDA portal from the link at the end of this post.

OnePlus has issued a statement to XDA which denies faking the benchmark scores. Here is the official statement:

People use benchmark apps in order to ascertain the performance of their device, and we want users to see the true performance of the OnePlus 5. Therefore, we have allowed benchmark apps to run in a state similar to daily usage, including the running of resource intensive apps and games. Additionally, when launching apps the OnePlus 5 runs at a similar state in order to increase the speed in which apps open. We are not overclocking the device, rather we are displaying the performance potential of the OnePlus 5.

As per XDA, as the benchmark cheating puts the device into a state which is explicitly not how the device will run in day to day usage, and it is representing performance that you will not see in other apps that aren’t specifically targetted by such boosts. Not just OnePlus, even other companies such as Samsung and HTC have been accused of faking the benchmarks before.

The presence of this cheating mechanism makes it a bigger problem as if true, it presents a greener picture of performance in the reviews posted by reviewers worldwide in spite of Snapdragon 835 already being a great SOC chip. We just wished that this had never happened.