Synthetic Benchmarks: To Consider Or Not When Buying New Phones?


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Synthetic benchmarks are present in the world since the time smart and powerful computers came into picture. They became the standard to compare the top of the line computers from various brands. Also they were used to compare the performance of processors and other devices that are connected to a computer computer’s performance. In this article will be covering the idea of whether or not to consider the synthetic benchmarks when you buy a new phone.

Ever since the advent of the smart phones, this custom of performing benchmarks has been adapted in the world of smart phones too. This is especially true for the Android phones. What these tools basically do is run simple tests on your phone and based on the results of these tests, they provide a total score to your phone.  This total score is then used to pit your phone against other phones that have been tested earlier or will be tested in the future. These apps also show the rank of your phone alongside the rank of your nearest competitor as well as the top notch phone with the latest specifications.

Many companies around the world use these apps to check how good their latest flagship smartphone scores and where does it stand amidst the competition. This is the reason why some of those leaks about the phones that haven’t been released yet happen even before the official announcement from the company.

Although these benchmarks help in ranking the phones against others, what goes wrong is the method that many of these apps use to test and rate the performance of the phones. Many of the phones that come these days with Android OS are heavily skinned with custom user interfaces (UI) that the companies put in place on top of the pure Android OS. Thus when the benchmark app runs tests, the performance of these phones is affected by the UI. Thus you will never really get the true benchmark of the hardware that lies underneath.

Some people at this point will make an argument that that is what is expected from the these benchmarks; the performance that these phones will give when the custom UI and all the extra apps that are installed are running simultaneously on the device. I partially agree to it. But the truth lies in the fact that these benchmark tools can give better results by simply tweaking a few minor things here and there. Also some of the results are so much affected by the these tweaks that a few minutes ago it will give a score of 8000 and after a little tweak it will give a score of around 10,000.

Also these tests are run on devices assuming ideal conditions which are far from the reality. The users will never use their phones under the so called ideal condition. An average user will generally install a few apps as well as some games on their phone. These apps that a user installs will mainly consist of Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and a few more. When a user installs these apps, they generally run always in the background as a service.

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Thus these apps will be always occupying memory in on the phone, resulting in slower device performance when the RAM is low due to these apps. Thus the ideal condition will never exist and hence the user experience will be quite different from user to user. Thus those benchmarks will never ever again come into picture.

I have attached an image above where I ran the benchmark tool on my device under two different conditions. This helped me boost the benchmark score but there was practically no difference in the performance of my device in these two completely different scenarios.

Thus considering just benchmark scores while you purchase a new phone will never really help you to get a new device. It will just be telling you how the phone performs under certain conditions which may or may not exist when you use that phone.

What you need to consider is simply what the users that have previously purchased a device say about it and try to have a firsthand experience before you purchase a device.Also read enough reviews online by experts that specialize in testing the performance of a device. Decent reviews of phones can be found at GSMARENA (my personal choice)as well as some other websites.

Well folks that’s what I got to say about Synthetic Benchmarks. If you got any suggestions or questions do let me know in the comment box below. Also if you have some more details to share do let me know!

– Anish Kumar


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