Ars Technica put the Galaxy Note 3 to the test and discovered something fishy about the device’s benchmark scores. Despite having almost the same internals as the LG G2, the Note 3 blew the G2 out of the water. This discrepancy caused Ars Technica to take a closer look at how the Note 3 handles benchmarks and conclude that Samsung was artificially boosting the results.
Samsung is supposedly boosting the benchmark scores of the Note 3 by using a high-power CPU mode that kicks when the phone is running benchmarking apps. It is very similar to the speed boost Samsung gave to the international Galaxy S4, but this is the first time it has appeared in a US device. Ars also hints that a similar CPU mode may also be present in the new Note 10.1 tablet, which was announced alongside the Note 3.
Ars Technica was able to disable this power mode and reveal that this burst of speed elevated benchmark scores by up to 20%. To make matters worse, a deep dive into the files responsible for this speed bump revealed it was engineered to only kick in when the device was running popular benchmark apps like Geekbench, Quadrant, Antutu, Linpack, GFXBench and others. I’m not one to point fingers until we have all the details, but this is some pretty damning evidence that Samsung is using some trickery to improve the benchmark performance of its devices.
You can head over to the Ars Technica article for all the nitty, gritty details on how they reverse engineered the software on the phone and uncovered this scandalous behavior on the part of Samsung.
[Via Ars Technica]