OnePlus is cheating benchmarks again

OnePlus has a history of cheating on benchmarks, and despite saying specs aren’t important, they’re doing it again on the OnePlus 5. They were caught doing it with the OnePlus 3T, but apparently, they didn’t learn their lesson. So here we are again.

XDA discovered that the OnePlus 5 has a mechanism built-in to target popular benchmarking apps. When detected, the phone locks in the highest clock speed. A phone doesn’t normally stay at the max clock speed for long. When the cheating is disabled, the OnePlus 5 is at max speed for only a quarter of the time.

This is cheating in a more subtle way. They aren’t overclocking the processor, but they’re putting the phone in a performance mode that you would never experience in day to day use. The results are unrealistic. OnePlus claims they are just trying to show the “potential” of the phone, but if it’s never performing like that in real life, is it really potential?

What do you think about cheating benchmarks? Do you even care about benchmarks?