Especially when their “We try to understand what a normal consumer would encounter, and not an enthusiast” argument holds no ground to excuse the final result which can most definitely be perceived by a paying pre-ordering customer as “Intel is so much better!”
The literal fact biased commissioned data came out at the same time as pre-orders is 100% suspect. No question.
The brutality continues:
I’m not sure what ‘normal’ consumer they had in mind that was likely to buy a 2700X, Threadripper or i9-9900K, especially if these are looking at gaming performance. Seems to me if someone is shelling out that kind of money for a pre-built, they are likely to get from a brand touting some sort of decent optimization/configuration from the get go, and better than stock cooling usually. If someone is building their own rig, on the other hand, and again shelling out that much money, they are very likely an enthusiast of at least some degree that has some kind of knowledge of what to do to get decent performance, and again, not likely using stock cooling at the least.
And if they are doing this with a 1080 Ti… all the more unlikely for above reasons.
It’s a poor excuse at the end of the day which doesn’t hold much water. Like @catsay mentioned, it seems they had a predetermined outcome, and ran tests to validate that outcome.
Not necessarily.
PC building isn’t hard. My girlfriend built her haswell box herself with no help and no prior experience.
(then again she also hackintoshed it herself too, so maybe she’s more nerdy than she lets on :D)
Plenty of people build their own and just load BIOS defaults, load XMP profile, and run the box cooler.
Which makes this even more egregious because Principled Tech made a variety of tweaks which MAKES PERFORMANCE WORSE than just running things out of the box… For AMD at least. Whilst the intel system was tweaked for improved performance.
My 2700x for example runs bios defaults, XMP profile for 2800mhz DDR4, box cooler, and beats most of the comparable systems on firestrike. Or did when i benched it last (a few months back).
A lot (note: NOT ALL) of the “enthusiast tweaking” in the BIOS, etc. is BULLSHIT and either only works in niche situations or is a total waste of time and effort IMHO.
Plenty of people self build purely to get the case they want and the exact hardware spec they want, with expansion capability. Not to tweak to the Nth degree.
Yay, finally someone to be angry at! All the internet trolls and basement monkeys got something to do (for like a week). Yes, PT messed up. Yes they need to revise there testing methods. But isn´t there anything important to report on?
If there is, it’s embargoed. NDAs are preventing any new news as of right now.
Seeing the history as analyzed by Jim gave me an idea.
Lets see what else whas commissioned by Intel corp or Principled Technologies…
Going to update things here as I go:
http://www.earthwalk.com/wp-content/uploads/Intel_processor-VS-ARM.pdf
Infact I’m going to go as far as saying that Principled Technologies is not far from being an Intel Front, that primarily exists to push Intel’s advertising and absolve Intel of direct legal responsibility.
Just about all of the ‘reports’ on Intel’s website are heavily biased as being ‘sourced’ from Principled Technologies.
In Total there are 1650 PDF’s on Principled Technologies Website
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf
1320 results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf intel
203 results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "commissioned by intel"
250 Results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf AMD
43 Results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "commissioned by amd"
97 results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf ARM
43 Results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "commissioned by lenovo"
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "commissioned by HP"
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "commissioned by dell"
Infact Intel’s Portfolio on the site is the oldest, dating back to as far as 2004.
https://www.principledtechnologies.com/portfolio-marketing.php#Intel2004
As such I will have to suggest that PT’s response to GN and the testing community was purely a response to save face.
Great job again. I am so happy you are a leader here!
edit - a little correction.
Now some interesting side points that Jim (AdoredTV) raised.
108 Results
site:principledtechnologies.com filetype:pdf "BAPCo" | "SYSmark"
The earliest Intel test from 2004.
An interesting historical test from 2008. Notably looking at the document you will notice a lot of parallels to their latest testing, it’s nearly the same style, patterns of testing and template. Close to unchanged except for the tables and colors in 10 years.
Further demonstrates that in actuality, PT cannot claim inexperience, incompetence or simple negligence to excuse themselves for as blatant mistakes they have made in the recent study commissioned by intel.
They have been in this field testing hardware as commissioned for over 10 years now.
In addition their testing over time shows a particular bias towards using benchmarks that have previously been demonstrated to be skewed in Intel’s favour.
Interesting the disclaimers and address are pretty much unchanged in 10 years.
If I dug further into this and scraped every single PDF off their page one could do simple sentiment analysis to demonstrate any biases.
But I’ll leave it at that since unless something else happens It’s not worth spending the time on that now.
Man, this should be presented to Hardware Unboxed Steve. This is a lot of work in a short period of time!
Sure, not necessarily, but that’s why I said very likely, rather than leaving it as “they are”. Qualifiers.
Yes, there is a subset of people that build very expensive rigs that don’t know or care about anything other than putting it together, but at least from my experience, while putting together a computer isn’t actually that hard now, most people simply don’t do it for a variety of reasons (including they know how but don’t want to put in even that much effort or time).
And if were talking about those that are willing to throw down $500 for the processor alone, on top of the money for a 1080 Ti, but think “eh, screw it on the heatsink” or aren’t willing to take any time to see if there is a good way to configure their system that’s already known or ask for help, that sub-set is likely no longer ‘normal’.
I wasn’t talking about just the tweaking side of things here, I was talking about things like “don’t set game mode on 2700X”, and “use something better than stock cooling”. Again, I’m talking about enough knowledge for “decent” performance, not “fully optimized”.
Im starting to think looking at the history PR are gaming idiots and bit the Social Media bullet. all there history is nothing gaming.
Every way there a gaming pedo now and stigma.
Who ever said benchmark ryzen 7 in gaming mode 
You did it.
I’m pretty sure Intel did and with good reason.
Took an Adored video to get me to look into the PDF…
wow didn’t know my R2700x is not a mainstream 8 core 16 thread processor… 
what does “GPU bound %” mean, though? Part of the time the rendering was GPU-bound? Makes no sense.
My best guess is the time of the benchmark when the GPU was the limiting factor.
Taking the numbers as “Intel was 13.6% faster than AMD” would be about what I expect from a $500 CPU
