UserBenchmark calls Media “incompetent smearers” in the face of CPU-weighting criticisms

Criticism is something that reviewers have to live with. With every viewpoint comes its detractors, that’s a fact of life. Nobody can be right about everything, and when it comes to opinions, there is never going to be an answer that satisfies everyone. 

Over the past few months, UserBenchmark has faced a lot of criticism; both from the tech press and from the PC hardware community. This critique came thanks to the website’s adjustments of their benchmark score weighting system, which pushed high core count processors down its official rankings. 

The conflict here is simple, UserBenchmark believes that faster single-threaded performance and performance at intermediate core counts matters more than the performance of heavily multi-threaded workloads. For this reason, UserBenchmark has reduced the influence of highly-threaded workloads within its benchmarking database. 

Most recently, UserBenchmark has reportedly removed, Multi-Threaded scores for over eight threads from its “Average User Bench”, at least according to recent chatter on Reddit. 

What’s more startling is how UserBenchmark has responded to the criticisms of the tech media. @KeithPlaysPC over on Twitter has spotted additions to UserBenchmark’s “About Us” page which calls members of the tech press “incompetent smearers”, a statement that’s directly linked to the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel.  

As a matter of record, we have saved UserBenchmark’s current “About Us” page using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Follow this link to see what UserBenchmark has to say about its critics.

Personally, I think it is a mistake for UserBenchmark to focus so heavily on CPU performance at low core/thread counts. Heavily multithreaded processors are becoming more and more common, and with that shift, today’s software is becoming increasingly multi-threaded. Then a 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700 is available for £140 new; it’s hard to argue that heavily multi-threaded processors aren’t mainstream.