I spent a great deal of time recently researching a platform upgrade from AMD to Intel. In my quest, I researched gaming benchmarks from various sites, and meta-benchmarks like PassMark and UserBenchmark. I came to the conclusion that none of these metrics on their own seem to paint a picture that makes sense.
For instance in gaming benchmarks you sometimes have Skylake blowing out Haswell, and other times there's almost no difference. This occurs even when the test setups are very similar across different sites.
With PassMark, you have the FX-8350 doing as well as an i7 2700k, which most people regard as still being a viable option.
UserBenchmark shows that the i5 6600k has better single threaded performance than the 4790k, even though we know that can't be possible given the clock speed advantage Haswell has.
All of this research has left me confused as to whether or not any of these benchmarks are even useful in making an informed decision.
So how do you wade through all of this contradictory data? What benchmarks do you trust?
For instance in gaming benchmarks you sometimes have Skylake blowing out Haswell, and other times there's almost no difference. This occurs even when the test setups are very similar across different sites.
With PassMark, you have the FX-8350 doing as well as an i7 2700k, which most people regard as still being a viable option.
UserBenchmark shows that the i5 6600k has better single threaded performance than the 4790k, even though we know that can't be possible given the clock speed advantage Haswell has.
All of this research has left me confused as to whether or not any of these benchmarks are even useful in making an informed decision.
So how do you wade through all of this contradictory data? What benchmarks do you trust?