Are Review Sample CPUs Cherry-Picked? $H!T Viewers Say 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,254 words · ~6 min read
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engineering samples or review samples
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they're cherry picked so that the media outlets
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like Linus tech tips will see inflated performance and overclocking numbers so
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that you yes you jerry will get suckered
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into buying a new CPU every year right
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well that's what people keep telling us and
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this common knowledge has been around for years now so today in our inaugural
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installment of [ __ ] viewers say we are going to either prove that there
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is something to this or debunk this myth once and for all
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thanks to zotac by the way for bringing us today's video the mech one pc is an
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ultra slim desktop built for gaming featuring a sleek robotic themed design
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check it out at the link below to learn more
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so here's how we decided to run our test we grabbed our sample core i5 8400 and
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not to play favorites our sample ryzen 5
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1600x then we went to the local nci
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sorry memory express to buy retail chips of the same to
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compare them against for your peace of mind we will upload the entire uncut
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clip of us buying the chips and running
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our tests on them we're gonna have that linked below anyway let's talk about why
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it might make sense or might not for a company to seed reviewers a superior
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sample now the obvious answer we hear all the
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time is that they would get articles boasting of better performance numbers
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or a better overall user experience in
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that initial oh so important wave of
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launch videos and articles enticing
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consumers to open up their wallets all
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while not actually having to provide that level of performance or polish at
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retail but conspiracy theories aside would this
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actually make business sense imagine this you've got a lemonade stand where
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you sell the freshest tastiest lemonade on the block
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on day one and then you swap it out with
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lemon pledge now a lot of people are gonna show up to
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buy on the second day but as soon as your reputation for selling what is
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literally furniture polish spreads the kids across the street who were selling
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cheap powdered lemonade the whole time are gonna take the bulk of the market
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share now we're not saying this has never
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happened think back to watch dogs and no man's sky at e3 both ubisoft and sony
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respectively showed off beautifully complex worlds with tons of graphical
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detail and then both of them ended up being
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significantly simplified upon release
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now while in some industries it is possible to get away with this kind of
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bs in general the negative pr has the
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potential to completely stall future sales so it is not a risk to be taken
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lightly and in electronics the up to
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multi-billion dollar investment that goes into designing and fabricating a
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processor design makes this kind of switcheroo an economic impossibility
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like it's not a different paint job so then let's look at one of the other
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theories maybe they're just taking golden samples off of what is otherwise
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the regular production line now that one is much more likely
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but it doesn't really hold up to closer scrutiny either from my experience and
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others earlier cpus are produced at the tail
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end of the manufacturing learning process when viable yields are lower and
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compared to the more mature units that come later
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can actually require more voltage to
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maintain a specific clock speed not to mention that they might have
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poorer memory compatibility or might output more heat at the same performance
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levels even the couple of weeks between early
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sample shipping out and retail availability can result in improvements
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now there have been and there always will be exceptions to this but it is far
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more likely that we are dealing with the same silicon lottery as any other CPU
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because you got to remember even on the same wafer no two processors will have
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identical characteristics so if it doesn't make any sense why do people
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still think it's happening most of the time as far as we can tell
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it just seems to be a fanboy argument justifying why someone disagrees with
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the results being published by the dishonest
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media and frankly we're just so tired of hearing
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it that we not once but twice
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the first time we bunged up the footage so we had to start over including buying
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two more cpus Anthony
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not once but twice went out and bought
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these cpus so we could show you this
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tldr for gaming we found basically no
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variance in frame rates even in directx 12 mode while synthetics actually
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favored our retail chips as for productivity tests on the Intel
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side our chips traded blows back and forth but it's not a clear-cut victory
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for either side and we put this down to normal chip or even run to run variants
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due to the dynamic and reactive nature of turbo boost and then as for team red
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it was pretty much even across the board so for better or for worse AMD appears
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to be shipping exactly the same product today that they were in april of last
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year and then to back that up we even tried overclocking both of our AMD chips
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our Intel ones were locked but both of our AMD chips hit identical clocks at
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identical voltages and identical temperatures they even crashed at
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identical settings so in summary then
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this conspiracy theory is busted for the
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two major CPU players and while nothing that we've said today
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is going to prevent people from making these arguments in the future what i
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hope is that it has at least armed the rest of you with the ammunition that you
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need to shut them down once and for all
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it doesn't make business sense it doesn't make engineering sense it just
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doesn't make sense
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so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do right
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that one yeah but it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check
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out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description
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maybe literally these ones maybe we'll put them on ebay i don't know also link
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down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join we have so many processors now