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Samsung is falsely inflating the scores of its new Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, according to a detailed story published by Ars Technica.
Reviews editor Ron Amadeo provides compelling evidence of his charges, which he says inflates the new smartphone’s performance scores by up to 20 percent when it specifically identifies popular benchmarking software such as Quadrant, Geekbench, and Linpack is running.
Indeed, CNET’s own testing of the Note 3 revealed a stratospheric Quadrant score of 23,048 — but that result now appears to be tainted.
Brian Bennett/CNET
During my testing of the Note 3, I chalked its impressive benchmark performance up to its muscular quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, the baddest mobile CPU you can get in an Android device. By contrast, LG’s flagship the G2 — which uses the same chip clocked at the same speed — notched 19,050 on Quadrant. The Note 3 has 3GB of RAM versus the G2’s 2GB.
Ironically, Amadeo’s follow-up testing with a modified benchmarking tool still put the Note 3 ahead of the G2, but by a more modest margin.
This isn’t the first time Samsung has been accused of gaming the system. The Korean electronics giant was also called out for rigging the Galaxy S4 test results in much the same way.
CNET has reached out to Samsung for comment regarding this issue. We’ll update this story when and if Samsung responds.
