Digital Foundry is the Performance Review Top Tier But....

[Pemalite]

ArchangelMadzz said:

Their new reviews of the Intel 10th Gen are not good from a scientific perspective. 
When you're comparing the difference between 2 different variables you want to keep everything is equal as possible.

You wouldn't test the sound quality between Spotify and Youtube by using different headphones for each platform. So obviously with CPU reviews it's very important to compare using the same GPU, RAM amount and speed, etc etc.

I assume Digital Foundry did this, but as they explain in the review they used a 240mm Storm Castle AIO Water Cooler on the Intel platform. And they went with the stock cooler bundled with the AMD CPU.

I genuinely do not see the logic behind this, we know that Ryzen's power management clocks the CPU higher as the temps are lower. It's CPU reviewing 101 to use the same(roughly the same) cooler and not entirely different cooling mediums.

(Also I'm not sure why they're still testing Crysis 3, The Witcher 3 and older titles when people are buying these very expensive CPU's to play modern games).

I love these guys, but that's a serious miss-step. 

When it comes to hardware reviews, it's best to stick with Anandtech.

Crysis 3 is a logical choice due to it's game engine that is used in other titles, even more modern ones, it gives us an idea of how that engine will typically run on certain sets of hardware.

And when gathering a heap of games for a benchmark suite, it is good to get an equal mix of games which typically favor Intel and AMD, that way you remove hardware bias.

Witcher 3 is still a pretty technically impressive title to benchmark with, got no issue with it being used... It's good to retain a few older games in a benchmark suite so you can see the performance progressions generationally with hardware, because lets face it... The individual who is upgrading to a Core i5 10600K isn't typically going to be a Ryzen 5 or i5 9600K, it will be from much older hardware like the 5600K, 4600K etc'.


As for the cooler, I can see what Digital Foundry has done here... And I share your concerns.
The issue is AMD bundles a cooler, Intel doesn't with the i5 10600K and i9 10900K, so digital foundry probably just grabbed "whatever" and threw it onto the Intel platform.

They should have done the same for the AMD.

In saying that, they could have ran the AMD numbers a long time ago, so they may not have re-ran the actual numbers again for this particular benchmark/review.

Captain_Yuri said:

Yea I haven't watched DF for PC tech reviews for a very long time. I like Gamers Nexus cause they do very in depth tech reviews and they do it very well.

I will say that one of the problems with Ryzen is that it doesn't overclock very well vs Intel which does. But that does mean that Intel's power draw is pretty crazy, specially with 14nm vs 7nm on Ryzen and needs very beefy cooling compared to Ryzen. I do think they still should have used the same cooler though and made the setups as close to each other as possible. I guess DF's problem is that they don't do as many PC videos as say Gamers Nexus so they don't invest much when it comes to their PC testing setups.

I don't mind gamers nexus's actual content.
I just can't stand the presenters voice, hair and how he waffles on. But that's just me personally... So will prefer to wait on Anandtech or Linus.

JRPGfan said:

You have to question why pc guys are benchmarking these things at 1080p or 720p as well.

You should be giveing people a honest representation of real world performance.
Now one buys a Geforce 2080ti to game at 720p or 1080p.

The only reason they dont show the 1440p or 2160p (4k) results, is because the differnce in CPU performance in gameing go away at that point.
Ei. the graphics card becomes the bottleneck.

That is exactly why you don't run CPU benchmarks at a high resolution... It turns the benchmark into a GPU benchmark, not a CPU one.

You want to showcase the CPU differences as much as possible.