News Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a £10 monthly subscription

[Admin]

Infamous for its rants about AMD and leaking early hardware samples, Userbenchmark will now be charging users to run its benchmark tool.

Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a £10 monthly subscription : Read more

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I doubt anybody will care and it's going to flounder.

 

[COLGeek]

This is the most "meh" thing I have read all day. Good riddance as I am sure it will be a tremendous success...not.

 

[stonecarver]

In 2016/17 you could go there and get at least results between GPU A and B.

I always scratched my head where there math came up with there % calculation.

You used to be shown FPS also between card A or B with games as well and that today is a flaky slope.

It always got the year release of GPU off as well.

Not gonna miss it as it was already bad.

 

[usertests]

And nothing of value was lost.

 

[purposelycryptic]

Good riddance to bad trash - especially since they even decided to walk themselves to the curb.

 

[Bennett_2]

Infamous for its rants about AMD and leaking early hardware samples, Userbenchmark will now be charging users to run its benchmark tool.

Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a £10 monthly subscription : Read more

I get that the author is trying to be non-biased... But userbenchmark's bias is very well documented. Hell, go on there and compare the 12700p against the 7745hx. Userbenchmark's result is that the 12700p is 20% faster than the 7745hx. Go to literally any other source and it will say the 7745hx is between 10-20% faster.


Userbenchmark has consistently changed their scoring criteria, cherry picking (and often boardline falsifying) data to make Intel look better than AMD.

 

[mdd1963]

Infamous for its rants about AMD and leaking early hardware samples, Userbenchmark will now be charging users to run its benchmark tool.

Controversial benchmarking website goes behind paywall — Userbenchmark now requires a £10 monthly subscription : Read more

This plan has 'Mega Fail' written all over it.....; nobody is paying $10 even *once*, much less monthly for this 'service'.

 

[Notton]

The only way that site's finances makes sense to me, is if they get paid gobs of money by Intel behind the scenes.
There's no way that site rakes in enough money on its own when they pay google to boost their search results.

 

[ddelrio]

Good riddance.

 

[HopefulToad]

How to Utterly Decimate Your User Base: A Guide
Starring UserBenchmark

Edit: Except... I visited the website itself and see no evidence of this anywhere. You'd think if they were moving to some kind of subscription-only service, it'd be the first button I could click on their home page. TH, can you provide a better source than some random dude on TwXtter?

Edit 2: Just downloaded UserBenchmark test suite and I'm running it now, without having paid $10 first. So, make of that what you will.

Userbenchmark is obviously biased and unprofessional in their published write-ups, and their comparisons between hardware may not be the best, but it's still useful for sanity-checking your system to make sure it's performing about as expected.

Edit 3: I did have to solve a "captcha" in the form of playing a game where you shoot the red ships. When I ran the test a second time, it took much longer to do. Still, not exactly paywalled.

 

[SirStephenH]

How to Utterly Decimate Your User Base: A Guide
Starring UserBenchmark

Edit: Except... I visited the website itself and see no evidence of this anywhere. You'd think if they were moving to some kind of subscription-only service, it'd be the first button I could click on their home page. TH, can you provide a better source than some random dude on TwXtter?

Edit 2: Just downloaded UserBenchmark test suite and I'm running it now, without having paid $10 first. So, make of that what you will.

Userbenchmark is obviously biased and unprofessional in their published write-ups, and their comparisons between hardware may not be the best, but it's still useful for sanity-checking your system to make sure it's performing about at expected.

Edit 3: I did have to solve a "captcha" in the form of playing a game where you shoot the red ships. When I ran the test a second time, it took much longer to do. Still, not exactly paywalled.

I checked it out after reading this too and I also found no evidence of a paywall. I also did a quick Google search and found this article as apparently the only source of this information, aside from the single Twitter post the article refers to. All the comments out there that I saw are either people ragging on UB or people who have checked out the site and found no evidence of a paywall.

Considering the insanity of charging $10/month or anything really, I doubt this was ever true.

 

[ivan_vy]

I did have to solve a "captcha" in the form of playing a game where you shoot the red ships.

first time using that tool, I hate it with passion, my time is far more valuable, 'annoying customer to make them pay' is a horrible tactic, I'll avoid them like the plague.

 

[Psiboy69]

These tools have just written their own death certificate. Good riddance to bad rubbish and worse people.

 

[bit_user]

the benchmark’s CPU-memory latency test is pretty unique and notable.

There are other memory latency benchmarks out there. In the past, I've used one by SiSoft. AIDA64 also makes one. In principle, it's really not hard.

Here's a free, web-based one. Note that they recommend Chrome or Edge:

Memory Latency Test

This is a memory latency test tool written in JavaScript by our author clamchowder. You can use this to measure the latencies of your caches and memory on your CPU without the need for an external …

chipsandcheese.com

If you're more technical, here's one they wrote in C/C++/asm:

https://github.com/clamchowder/Microbenchmarks/tree/master/MemoryLatency
​

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

Though truth be told this does worry me a but that it might cause others like 3DMark to switch to a subscription service. But since it's a benchmark that nobody cares about from a site that many consider the least reliable I am hoping this means there is far less of a chance of that happening than if some major benchmarking tool went subscription.

 

[-Fran-]

I wonder if they're testing the waters by "leaking" this information and checking reactions? Another simple take is they want the traffic to their page by any means necessary as you often do a "hoax" type advertising?

Still, it doesn't take away the fact that site is cursed.

Regards.

 

[punkncat]

I actually have enjoyed certain aspects of UBM over the years, aside from the well documented Intel bias.

You get these users here who have no clue at all what they have, ask for specs and get a copy of the "About" page from their PC, don't know the hardware, don't know what they have running, and so on....Very handy troubleshooting tool in some instances.
The benchmark aspect has always been considered "take with a grain of salt" but semi useful. Not $12 a month semi useful.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Whilst I would be a staunch serial hater of UBM, and would never advise anyone to use it as a tool for solving a PC problem, I do have it as part of my bench suite. This also includes AIDA/OCCT/Prime 95/Cinebench/CPU-z et al.

What's odd is, that I only recently signed up to the Pro version of UBM, which is 10£$€ per year! Suddenly it's gone to 10 per month!? Not good. At 10£$€ per month it gives you nothing worthwhile.

Edit: Okay, so in setting up a subscription, is that any different from Tom's using a myriad of ads to earn their penny?

 

[MoxNix]

What a concept, let's charge people to use THE WORST benchmarking tool there is.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

I actually have enjoyed certain aspects of UBM over the years, aside from the well documented Intel bias.

You get these users here who have no clue at all what they have, ask for specs and get a copy of the "About" page from their PC, don't know the hardware, don't know what they have running, and so on....Very handy troubleshooting tool in some instances.
The benchmark aspect has always been considered "take with a grain of salt" but semi useful. Not $12 a month semi useful.

Agree with you, the only thing semi useful was whether or not a PC was running in XMP or not. This info can be found very easily in CPU-z.

 

[SkyHighest]

Whilst I would be a staunch serial hater of UBM, and would never advise anyone to use it as a tool for solving a PC problem, I do have it as part of my bench suite. This also includes AIDA/OCCT/Prime 95/Cinebench/CPU-z et al.

What's odd is, that I only recently signed up to the Pro version of UBM, which is 10£$€ per year! Suddenly it's gone to 10 per month!? Not good. At 10£$€ per month it gives you nothing worthwhile.

Edit: Okay, so in setting up a subscription, is that any different from Tom's using a myriad of ads to earn their penny?

I can use an ad blocker and never see ads.

With a subscription I must pay or not use it

Yes, they are very different.

 

[CelicaGT]

Whether or not the article is correct, UBM is an utterly biased and therefor completely useless piece of burning trash. If I cannot trust the results of a benchmark suite I have no use for it. Any other functionality it provides can be done with better, trustworthy suites that work hard to eliminate bias and post useful results. Don't support it, don't use it, stop recommending it. UBM has been spiraling the drain for years now, it's time for it to go.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

I can use an ad blocker and never see ads.

With a subscription I must pay or not use it

Yes, they are very different.

Yes, of course, but it comes down to both Tom's and UBM earning money, and possibly so for their survival (maybe not Tom's so much any more). This is the only way UBM can make money. Can we blame them for trying?

 

[rluker5]

I just downloaded it. I just have to complete the annoying, time wasting captcha thing. It is very aggravating with a touchpad. Only moderately aggravating with a mouse. At least it is free, I wouldn't pay $10 to use it. I think that captcha thing came out as an extension of their skill test, and I think their skill test might have come out to appease the people who wanted to show that they can get good shooter results in a lower specced system.

I used to use it a lot more often. It was quick, convenient all in one way to check that everything is running well, and to see the results of tuning on a different way of testing. The hoops I have to jump through to run it now are a significant added annoyance though.

The CPU tests do seem to favor Intel, but they also favor normal consumer use and responsiveness for the most part. Biased towards better performance of lower numbers of threads vs scoring flat across them all, and biased towards lower memory latency. Both of these seem like good choices for the non technical user that would use Userbenchmark in the first place. For technical users with workstations there are more specific benchmarks to their use cases that would be more applicable. There are other CPU benchmarks that are far worse, like 3DMark CPU tests in gaming benchmarks that are often wildly disproportional to relative gaming performance.

They are not perfect. I think that the memory latency part of CPU performance should be replaced by a system memory latency score that adds a multiplier for the performance in the more frequently accessed lower sized areas to better reflect the added benefits of large cache. But you can't have everything.

And the CPU reviewers who do the text writeup are definitely Intel biased. Not as bad as trash talking commenters on some sites, but some do sound in the same vein. Maybe the reviewers are trying to push back against what they see as pervasive bias for AMD on many tech/tech media sites? Maybe they are trying to drum up some hype and targeting some benchmark entertainment market? Get free media exposure?

Also the results give you a lot of compliments where other benchmarks just give you numbers. Which also sets this software apart from others with a less technical, more entertainment bias. For example: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/67297088