Samsung pulled some dirty tricks with benchmark testing with the Galaxy S4 before, and now they've been caught rigging the Galaxy Note 3 to perform better in benchmark tests. Steroids for Samsung phones now?

Anyway, Ars Technica reports that the Note 3 can inflate benchmark scores by as much as 20%. This means that while it looks like the gadget may be 20% faster in some tests, its real life performance will hardly show the same speed.

Ars noticed the speed discrepancy because the Note 3's 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor was able to smoke LG's G2 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 in benchmark tests. Which by the way, shouldn't happen in identical SoCs.

So how did they do it? Ars discovered that certain benchmark tests would trigger maximum 2.3GHz CPU speed on all four cores of the Snapdragon 800 processor while the same benchmark test was just re-named to show three of the four cores completely shut off and other running at 300MHz.

In other words, Samsung had made the CPU push the pedal to the floor in specific tests just to look good.

Here's the difference in speed that Ars found:



The Note 3 outperforms the LG G2 even though the G2's guts are similar to the Note 3. [Ars Technica]