OnePlus 5 caught gaming benchmarks (again)

The OnePlus series has always had the ethos of flagship performance at mid-tier prices. (Source: The Verge)

Chinese manufacturer OnePlus has been once again caught by XDA in manipulating phone behavior for higher benchmark scores. In this case, the tweaks cause the OnePlus 5 to score around 5 percent higher than other Snapdragon 835 handsets, but at the cost of the phone heating up to nearly 50C.

Douglas Black, Published 06/21/2017

Earlier in the year, Chinese smartphone manufacturers Meizu and OnePlus got caught red-handed "cheating" at benchmarks by notable Android development forum XDA. The companies had slyly implemented a feature that invisibly pegged all the CPU cores to maximum as soon as a recognized benchmark was launched, resulting in higher scores than other phones with the same chipsets. XDA has once again caught OnePlus's gaming the scores of the OnePlus 5 with a similar trick.

Earlier, the OnePlus 3T boosted its benchmark scores by boosting its CPU frequency when a benchmark was running. This time, however, XDA found that the minimum frequencies of the "little" cores were pegged to their maximum, again forcing 100 percent during benchmarks. OnePlus CEO Carl Pei defended the phone's behavior on Reddit, claiming that the phone was performing the way it would when any resource-intensive game was launched. However, users challenged Pei on this explanation over the abnormally high heat output of the phone when benchmarking — up to 50C.

Whether Pei's explanation justifies the benchmarking behavior of the OnePlus 5 is up to you, but either way, we'd recommend against purchasing a phone solely on its benchmark performance.