Update 04/25: After publishing this review last week, it quickly became clear that some of our results were not aligned with those from other media. Initially we were under the impression that this was as a result of the Spectre and Meltdown (or Smeltdown) updates, as we were one of the few media outlets to go back and perform retesting under the new standard.
However in order to ensure that our results were accurate and completely reproducible, we decided to undertake an extensive internal audit of our test results. As a result of that process we believe we have found the reason for our test results being so different from the results of others, which we have
documented in detail in this follow-up article. In short, an issue with a non-standard use timers on Windows was causing the performance of both AMD and Intel processors to dip, particularly impacting the latter.
Now that we know what the issue is and how to correct for it, we are going back and re-running all of our benchmarks for this review to generate updated results. Some of those results have already been added to this article, and the rest are expected next week. In the meantime I have decided to retracting our conclusion for this article until the rest of our results are in, and we can update our conclusion to account for any differences. -
Ryan Smith