I read and watch a decent number of PC hardware sites/channels and they don't seem to use geekbench. The only time I hear people mention geekbench is in relation to apple.
Is there a reason why pc hardware sites don't seem to use geekbench?
It is always better to benchmark with actual programs than it is with benchmark utilities. Geekbench's claims as a cross-platform test are also not really validated.
For example, let's check out the M1 Mini review that Anandtech did, specifically these two pages:
According to Geekbench, the M1 handily beats the 5950X in single-threaded work. However, according to Cinebench 1T and spec2017, the 5950X is faster at single-threaded. Who is "correct"?
The answer is a much more simple "look at the benchmark results that matter for your workloads." A good review will cover benchmarks of a variety of workloads as a result so you can figure out which matters to you. Which is never geekbench, since nobodies workload is ever geekbench. So a good review will tend to not include geekbench rather than include it, unless they just don't have better ways to compare whatever they're testing.
GB4/5 are... not a particularly high quality codebases. I can't offer anything more than that, but, well, lets just say that GB4/5 is my least favorite benchmark as a compiler engineer for AMD. It shouldn't be given much weight as a benchmark.
GeekBench is intended as a cross-platform benchmark.
> Designed from the ground-up for cross-platform comparisons, Geekbench 5 allows you to compare system performance across devices, operating systems, and processor architectures. Geekbench 5 supports Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
But it seems like there are a lot of other options.
PC hardware sites are probably less concerned with "cross-platform" benchmarks. As long as the system hardware and operating system are the same, varying only the component you're testing, you can test with any benchmark that runs on the system.
