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Dave Lee's tests usually come from a gamer and media creator's perspective. In most, if not all, of his reviews he makes a point to check thermals and throttli

Dave Lee's tests usually come from a gamer and media creator's perspective. In most, if not all, of his reviews he makes a point to check thermals and throttling related to heat, because that matters to the gaming segment of his audience. As for media creation, he always tests Adobe Premiere for his cross-platform media creation tests while acknowledging that Premiere on Mac is less performant than it is on Windows, and that there's a significant number of Mac media creators who prefer Final Cut. The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. Running a CPU hot for short bursts can yield different comparative results than for a task that takes 30 minutes or more.

mcphage 8y ago
> The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. I would expect so—benchmarks often have long-running tasks; if a task only takes a few seconds it's hard to distinguish the overhead from the task itself. But if nothing else—they will do so going forward.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  >> benchmarks often have long-running tasks Yes, but depending on who you're talking to, "long-running" could mean a few minutes or several hours. Throttling doesn't usually have a major impact on tasks that take a few minutes. But on heavy, long running loads, the effect of throttling starts to add up quickly, which is why the i9 MBP couldn't outperform the 2017 i7 MBP until it was stuffed in a freezer. While the use of Premiere might raise eyebrows, I don't think it matters in Lee's testing, because he ran the same test on both the 2018 i9 MBP and a 2017 i7 MBP. Either way, it was a heavy, taxing, long running task. I don't think anyone will dispute that the i9 has significant performance gains for people whose CPU utilization spikes are relatively short -- and that might be the majority of people who will opt to buy an i9 equipped MBP. For content creators and other users who need to tax the processor for long periods of time, however, those users might be better off with the i7 version of the MBP.

mcphage 8y ago

> The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. I would expect so—benchmarks often have long-running tasks; if a task only takes a few seconds it's hard to distinguish the overhead from the task itself. But if nothing else—they will do so going forward.

slantyyz 8y ago
>> benchmarks often have long-running tasks Yes, but depending on who you're talking to, "long-running" could mean a few minutes or several hours. Throttling doesn't usually have a major impact on tasks that take a few minutes. But on heavy, long running loads, the effect of throttling starts to add up quickly, which is why the i9 MBP couldn't outperform the 2017 i7 MBP until it was stuffed in a freezer. While the use of Premiere might raise eyebrows, I don't think it matters in Lee's testing, because he ran the same test on both the 2018 i9 MBP and a 2017 i7 MBP. Either way, it was a heavy, taxing, long running task. I don't think anyone will dispute that the i9 has significant performance gains for people whose CPU utilization spikes are relatively short -- and that might be the majority of people who will opt to buy an i9 equipped MBP. For content creators and other users who need to tax the processor for long periods of time, however, those users might be better off with the i7 version of the MBP.