Graphical Display of Benchmark Scores

[Mr Bill]

I really like the way Anand has choosen to display his benchmarks both as bar graphs and as X-Y graphs in his Athlon XP 2100+ review
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1595&p=1
It lets you see how each family of CPU scales. It also lets you extrapolate how much faster a CPU family needs to be, to beat the other CPU family. I know its a lot of work and the same platform has to be used over and over but it sure gives useful information. Anybody else have kudos, gripes, or comments about graphs used to display benchmark data?

[Dissonance]

One more thing that should be noted: not only do you have to repeat testing over and over again, which takes a lot of time, you also need to actually have the processors at each speed grade.

Life was a lot easier when multipliers were unlocked and you could just simulate certain processors with underclocking and such... but it's significantly more difficult now.

Hell, give me Anand's lab and a salary and I'd be happy to do it, though

As for stuff I hate, graphs that don't start at 0. Agh, it pissed me off to no end.

[Mr Bill]

I'm a gear head and I got pretty excited when I plotted up that TomsHardware stuff from his 3GHz P4 article. But then I realized I did not have permission to share the graphs because its not my data. Rats! The thing that bug me most are two-fold. The first is that SisSoft's Dhrystone test is obviously modified to be bandwidth sensitive which I think is outright lying. The second, is when websites only do single application tests of either OS's or systems when its clear that some systems multitask tremendously better either because of hardware or OS. I'd like to see more "simultaneous" tests like you did for that dualie Abit board review. Finally on a different note, I like your use of the Linpack test. It shows an extra dimension of system behaviour that other websites neglect.

I am suffering from duallie envy.