OnePlus Cheats Benchmarks? OnePlus 5 Units Comes with Mechanism That Could Overheat the Phone
The OnePlus 5 packs impressive hardware for a reasonable price range, so it could be a sign of how competitive the flagship phone market has become when the handset maker faces allegations of benchmark cheating.
OnePlus 5 benchmark results that have been floating around online cannot be trusted, according to gadget review site XDA Developers. Review handsets provided by the company for benchmarking allegedly contained a cheating mechanism that aims to manipulate benchmark scores in favor of the phone.
The flagship phone has been topping the charts even among other phones equipped with the same Snapdragon 835 chipset, and reviewers from XDA Developers have offered an explanation as to why that is the case. They have examined the code for the Android operating system that came with the device and found that they have been tampered with,
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The added code reportedly detects if a benchmark software is being run, and makes changes to the configuration of the Snapdragon 835 chipset accordingly. On the OnePlus 5, this involves locking one of the clusters of the chip to the highest possible clock speed at 1.9 GHz, according to GSM Arena.
While this is not considered an overclock, this setting disables the protection afforded by the thermal throttling feature of the chipset. While the result may be outstanding multi-core benchmark results, this configuration is not possible to come up during daily use of the handset.
With the thermal throttling disabled, the phone quickly reaches unsustainable temperatures. For the Graphics Processing Unit benchmark, for example, even the exterior backplate of the phone reaches 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). At this point, the phone clearly runs the risk of overheating.
The issue is not just confined to benchmark. Certain OnePlus 5 units also lock the chipset into its top speed when playing games, according to 9 to 5 Google. This means that users running graphics apps are also at risk of overheating their mobile device.
OnePlus has said that the software, with the chipset locking mechanism included, will be shipping to buyers. "We are not overclocking the device, rather we are displaying the performance potential of the OnePlus 5," the phone maker explained in their statement.
