Updated Smartphone & GPU Bench DBs Live!

We've been running our public performance database tool, Bench, for a few years now. Bench allows you to have direct access to the performance data we use in our reviews, segmented according to product category. Today we have five major product categories in Bench: CPU, GPU, Smartphone, Mobile and SSDs.

CPU Bench is the longest running without significant changes. You can actually compare Intel's most recently released Sandy Bridge E CPU to an old Core 2 Duo E6550 from four years ago in a number of tests using the tool. 

GPU Bench has always posed a more significant challenge. Drivers and test platforms change very frequently, which often precludes us from keeping a running tally of benchmarks similar to what we do on the CPU side. We used our Radeon HD 7970 review as the kicking off point for our brand new PCIe 3.0 testbed for GPUs going forward - a platform we hope to keep in place for at least the next 12 months. While all of this data is already in the 7970 review, if you want to do any head to head comparisons between GPUs you can now do so using our updated GPU Bench 2012 database. The previous version of the database (GPU Bench 2011) is still available.

Similarly, we've finally updated our Smartphone Bench database. Smartphone Bench 2011 features all of the tests and test data we've been using in our most recent smartphone reviews (e.g. Droid RAZR). We opted against calling it Smartphone Bench 2012 because we plan on updating some of the benchmarks in the new year (e.g. you may have seen one of our new battery life tests in our Eee Pad Transformer Prime Follow-up).

We are in the preliminary stages of planning AnandTech's site refresh for 2012, including updates to Bench. If you have any suggestions you'd like to see implemented, please feel free to leave them as comments here. We already have a number of ideas of things we're trying to implement, but your opinions are the most important here so I'm always eager to listen if you're willing to share.