BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Tag Archives: Notebookcheck

It’s time to shop for the holidays, and the XPRTs are here to help!

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with widespread product shortages and supply chain interruptions in the tech industry, it’s wise to start your holiday shopping now. If you’re considering phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops as gifts, but are unsure where to get reliable information about the devices, the XPRTs can help!

One of the core functions of the XPRTs is to cut through the marketing noise by providing objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance. For example, instead of trying to guess whether a new Chromebook is fast enough to handle the demands of remote learning, you can use its CrXPRT and WebXPRT performance scores to see how it stacks up against the competition on everyday tasks.

A good place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 2,800 test results from over 110 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. You can find a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. Learn how to use the results browser here.

If you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for that device. You can find these reviews by going to your favorite tech review site and searching for “XPRT,” or entering the name of the device and the appropriate XPRT (e.g., “Apple iPad” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one or more of the XPRTs to evaluate popular devices:

The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

The WebXPRT 4 tech press feedback survey

Device reviews in publications such as AnandTech, Notebookcheck, and PCMag, among many others, often feature WebXPRT test results, and we appreciate the many members of the tech press that use WebXPRT. As we move forward with the WebXPRT 4 development process, we’re especially interested in learning what longtime users would like to see in a new version of the benchmark.  

In previous posts, we’ve asked people to weigh in on the potential addition of a WebAssembly workload or a battery life test. We’d also like to ask experienced testers some other test-related questions. To that end, this week we’ll be sending a WebXPRT 4 survey directly to members of the tech press who frequently publish WebXPRT test results.

Regardless of whether you are a member of the tech press, we invite you to participate by sending your answers to any or all the questions below to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com. We ask you to do so by the end of May.

  • Do you think WebXPRT 3’s selection of workload scenarios is representative of modern web tasks?
  • How do you think WebXPRT compares to other common browser-based benchmarks, such as JetStream, Speedometer, and Octane?
  • Are there web technologies that you’d like us to include in additional workloads?
  • Are you happy with the WebXPRT 3 user interface? If not, what UI changes would you like to see?
  • Are there any aspects of WebXPRT 2015 that we changed in WebXPRT 3 that you’d like to see us change back?
  • Have you ever experienced significant connection issues when testing with WebXPRT?
  • Given the array of workloads, do you think the WebXPRT runtime is reasonable? Would you mind if the average runtime were a bit longer?
  • Are there any other aspects of WebXPRT 3 that you’d like to see us change?

If you’d like to discuss any topics that we did not cover in the questions above, please feel free to include additional comments in your response. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Justin

The XPRTs in 2020: a year to remember

As 2020 comes to a close, we want to take this opportunity to review another productive year for the XPRTs. Readers of our newsletter are familiar with the stats and updates we include each month, but for our blog readers who don’t receive the newsletter, we’ve compiled some highlights below.

Benchmarks
In the past year, we released CrXPRT 2 and updated MobileXPRT 3 for testing on Android 11 phones. The biggest XPRT benchmark news was the release of CloudXPRT v1.0 and v1.01. CloudXPRT, our newest  benchmark, can accurately measure the performance of cloud applications deployed on modern infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms, whether those platforms are paired with on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud deployments. 

XPRTs in the media
Journalists, advertisers, and analysts referenced the XPRTs thousands of times in 2020, and it’s always rewarding to know that the XPRTs have proven to be useful and reliable assessment tools for technology publications such as AnandTech, ArsTechnica, Computer Base, Gizmodo, HardwareZone, Laptop Mag, Legit Reviews, Notebookcheck, PCMag, PCWorld, Popular Science, TechPowerUp, Tom’s Hardware, VentureBeat, and ZDNet.

Downloads and confirmed runs
So far in 2020, we’ve had more than 24,200 benchmark downloads and 164,600 confirmed runs. Our most popular benchmark, WebXPRT, just passed 675,000 runs since its debut in 2013! WebXPRT continues to be a go-to, industry-standard performance benchmark for OEM labs, vendors, and leading tech press outlets around the globe.

Media, publications, and interactive tools
Part of our mission with the XPRTs is to produce materials that help testers better understand the ins and outs of benchmarking in general and the XPRTs in particular. To help achieve this goal, we’ve published the following in 2020:

We’re thankful for everyone who has used the XPRTs, joined the community, and sent questions and suggestions throughout 2020. This will be our last blog post of the year, but there’s much more to come in 2021. Stay tuned in early January for updates!

Justin

The XPRTs can help with your holiday shopping

The biggest shopping days of the year are fast approaching, and if you’re researching phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the XPRTs can help! One of the core functions of the XPRTs is to help cut through all the marketing noise by providing objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance. For example, instead of trying to guess whether a new Chromebook is fast enough to handle the demands of remote learning, you can use its CrXPRT and WebXPRT performance scores to see how it stacks up against the competition when handling everyday tasks.

A good place to start your search for scores is our XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 2,600 test results from over 100 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that someone has already published an XPRT score for that device in a recent tech review. The quickest way to find these reviews is by searching for “XPRT” within your favorite tech review site, or by entering the device name and XPRT name (e.g. “Apple iPad” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one or more of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:


The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

WebXPRT in action

Just this past summer, WebXPRT passed the 250,000-run milestone, and since then, the run total has already passed 330,000. September was our biggest month ever, with over 28,000 WebXPRT runs! We sometimes like to show the community how far a reach the XPRTs have around the world by reporting the latest stats on the number of articles and reviews that mention the XPRTs, and the fact is that most of those mentions involve WebXPRT. Today, I thought it would be interesting to bring the numbers to life and provide a glimpse of how the tech press uses WebXPRT. Here’s a sample of WebXPRT in action during the past couple of weeks.



While WebXPRT continues to be a useful tool for tech enthusiasts around the world, you don’t have to be a tech expert to benefit from it. If you’d like to know more about WebXPRT, check out our recent video, What is WebXPRT and why should I care?

Justin

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?