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[Ian]

Techware labs have an interesting piece discussing Synthetic VS Real World Benchmarks from online reviews, worth a read if you often compare benchmarks:

You may have noticed that many hardware and software review websites make sure to note when they use real or synthetic benchmarks in a particular review. Some sites concentrate solely on synthetic benchmarks while others concentrate on the so called "real world" benchmarks. The important thing is not to know which one is right or wrong but to understand what the difference is and what you can personally do with the data that you get from these benchmarks you find online. So lets first start with the difference between real world and synthetic in terms of benchmarking.

Read the article here.