Just google userbenchmark bias. Basically, when AMD shook things up a few years ago with huge numbers of cores, UserBenchmark responded by weighting down the importance of multithreaded workloads in their scores, so Intel would stay on top. Now their site is banned from most subreddits, including both r/intel and r/amd.
It wasn't one event, more like the ratings for CPUs just became laughably, transparently, utterly worthless, to the point where Intel i3 laptop CPUs were scoring higher than top-end AMD Threadripper CPUs. And they refused to acknowledge any issues.
Within a month or two after AMD started shipping CPUs with more than 8 cores, they tweaked the algorithm to ignore >8 cores. And various other ridiculous changes that hurt AMD's rankings.
Unfortunately Userbenchmark is totally useless for comparing components. They don’t even attempt to benchmark one change at a time while keeping all other parts of the testbench identical.
Worse yet every time I benchmark one of my machines, I score significantly higher than the average user results for the same hardware. Perhaps the average submitter has crapware/antivirus installed or their machines are misconfigured (e.g. XMP disabled) which makes all their data suspect.
I appreciate the links. But it's tough to believe stats uploaded by random users, especially when we're only talking a few percent difference. Not to mention, if you sort by "avg bench %", apparently WD released an NVMe drive that's faster than Intel Optane. You'd think that would have made the news.
fwiw the best motherboard comparison I found was on overclock.net[1]. It didn't list everything I cared about, but it was a great starting point
Individual benchmarks uploaded by random users would be hard to trust yes, but UserBenchmark collects thousands. If you click through to the page for a given product it'll even show you a distribution graph of the collected scores from different real-world machines.
> apparently WD released an NVMe drive that's faster than Intel Optane
"Faster" is a matter of opinion; it depends on what you're optimizing for. Optane obviously has faster random reads, but it's not so great at sequential writes. The UserBenchmark score tries to take all of that into account: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe...
Userbenchmark has benchmarks for SSDs[1] and RAM[2]. Can't help you with motherboards though.
[1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/
[2]: https://ram.userbenchmark.com/