A week ago, the HWBot website, which collects benchmark scores in their online database from their community members, decided to ban all Windows 8 numbers from its service. The site claimed the real time clock (RTC) in Windows 8 caused programs like 3DMark and PCMark to show inaccurate results if the CPU base clock (BCLK) frequency was changed in software.
A couple of days later, the site posted an update which said the RTC issue did not appear when benchmarks were run on a PC with an AMD processor. Now HWBot has changed its Windows 8 policies yet again and has banned scores from AMD PCs as well.
The reason? Another website, Ocaholic, claims that their investigation of the bug showed it could be replicated on AMD chips if a person runs cmd as an admin and then pastes in the following command line, "bcdedit /set {current} useplatformclock No". However, the bug on AMD only affects the Windows 8 PC during its next boot. After that, the OS resets the "useplatformclock" choice back to "Yes". This apparently does not occur when used on a Windows 8 PC with an Intel processor.
This new information was apparently enough for HWBot to ban all Windows 8 AMD benchmark scores. In fact, the only scores that will be allowed in their database will be from "non-overclockable notebooks"; Microsoft has yet to comment on HWBot"s decision.
Source: HWBot | Image via HWBot