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UL (3DMark) delists OPPO Find X and F7 after benchmark cheating
August 04, 2025
At the end of September, an exposé fromTECH2brought to light various smartphone manufacturerscheating benchmark scoreswith some of their high-profile phones. The research followedan admission from HUAWEIthat it overclocked theHUAWEI P20 Proto gain a favorable score.
The research performed byTECH2suggested HUAWEI wasn’t the only one gaming the benchmarking system, but its sub-brandHonorand fellow Chinese OEMOppo(and its sub-brandRealme) were doing the same.
Now, venerable benchmarking resource UL (which owns 3DMark, the benchmarking app) hasdelisted two popular OPPO devicesfrom its benchmark leaderboard: theOPPO Find Xand theOPPO F7. The delisting of the OPPO Find X is particularly noteworthy as it was previously ranked fourth on the list of Android smartphones.
The two devices in question are now at the bottom of the ranking list with no scores attached and “DELISTED” next to their names.
As explained intheTECH2exposé, OPPO’s cheating strategy was fairly simple and similar to HUAWEI’s: when a user runs a recognized benchmarking app — in this case,3DMark— the phone will, in response, ramp up all its processing power to artificially create a favorable score. Since the benchmarking procedure only lasts a short while, whether or not the phone could ever sustain that high of a workload doesn’t matter — unless, of course, you want benchmarking to be a fair and balanced system.
OPPO responded to the delisting of its devices (viaThe Verge)by explaining, “when we detect that the user is running applications like games or 3D Benchmarks that require high performance, we allow the SoC to run at full speed for the smoothest experience.” This would be fine and dandy if the user could control this “performance mode” and run that mode continuously without the phone melting from the heat. However, that does not appear to be the case.
With all that in mind, the delisting of these OPPO phones isn’t that surprising. What is surprising is that it took three weeks before UL delisted the phones, as theTECH2article was published on September 28.
DuringTECH2‘s testing, it also discovered devices fromHMD Global,Samsung,OnePlus, andXiaomiwere not cheating with their scores.
NEXT:Benchmark session: How fast is the Snapdragon 845?
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