Poor Intel i9 Macbook Pro performance: why?

[minty2miller]

Hi Everyone. I've been running EtreCheck reports a few times on a recently acquired Macbook Pro (16" Intel i9) and it's reporting poor performance, taking almost twice as long to run benchmarks as the average for this machine (I assume it's not the average of all machines).

Runtime:	5:38 (minutes:seconds)
Nominal I/O usage:	3.80 MB/s
File system:	17.10 seconds
Write speed:	3067 MB/s
Read speed:	3064 MB/s
Performance:	Below Average

I decided to corroborate this with PerformanceTest and sure enough, the results are pretty weak. But why? I know this machine suffers from heat and throttling issues, but it never approaches those thresholds when running the tests, so I doubt throttling is the cause (and it mostly runs cool after I cleaned out its fans). Admittedly, this is a 2019 machine that was running a leaner operating system when it first launched (macOS Mojave, I think). The thing is that the experience I get with it doesn't feel slow to me and as you can see, its read/write speeds are pretty respectable. I can post the EtreCheck report if anyone's interested.

[David (PassMark)]

Your CPUMark result was 15,068.

This is actually above the average result for this CPU model, (mean 13,544 and median of 14,220 at the moment).

So, from our software, I don't see any evidence that the machine is slow. Of course it is slow to compared to CPUs released this year. But for a 2019 CPU is it pretty good and I don't think you can expect any better.

[minty2miller]

You're absolutely right David and I should stop worrying about it! Thanks for the feedback.