Interesting, I think we are seeing the two extremes here.
Personally, I feel that the "canned" benchmarks do have some merit, as their single focus can often enlighten users and reviewers as to why some hardware behaves as it does. At the same time we do not sit for hours in front of our computer watching 3D Mark for pleasure. At the same time though, FS has some good points in that Kyle's idea of playable is not the same as ours, and if some user in a deathmatch/competition needs the extra CPU cycles while cutting down the bottleneck of the graphics card by playing at 800x600 with the eye candy turned off, but getting 60 more fps in a modern game by going Conroe over an X2 can be just the edge they are looking for.
The name calling should stop though. We all have different philosophies on testing, and it is good to respect those. You may not agree with it, but you don't need to pan those of us that do use synthetics, or run specific demos, or *gasp* run games at lower resolutions to see how CPU's scale so we can get a better idea of performance when the next gen of video cards come out and prove to be less of a bottleneck.
Heh, just my opinion though.
