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I have a little foundation for this:
I've seen a lineup of hundreds of identical PCs all get the exact same OS image, and inevitably you'll get one or two that are significantly slower than the rest.
Its my belief that sometimes there's some sort of deeply embedded hardware flaw that makes some computers suck and there's no amount of tweaks or reinstalling an OS that will fix it.
That intuition is correct. Hardware isn't a magical exactly perfect thing every time. Everything has "flaws" and so you set tolerance levels and do your best.
CPUs and GPUs and RAM and drives all have specs they are aiming for, like a CPU manufacturer may want the next chips on the assembly line to be >4ghz, they crank out 1,000 of them and benchmark them. Some hit 4, some do 3.9, some may be 4.1 even. As long as it's above spec it gets labeled the 4ghz Ultra or whatever brand. But the chips that run fine, but are slower, say 3.5ghz, then they just slap the 3.5ghz Mideange Label on those and sell for %20 less. The ones coming out at 3ghz get the Low End Label and are half the price.
That way they sell them all and everyone is happy (mostly).
Also that pesky law of thermodynamics ruins our fun and hardware gets worse over time too. Depends on the defects and lots of variables, but maybe one case didn't cool as well so the CPU gets hotter and it had a defect that degraded it's speed a bit so now that 4ghz Ultra is actually running at 3ghz, but that happened after the user bought it, so it is just "a slow machine" as you said.
It's very real and you aren't crazy for feeling like or even proving that some really are slower than others.
I have a really weird story related to this:
I was doing IT for an esports event, with 10 identical PCs on stage. Identical hardware, identical images, everything. One of them had much worse FPS than the rest. Okay, weird. Probably the player did something weird with their config.
My best guess is there was some kind of electrical interference manifesting in that one particular location. Never seen anything like it before or since...
My bet is on some of the systems having SSDs and some of them having spinning disks. They need separate images from hardware native installations. This results in exactly this scenario. Also not everything labeled ssd contains ssd. Dell used to slip sshds into they systems even in the pricy segment.
And somehow I've owned every single one of them.
Just search for “cpu binning”, anything that slips through the cracks of that process are exactly this.
yeah it's called a defective or out of spec component. those are the ones that fail typically.
Or in spec when the spec is very broad.
See also “silicon lottery” in the world of overclocking.
Or in spec when the spec is very broad.
See also “silicon lottery” in the world of overclocking.
I have a little more foundation for that.
I think you're right.