Jokester

But it certainly isn't a hinderance.

Some people might not be overly concerned about their teams score, but it does go to show that doing this will get a group further up the table than they would have otherwise as individuals, which as some have pointed out, might be the difference between getting sponsored or not or anyother plaudits that are handed out by HWbot and others.

It's not a money issue, what you're saying is that it's ok for a group of individuals to pool together with a greater array of benchable hardware (and thus more achieve more points than as an individual any one of them could attain and therefore get a higher ranking). The hardware itself could cost peanuts off ebay as all hardware can get you points, not just the £500 GPUs and £1000 CPUs. If this is allowed there's a distinct advantage for groups of individuals to "merge" their scores where they have little overlap in hardware and as a result end up higher in the "individual" rankings.

Problem with that is that they are pulling resources like a team, not an individual. If this is allowed the single user rankings are now meaningless as you're comparing individuals who also contribute to a team score to teams who potentially also contribute to a bigger team. There's a distinct advantage as you say for people to pool together their resources. This is what the team ranking is for, not the individual rankings.

http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=640451 Wrong test run resulting in inflated score. Jokester