Hmmm, when should you pay attention to benchmarks? We say ALWAYS! How are you going to know how big your e-peen is? Duh.
Benchmarks provide a way to measure real-world performance without getting bogged down in comparing specs. You don’t need to know how many cores or how much RAM a graphics card has if it renders Mass Effect: Andromeda at the highest frame rate in the most crisp detail. There are a lot of different kinds of benchmark tests, but here are some of the most common.