The new testing stuff
That faint aroma of leather and chemicals you smell isn't your granny's handbag; it's the new-car smell emanating from Damage Labs. As I said, we've revamped much of our CPU testing apparatus in Damage Labs—and words like "apparatus" and "labs" sound much more sophisticated than "long table with skeleton PCs sitting on top." Atop the table now is this nifty new motherboard:

Gigabyte's GA-P35T-DQ6

The Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6 won an Editor's Choice award in our five-way roundup of Intel P35 chipset-based mobos, so it seemed like a logical choice for our Intel CPU test platform. We opted to go with the DDR3 version of this board because we wanted to maximize the like-new aromatic potential of our test rigs, and because we wanted to give the latest CPUs the best chance to shine. We then plopped four Corsair DIMMs capable of running at 1333MHz into each of the DQ6's four DIMM slots, for a total of 4GB of memory.

In fact, we've bumped up all of our test systems to 4GB of memory—a logical step given that we're using a 64-bit OS and a fair amount of 64-bit software these days. We also outfitted our test systems with GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, and we replaced their aging Maxtor 250GB hard drives with our current pick of the desktop drive litter, the WD Caviar SE16. Oh, and we patched Windows Vista until it worked correctly. The end result should be reasonably high-end PCs ready to take full advantage of the latest DirectX 10 games.

That is the hope, anyway. Let's see what we found.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Please note that testing was conducted in two stages. Non-gaming apps and Supreme Commander were tested with Vista patches KB940105 and KB929777 (nForce systems only) and ForceWare 163.11 drivers. The other games were tested with the additional Vista patches KB938194 and KB938979 and ForceWare 163.71 drivers.

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. Their products and support are far and away superior to generic, no-name memory.

Our primary test systems were powered by OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply units. The dual-socket Xeon and Quad FX systems were powered by PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR power supplies. Thanks to OCZ for providing these units for our use in testing.

Also, the folks at NCIXUS.com hooked us up with a nice deal on the WD Caviar SE16 drives used in our test rigs. NCIX now sells to U.S. customers, so check them out.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• SiSoft Sandra XI.SP4a 64-bit
• CPU-Z 1.40
• WorldBench 6 beta 2
• Team Fortress 2
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition with DirectX 10
• BioShock 1.0 with DirectX 10
• Supreme Commander 1.1.3260
• Valve VRAD map build benchmark
• Valve Source Engine particle simulation benchmark
• Cinebench R10 64-bit Edition
• POV-Ray for Windows 3.7 beta 21a 64-bit
• CASE Lab Euler3d CFD benchmark multithreaded edition
• MyriMatch proteomics benchmark
• notfred's Folding benchmark CD 8/8/07 revision
• picCOLOR 4.0 build 598 64-bit
• The Panorama Factory 4.5 x64 Edition
• Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Edition
• LAME MT 3.97a 64-bit

The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.