Test notes
The advent of Windows 7 prompted us to throw out our old CPU test results and start fresh with all new, well, just about everything—new OS, new drivers, new revisions of nearly every application we use in testing. We also took this opportunity to freshen up our CPU test rigs, an endeavor made possible by a number of folks in the industry.

Here's a look at one of our Lynnfield processors sitting in a Gigabyte P55-UD6 motherboard. Notice the Corsair Dominator modules nestled into those DIMM slots—those are purpose-tuned for Lynnfield processors, capable of running at 1600MHz with a CAS latency of 8 at only 1.65V, which is the max voltage Intel recommends putting through its integrated memory controllers. We chose to run our RAM at an officially sanctioned 1333MHz for this first test, but I expect we'll explore performance at higher memory clocks soon.

Asus kicked in some higher-clocked GeForce GTX 260 cards like this one for our test systems. This change was prompted mainly by my desire to aim for lower power draw at idle on our test systems. Right now, Nvidia GPUs draw quite a bit less at idle than comparable Radeons, which is one reason our test systems have finally dipped below the 100W mark, as you'll see. Upgrading to these from our previous Radeon HD 4870 cards also got us almost twice the video RAM, higher performance, and quieter operation in the confines of Damage Labs.

The biggest noise reduction among our test rig upgrades, though, was easily the move to PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W PSUs. We've downsized a little on wattage here, too, in an attempt to chase more efficiency at idle while retaining the proper connector payload for anything we might wish to do with our test systems.

Last but not least, we have our 1TB WD RE3 hard drives. With much higher transfer rates than our old Caviar SE16 320GBs, these drives have driven up our WorldBench scores across the board. We chose these drives over SSDs in part because we had some trepidation over new versus used-state performance issues in SSDs, which might lead to inconsistent test outcomes.

Thanks to Gigabyte, Corsair, Asus, OCZ, and WD for making this major upgrade of our test systems possible.

I should note several other things before we go on. First, one of our processor speed grades is simulated; the Core i7-950 is actually a Core i7-975 Extreme underclocked to the appropriate speeds. That's fine for performance analysis, but it's not always an exact match on power consumption, so we've left the Core i7-950 out of our power tests. Somewhat similarly, the Core 2 Quad Q9550 we used for testing was actually the Q9550S low-power variant, since that was what we had on hand. Its performance should be identical to the regular Q9550, but we've excluded it from our power consumption tests, since we're not focusing on the low-power segment here.

Second, we decided to make a switch from averaging the results of multiple test runs, as we have typically done in the past, to reporting the median. This change was prompted by a number of considerations. We like how the median filters out statistical outliers, which are increasingly common as CPU performance becomes more variable and tests become more complex. We like that the numbers we report are now actual results produced by test run, and in cases where we graph performance over time from a single run, we can choose to display the data that corresponds to that median run. We like, uh, several other things I can't remember right now. Point is: we saw enough upside to give this a try. We'll see whether it works out long-term.

Finally, after consulting with our readers, we've decided to enable Windows' "Balanced" power profile for the first time in a desktop processor performance test, which means power-saving features like SpeedStep and Cool'n'Quiet are operating. (In the past, we only enabled these features for power consumption testing.) Our spot checks demonstrated to us that, typically, there's no performance penalty for enabling these features on today's CPUs. If there is a real-world performance penalty to enabling these features, well, we think that's worthy of inclusion in our measurements, since the vast majority of desktop processors these days will spend their lives with these features enabled. We did disable these power management features to measure cache latencies, but otherwise, it was unnecessary to do so.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and we reported the median of the scores produced.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Thanks to Corsair and OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1600x1200 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 2009.9.15.124
• Stream 5.8 64-bit
• CPU-Z 1.52.2
• WorldBench 6 Gold
• Left 4 Dead build 3939
• Crysis Warhead 1.1 64-bit
• Far Cry 2 1.03
• Wolfenstein 1.1
• Valve VRAD map build benchmark
• Valve Source Engine particle simulation benchmark
• Cinebench R10 64-bit Edition
• POV-Ray for Windows 3.7 beta 34 64-bit
• 7-Zip 4.65 64-bit
• notfred's Folding benchmark CD generated 8/25/09
• The Panorama Factory 5.3 x64 Edition
• Windows Live Movie Maker 14
• x264 HD benchmark 2.0 with x264 version 0.59.819
• 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.