Before playing games, setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

DhryStone / Whetstone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

So then, let me first explain how we will be testing and comparing in this article. I wanted to compare three things here. First off I picked up an Intel E8200 Dual-Core processor (colored in Intel Blue).

This processor runs pretty close to the Athlon X2 7750 BE (Yellow bar) processor at 2.66GHz 1333MHz FSB. Now it comes with a slightly larger cache making it a bit faster than the Athlon X2 in certain scenarios. It's also much more expensive than the 7750 BE.

In red you'll spot 7750 BE processor again, yet now you'll be able to check overclocked performance at 3200 MHz.

Lastly, (green bar) since we can not ignore the massive quad-core trend I felt we needed to include a quad-core processor as well. I picked AMD's flagship 9950 BE Phenom processor, which in comparison gives performance pretty equal to a Core 2 Quad Q6700 processor.

The test  - the DhryStone pure CPU test runs completely on the CPU itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core. Though one of the oldest, Dhrystone remains one of the most simple yet extremely accurate and effective ways to show you RAW CPU processing performance making it a very good indicator.

Queen CPU test

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example -- with HyperThreading disabled -- the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. However, with enabled HyperThreading the picture is controversial, because due to architectural bottlenecks the Northwood core runs out of internal resources and slows down. Similarly, at the same clock speed AMD K8 class processors will be faster than AMD K7 ones due to the improved branch prediction capabilities of the K8 architecture.

CPU Queen test uses only the basic x86 instructions, it consumes less than 1 MB system memory and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware and thus is a multithreading CPU Benchmark with MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

As you can see, the E8200 and 7750Be processor are pretty spot on in performance.