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.

Benchmark note:

We moved to a new 64-bit environment for all our tests. This entailed new software updates for our benchmarks plus we replaced a lot of our tests with different software. This means that if you compare the results published in this review with other processor reviews from Guru3D.com, the numbers might not add up anymore due to different software and tests.

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically 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 and what we will be testing and comparing in this article. Due to the nature of changes in our benchmark software we'll try and add many processors per benchmark title for you to compare with.

Your main focus should be the red bars, these are the processors tested today. Now PLEASE take into account that we mostly test mainstream and high-end processors, pushing todays tested processors low in the charts.

Also, and this is very important, due to the nature of multi-core development all our benchmarks are all very multi-core aware... meaning that three or more processors cores will have a large effect on overall results.

And sure, we'll throw in overclocked results as well, however only for the BE processor. We did not have enough time to try overclocking the Athlon II X2 processor just yet. The X2 550 BE processor is clocked in all benchmarks shown today to 3700 Mhz as well to prove how stable this overclock is. And always keep in mind we are dealing with a 104 USD processor here okay?

Whetstone

The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was initially written in Algol 60, back in 1972. The Whetstone benchmark originally measured computing power in units of kilo-Whetstone Instructions Per Second (kWIPS). This was later changed to Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS).

The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the floating-point arithmetic performance. A similar benchmark for integer and string operations thus is the Dhrystone.