Our benchmarks are quite self-explanatory. While benching we find out that the new BIOS is considerable faster in lamemt, so we had the pleasure to re-test all CPUs again, to give you accurate results. Beside the usual benchmarks we included the Far Cry 2 Bench, which should show only the benefit of a faster CPU. With only the real cores enabled, the new CPU is not that much faster compared to the Q9 series, which are clocked a bit slower. The x264 optimizations for i7 do pay off. If you check out the results of Cinebench with the i7 overclocked at 4.3GHz, it's nearly twice as fast compared to the 3.0GHz Q9650.