Hardware

For this look at Core 2 Duo gaming performance, we used the following configuration:

• CPU: E6700 Intel Core 2 Duo 
• Motherboard: Asus P5W DH Deluxe
• Memory: 2 gigabytes of OCZ Flex XLC PC2-9200 DDR2 RAM (4-4-4-12 timings)
  
• Video Card: XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512 Alpha Dog XXX Edition
• Power Supply: OCZ 850W GXS
• Hard Drive: 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA, w/16 MB cache
• CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U 12 

We chose one of our fastest video cards and one of quicker sets of DDR2 on purpose in order limit their ability to bottleneck gaming performance. 

For setting our CPU speed, we always used a multipler of 8. Starting with a FSB of 200, we worked our way up by increments of 25. We tried to use memory speeds as close to 900 MHz as we could get, while still mainting system stability.

Software

Our criteria for selecting games to bench came down to a few things: the game had to be a fairly recent release for starters; and we chose games which we have had ample experience benchmarking with in the past. We decided to go with Crysis, Call of Juarez, World In Conflict, and Unreal Tournament 3. With the exception of Crysis running at medium settings, we ran the benchmarks at high graphic settings, with 4x antialiasing. You can find more information about how we tested over here.

We also benched using Vista over XP, for two reasons. The first reason was that we wanted to bench DX10 performance; and the second reason was that the higher resource overhead that Vista demands would also put more strain on our CPU,  and in this sort of benchmarking this is a good thing, not a bad.