While the widely used PassMark Server benchmarks run about 10 seconds for each of 10 tests, our application benchmarks are real world intensive processing involving disk/sql access, memory and cpu operations and are 4-5 minutes each in length. I would assume that while this is only a single user testing, they are long enough (and repeated run) to gather a realistic appraisal of the performance changes as a result of the bios changes.
Your response seems to suggest a disbelief in our observations - as I did myself until we had repeated our testing.