With a new pre-release iPad now out in the wild ahead of Friday's launch, benchmark tests conducted with the device have confirmed it has 1 gigabyte of RAM and an ARM CPU clocked at 1 gigahertz.

Vietnamese-language site Tinh.te ran a Geekbench test with the new iPad it obtained this week. The "System Information" details displayed show an "iPad3,3" model running iOS 5.1.

The new iPad's custom A5X processor has an ARMv7 processor clocked at 1GHz, which is identical to the A5 CPU found in the iPad 2. While the dual-core CPU remains the same, the system-on-a-chip also includes a quad-core graphics processor that Apple has said blows away its predecessor.

The hands-on test also shows a total of 988 megabytes of RAM in the new iPad, confirming earlier reports that claimed the amount of RAM in the A5X had been doubled to 1 gigabyte. Both the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S feature 512MB of RAM.

The third-generation iPad earned an overall Geekbench score of 756. Its strongest performance came in the "Floating Point" test, where the score was 915, followed by the "Memory" test, at 815.

The tests were conducted on the latest available release of Geekbench for iOS, version 2.2.7. For comparison, a Wi-Fi 16GB iPad 2 running iOS 5.1 earns a similar score of 760. That's because the software tests the CPU, which is identical to the new iPad. The Geekbench test does not represent the new graphics processing in the A5X, but it does confirm the clock speed and RAM.