I ran both the old and new codes ten times each then averaged the results to get a reasonable impression of times for each test. The results can be found here: http://salathe.googlecode.com/svn/tests/compare.txt

For my tests at least, the new code (the object version) consistently gave very, very slightly faster results but in the grand scheme of things I think it's fair to say that the two test types behave approximately equally with most results being within a couple of microseconds of each other.