阅读大量xml的最佳方法

What is the best approach on reading large amounts of xml files (I need to read 8000 xml's) and do some computations on them, and have best speed on it? Is it ok using a xmlreader and returning the nodes i'm interested in in a list? Or is it faster when reading the node, also to do some computations on it? I tried the second approach(Returning the nodes in a list, as values, because I tried writing my application with as much modules as possible). I am using C#, but this is not relevant.What is the best approach on reading large amou