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SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.

Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide whether what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

• Download SANDRA (special Guru3D.com edition)

Here you can find the scores of Sandra.

The test system used is an Albatron PX865PX PROII. It uses a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Processor (aircooling). It of course has a quad pumped 4x200 MHz FSB.

Memory is based on non tweaked and suggested (2.5-3-3-8) timings. Memory timings as you probably know are good for this rule: the lower the better. Memory timings let you know how many cycles it takes for diverse operations internally to the memory with CAS being the most important one. 3 is 'okay', 2.5 is good and 2 is best yet hard to achieve on very fast memory like this.

As you can see from the results performance is rather good. We increased the FSB until we could not go any further, unfortunately that limit was roughly 250 MHz making the memory run at 500MHz (that's still 33Mhz below the theoretical maximum). We also tried the memory at 2-2-2-5 yet the system refused to boot with that FSB, aah well ... can't have it all eh ?. At standard DDR400 we are able to run CAS 2 flawlessly though.

At one point we where able to overclock the 2.8 GHz processor towards 3.7 GHz. But the CPU was running so hot that I decided to call that test run off. Anyway, at a 4x250=1000 MHz FSB we where able to achieve a memory bandwidth faster than the DDR2 533 MHz FSB based 925 you see in the results. That's pretty amazing stuff.

On the previous 865 based mainboards we had to use little trick to enable a little extra memory performance as that performance is comparable to 875 chipsets. The graphics clearly show what a difference dual channel memory can do in terms of memory bandwidth.

Let's go have a look at the PC Mark04 results.

PC Mark 2004PCMark®04 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark04 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark04 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results. As far as possible, PCMark04 uses public domain applications whose source code can be freely examined by any user. 
 

Info and download -

Okay so the 1100+ dollar platform will beat the one costing 500 bucks. But that's high-end memory performance right there, we are being limited by the CPU here, it just won't go any faster. But that system does have DDR2 and is running the full 1066 Mhz bus. More importantly compared to synthetic performance I thinks is to look at the actual performance you get by playing games. Let's go have a look at some gaming benchmarks.