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 are 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

Here you can find the scores taken with Sandra.

Sorry, no flashy graphs in this review. I was short of time.

SANDRA has been much discussed on the web regarding the results with Hyper-Threading enabled. Fact is that if you use Hyper-Threading properly the performance gain can be significant. It really is an inventive new technology, yet the following benchmarks will proof that for us gamers it hardly is important.

Next we'll go into a series of gaming related benchmarks after that we'll do some more synthetic testing with PC Mark 2002. First up, 3D Mark 2001 SE Pro.

Before we start off with the gaming benchmarks I need to explain something to you to understand what is happening to the test-results. Logic assumes that you need to take a look at the highest resolution tested versus the score. This however is not the case.

The CPU's used are faster than a graphics card can handle. So in the highest resolutions you'll notice not much difference in the results. This is the videocards bottleneck as it can't push any harder. What you need to monitor are the lowest resolutions as the videocard is not limited in raw power or memory bandwidth. I know this may sound a bit weird but the Radeon 9700 Pro that we used is actually a limiting factor for the CPU in the highest resolutions. Bare that in mind as we try to demonstrate the power of the CPU and not the graphics card.