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SiSoft Sandra

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:

We make use of a Dhrystone test, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Our processor in the nForce4 PC is an AMD based FX-57 running at it's default 2800 MHz, to date one of the more powerful and definitely high-end processors available.

Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second. Times are changing quickly, the K8SLI in combo with the FX-57 processor was easily on top of the list. Let's have a look at memory performance, which should be awesome with the new updated memory controller inside the processor in combo with this mainboard.

Memory is based on non-tweaked SPD timings. As you can see performance is good. Just compare the different PC's a little to observe where we are right now with memory performance. The graphics clearly show what a difference dual channel memory can do in terms of memory bandwidth. Basically anything above 4000 MB/sec is at Dual Channel configuration. The NFORCE4 platforms in combo with a new AMD CPU kick ass.

Something I did not exactly expect was the Athlon 64 4000+ system to be as fast during encoding sessions as the Pentium 4 4.0 GHz. We took a little program called dBpowerAMP and convert a 58 MB .wav file to a 192kbs MP3 (Lame) file at 44100 in Stereo. For the freaks, this was the London Symphony Orchestra - Prokofiev - Romeo & Juliet, Introduction, Montagues and Capulets.

The score is in seconds need to compress the file and of course the lower the better. As you can see, the FX-57 processor feels quite at home on the K8SLI from Albatron. It's the fastest crunching machine. It's doing the job roughly 63% faster compared to a quite modern Pentium 4 3.2 GHz system.