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Sandra - Synthetic Tests
SiSoftware's 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)

Below you can find the scores of Sandra starting with memory performance:

It will be quite difficult to understand what we present to you today. Basically my idea for this review is to show you a selection of memory results. First comparing two other systems and then simply by tweaking timings, FSB and memory dividers. Above you see an overall impression of the systems running DDR400 memory versus the read speed of the memory. These are all Pentium 4 systems. AMD systems have way higher efficiency when it comes to memory bandwidth. Unfortunately the AMD processors are not really dependant on the memory as the Intel CPU's are. BTW, DDR400 at T1 Command rate and 2:5:2:2 timings instantly brings us at 6000 MB/sec, nice!

The Athlon 64 series is by far not as memory bandwidth hungry as the Intel platforms are. This is a generic look at performance as mainboard and memory differs on systems. Look at this is an overall view please. The AMD's have a hell of a memory controller though.

From left to right memory is based on non tweaked SPD timings and then we start to tweak. 250 MHz DDR, faster latency, FSB changes. All results you see here are done at the CPU's 2800 MHz frequency except (and that goes for all following benchmarks) the last results where the CPU runs slightly faster at 2954 MHz.