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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.

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.

You can see all he way on top the FX-62 processor at the FoxConn NF590 SLI mainboard in overclocked status. Now look all the way top your right ... and compare that performance with an Athlon XP 3000+ Amazing where we are now huh ? 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.

Amazing .. look at the overclocked scores .. the HTT (FSB) is running 266 MHz and thus effectively the memory is running at 1066 MHz.

A little more lovin' from Corsair

Now roughly 18 hours before this review went live another memory kit arrived. Unfortunately too late for complete thorough integration, yet Corsair has two EPP (SLI-ready) memory kits available for this platform. Right now I will divert from the EPP functionality and do a serious manual tweak on that new memory. Here's the thing .. the Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 1066MHz as tested throughout this review is high-frequency memory. A side effect is that it has lower timings. The second kit is a Package of two Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 800MHz low-latency SLI-Ready DIMMs (2GB total).

Now if you do not want to overclock that FSB too much and keep things at default clocks, you can still get very high memory bandwith with the 6400C4 package.

Now .. this is not for the average user. The 6400C4 memory is optimized for low-latency while the 8500C5 is optimized for high frequencies. Low latency memory runs faster with AMD processors because of the integrated memory controller. We actually can force a T1 command rate at CAS4!

If you buy this memory wand want to match our CAS 4/1T timings then make sure to adjust BIOS settings to the following:

• Memory 2.300V
• HT CPU -> nForce SPP 1.300V
• tCL (CAS) Latency 4 clock
• tRCD 5 clock
• tRP 5 clock
• tRAS 5 clock
• Command Per Clock (CMD) 1 clock
• AsyncLat 5ns
• MA drive strength 1.25x
• MCLK drive strength 1.0x

Your memory bandwidth will now have skyrocketed even further at that 800 MHz with some very exquisite timings. Have a look:

We also will show you some tweak differences on the next page with Everest. The rest of this review has been run with the high-frequency CMX1024-8500 (800 MHz) memory though.

PCMark 2004PCMark04 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 - Download!

Bare in mind that these are synthetic benchmarks. They really do not tell us that much do they. Look on how performance is scaling.