Sandra 2012 18.40 SP3 download released

SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility has been updated to build 18.40 SP3

SANDRA will provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what's really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, ODBC Connections, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Change-log:

• Removable Storage Benchmark: now uses I/O queues (based on number of system threads) just like the Physical Disks and File Systems benchmarks. This allows better performance on SSDs and other drives that can sustain more IOPS than 1 thread can handle.
• Why did it not use queues already? The benchmark is *not* meant to test IOPS at various data block sizes - but performance in creating / reading / deleting *files*, e.g. when copying / backing up to a removable disk. Creating or reading files (open, read/write, close) carries more overhead than reading/writing blocks of an opened file.
• In most cases, the change should not cause scores to change when testing HDDs, USB2 drives, etc. When testing SSDs, SANs or fast USB3 high-IOPS devices, score of small files will increase. As USB3 devices and controllers have now become mainstream, this update was required.
• Note that Virus Checkers may scan these test files either on open or on close; you may want to exclude temporary files (.tmp) from the scan so that the score is not affected.
• Cache/Memory Latencies Benchmark: has remained single-threaded in order to maintain consistency with previous scores. Running multi-threaded runs into various issues on certain processors and thus cannot be enabled at this time. Should we find work-arounds, the benchmark will be updated before Sandra 2013.
• CUDA GPGPU: Updated to CUDA SDK 4.1; note that future CUDA 4.2 will be needed for "Kepler" and to compile the code into "proper" Kepler object code. Currently Sandra contains code for CUDA 2.x and 1.x devices (hybrid PTX), another one will likely be required for Kepler.
• OpenCL GPGPU: Updated support for AMD/ATI 7700, 7800, 7900 series, nVidia Kepler.

Known Issues:

• CUDA/OpenCL Crypto GPGPU Benchmark: Hashing still fails on the latest nVidia drivers on Fermi; strangely Kepler has no problem with it, nor do older 1.x devices (e.g. GT200, older). nVidia may fix it eventually.
• CUDA/OpenCL Memory Bandwidth Benchmark: some driver/card combinations still have problems transferring large blocks sizes; you may find power management clocking the PCIe bus lower (e.g. 3.0 > 2.0 > 1.x speeds) and not scaling up enough to transfer at full speed.

Key features of Sandra 2012

• 3 native architectures support (x86, x64, ARM).
• Huge official hardware support through technology partners (Intel, AMD/ATI, SiS, VIA).
• 5 native virtualisation technologies support (Virtual PC 7, Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V Server, VMware Server/ESX, VMware WorkStation/Player)
• 3 native GPGPU/GPAPU platforms support (OpenCL, DirectX Compute Shader/DirectCompute, CUDA).
• 4 native Graphics platforms support (DirectX 11.x, DirectX 10.x, DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0+).
• 10 language versions (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Russian, Portuguese) in a single installer.
• Enhanced Sandra Lite (Eval) version (free for personal/educational use, evaluation for other uses)

Download here