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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 PC is a Prescott based Pentium 4 3.6 GHz (Pentium 4E [2SMT] 560). Since the whole Drystone 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.

As you can see the AA8Xe shows performance for sure as it's among the top of the crop.

Memory is based on non-tweaked SPD timings. As you can see performance is rather good, it defaults at almost 5000 MB/sec, overclocked we reached 6100 MB/sec without any issues actually. On the previous 865 based mainboards included in this list we had to use s little trick to enable a little extra memory performance as that performance is comparable to Intel 875 chipsets. 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 and anything above 4600 MB/sec with DDR400 can be considered really good.

SC means single channel while DC of course means Dual Channel. Dual Channel memory can kicks ass and will boost your overall performance if you are on a Pentium platform. With the included memory performance was good given the FSB, but clearly promising once you raise that FSB a little.

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. Both the nForce AMD and Intel edition performed the same followed closely (1 sec) by the AA8XE with a slower CPU.