Intel Core i7 4960X EE CPU / Asus X79-Deluxe Motherboard Review

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 is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

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, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Sandra's set of tests show the IVB-E part to have an across-the-board performance improvement of around 5 to 11%, in comparison to the popular SB-E 3930K. Sandra's processor arithmetic tests show the biggest improvement – an average percentage increase of almost 10% when going from the 3930K to 4960X.

Memory bandwidth increases by 5% when going from the SB-E's former second-in-command part to IVB-E's flagship chip. The IVB-E processors natively support memory speeds of up to 1866MHz, giving a bandwidth of 14.9GB/s for each of the four supported channels. Performance motherboards will typically allow for memory speeds greater than 2GHz to be used.

Neither of Intel's HEDT processors can match the Sandra multimedia integer performance of the Core i7 4770K, thanks to its AVX2 support. The same can be said for hashing bandwidth numbers in Sandra's processor cryptography test.

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