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) 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
Again, we saw significant performance gains when overclocking the system. But the stock scores are very respectable as well for those that don’t want to tamper with the BIOS settings.
Seems like a good value product to be honest. I like their boards, bioses are normally really good.
60 quid for a board like this is much lower than competiting products from say Zotac. im well impressed with this tbh. shame I have no intention of building a media pc right now.
Its always an issue with the smaller PCB’s. I know zardon had to modifiy the zotac board to fit the arctic cooling cooler onto it in his review. Its always going to be a compromise. someting like the watercooling all in ones you used in this are ideal, if the chassis can accommodate them.
Pretty good board, i think if I was building a media pc tho id opt for a bigger chassis to take a full sized board. these are limited.