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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
Interestingly enough, Patriot's slower -2133MHz – memory beats out G.Skill's 2933MHz TridentX kit in Sandra's memory bandwidth tests. This is a very surprising result, especially given the frequency difference that should have a much more significant effect than timings.
Cache bandwidth paints a similar picture to that of the previous test, with Patriot's slower memory taking the performance lead.
When it comes to a latency test, G.Skill's significantly faster TridentX memory shows a result which is around 12% better than that of the 2133MHz Patriot kit.
The sweet spot is 2,133mhz. its gives a noticeable benefit over crapo 1333mhz memory, but its still cost effective. Memory like this is so loose in regards to timings and so highly priced it makes no sense. good review though.
Its a nice product, and lovely styling, but it raises a good point, its such a niche product it makes little sense for most people.
interesting to see how memory is improving, but im waiting on a 3,000mhz kit with 9-9-9 timings.