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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
A solid processor arithmetic score gives the reference-speed Z87 OC Formula second place behind Asus' Maximus VI Hero.
Memory bandwidth isn't a strength for the ASRock Z87 OC Formula. The overclocked configuration is sat in joint-last position, while the stock-clocked setup only manages fourth place at the 4770K's reference frequency. It's clear that Asus has a distinct memory bandwidth advantage with its ROG boards.
wow that is awesome, looks stunning too!
This board looks great – good price point too, which I always like with ASROCK. plenty of detail luke, thanks for review
I just ordered one, hard to find here though, they need to work on their distribution
They are always well priced, they dont seem any worse than MSI, GB or ASUS either in my own tests, but it all depends on what board you get I guess.
Not the Formula I am looking forward to but I might go with this after trying out Asrock’s Fatal1ty Z77 and loving it. Not to mention that 9.5 rating.
That fan though >.<
It's forcing me to wait for the other Formula (VI) before I can decide.
Thanks for the review ^^
Got the ac version of this from Overclockers abour four weeks ago. Just waiting on my custom cable extensions to arrive from Pexon to get my build started. If it is half as good as my X79Extreme11 in my main rig it will be epic
Hi Luke,… was wondering. Is the PLX8605 embedded on the Z87 OC Formula AC driven from the CPU? or is it driven from the extra PCIe lanes provided by the Z87 Chipset? (I’m guessing from the lane configurations that it is the Z87? which would mean you could operate 2-way SLI without any latency?……) Thanks for any help you can provide.