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 memory bandwidth test shows a clear advantage for the Asus Maximus VI Extreme motherboard configurations. This improved performance could be related to tighter secondary timings as the DRAM frequency was identical to that of other the motherboards.
Thats a hell of a board, but its way out of my price range and I dont need a lot of the extras – still I like to see all the engineering that goes into these high end boards from ASUS, gigabyte and MSI
Hey don’t knock the ROG boards, I have had one for years, they use high grade capacitors. its not ASUS fault that Haswell wont overclock for sh!t.
Well finally, a review of this board from the perspective of a person who would want a high end board rather than the viewpoint of a reviewer who thinks ‘everyone should just buy a £150 board cause this one is too expensive’.
If I want a GTX titan and not a GTX770 or a GTX780 ill have one thanks very much. I dont give a rats ass about value for money because im loaded. Same with this board, already have it and its much better than a mid range board. Why? because I need all the SATA ports, know the capacitors will last 3 years min at my 4.8ghz 4770k OC and it will handle my 3 way SLI setup without crapping out in a few months.
Great review there luke, glad you didnt spend 1 hour droning on about a £20 saving on one of MSI or Gigabytes mid range boards because ‘I dont need this product as haswell won’t oc much anyway’. As if this is the only reason to get a high end board.
Give me the facts, and ill make my own mind up – so thanks.
If given a chance to have that kind of motherboard I know Its beyond the expectations of the owner. I know its good and very awesome.