MSI X79-GD45 Plus Motherboard Review (inc. CPU Gaming Performance Comparison)

Luke Hill October 25, 2013 Featured Tech Reviews, Motherboard

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