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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
Overall performance is good, and much as we would expect from a Z68 system with a Core i7 2600k @ 4.6ghz. Memory scores aren't quite as impressive as we achieved on the ASRock Fatal1ty board, as we could get the ADATA sticks running faster at 2,133mhz.
ALways a shame their products dont support SLI.
Very fair review. It seems more aimed at enthusiast users with a little more knowledge of the bios. When I read the reviews of ASROCK and asus boards, there are settings basically which take out all of the work. Just one setting for a clock speed for the processor installed. This is a great idea.
I wouldnt have a problem with the sapphire ;’slightly old fashioned’ bios settings, but for a newbie,. they would be better investing in a different board with UEFI, kiddie proof settings.
DIdnt Sapphire poach some of the engineers from ASUS or something? probably why they are doing so well with the board designs.