UK Gaming Computers Styx Mini-ITX System Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging and Bundle3. UK Gaming Computers Styx4. Testing Methodology5. SiSoft Sandra6. Cinebench R157. Handbrake video encoding8. SSD Performance9. USB 3.0 Bandwidth Testing10. 3DMark 1111. 3DMark12. Tomb Raider13. Grid Autosport14. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor15. Grand Theft Auto V16. Thermal Dynamics and Acoustics Performance17. Power Consumption18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

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 (girls') 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

The first thing to note is the performance of the i5-6500 in the CPU arithmetic test. While significantly faster than my dual-core i3-4160, it lags behind the mobile i7-6700HQ in the Dell Inspiron 15 7559 due to its hyper-threading ability.

However, you can see the advantage DDR4 RAM has over DDR3 in the memory bandwidth test – although the margin is not huge.

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