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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
The ATOM platform doesn't generate particularly impressive results in SiSoft Sandra, however it shows us that this particular system doesn't have a problem with any of the bandwidth oriented results.
No fans. id live with the lowish performance for that. looks quite nice too. Id best get entering the competition!
This is purely for media and it works. win for me. I wouldnt buy it for gaming.
No noise would be great. my girlfriend hates fans and this is quite nice looking. Its a bit bigger than the actively cooled media centers, but that is quite a heatsink over the CPU/GPU area.
the two tone colour system is odd. Not sure if that would grow on me. you reckon its meant to allow people to ‘pick’ their favourite colour and to rotate it to suit in a living room?
32 bit Windows 7? what a weird choice. the caching idea is unusual too. id rather have 64 bit and the memory for windows.
seems like a good enough deal, but id want my media center with a bit more grunt. not core i7, but something more capable.
Nice idea however, its a great idea for them to produce something which doesnt make noise. Many people will embrace this.
Its passive, I can forgive a few of the mistakes I think they made with this, just for that. because its extremely difficult to do.
I like the two tone idea, not sure its the prettiest looking media center, but its noiseless and has a bluray drive.
I like my PS3 however for media, but a PC would be better overall for the codec support…..
I’m sort of surprised that they build a really capable system and then slapped in an Intel Atom and Windows7 32-bit. Maybe its just me but I think that they could have gotten something better as far as the processor goes and still kept the beast silent. All in all though it seems like a good idea.
Thanks for the review, this looks like an interesting product. One thing I’m worried about is heat. The temperatures for CPU and GPU looked pretty high, and I wonder what the temperature of the device itself is, and how high it can reach if the room is at 30c+.
I have to wonder why they didn’t use an AMD E-350, though. Is the Atom + GPU combination lower power or provides more features?
By the way, I’m sure I said it before, but the “view all pages” option is a great feature of KitGuru reviews, and I wish more sites had it.
ET,
I have to agree with you on this. I want to know why they didn’t use an AMD APU for this build. The only thing that I can come up with is perhaps they were offered a significantly cheaper solution with the Atom and they took that route in an effort to keep pricing to a minimum.
maybe not that bad to have the 32bits, the D525 only can address 4GB anyway, and with all the issues I met with the 64bits, I am actually happy that they use the 32bits.
It should as well speed up the boot