KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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 AMD A8 4555M processor is very capable and scores well in these tests. The memory bandwidth test is particularly interesting. We can see an approximate +2GB/s gain by using our own Kingston HyperX memory in this system with tight timings. The default scores of the ‘all in one' EDGE VS8 system in previous tests were around 6.6GB/s.
Yeah, very nice. tiny little thing. Quite a lot of cash, but you pay for the size.
I didn’t like any of the others as the drive performance was rubbish and I wasn’t paying cash for a 5,400 rpm drive.
This is tempting, but ill be interested to see how much OCUk land it for. They have been quite expensive lately thats why im buying from SCAN now.
How did I miss all the edge reviews before! I read this site all the time.
This looks great, personally id need to put the money into a new gaming system, but great idea from sapphire. very cool.
I think this would be a great little office machine, my only concern is the asking price for the VS8 generally. £300 for a barebones unit isn’t a bargain.
I appreciate paying extra for the size, but I think the price tradeoff might prove hard for Sapphire. good review though
Zardon does a good job of selling this, however im sadly not sold. Not because I dont like it, or value the size and power saving. I just think the pricing is way out of whack.
Id want a 240GB SSD as I need a lot of applications installed. The HDD version they include is too slow so thats out. Then 8GB of ram and id need another Windows 7 license.
The OS license is my big sticking point. I dont want WIndows 8 so id need to fork out another £100 for Windows 7.
This would end up well over £500 (even £600). id rather build something in the Bitfenix Ghost chassis for the same cost with a core i3
@Alex,
Isnt the A8 4555m better than a core i3 for graphics though?
People are missing the point, the AMD A8 mobile chips are very low power demanding designs. Building a system into this is very difficult due to the size. its even smaller than a netbook.
The cost is a little higher, but if Apple made one of these and put an aluminum cover on it, they would sell it for £800-£900 with a basic SSD and 4GB of memory. People would accept it as a great deal.
@ James M. but apple would set it all up and put the OS on it, with all the ‘drivers’ and even some useful software.
Sapphire will only drop the price of the barebones by £70-£80 (depending on exchange in UK and OCUK). So people need to get something of their own choice in regards to HDD and memory, then an OS< install it all, make sure it all works, then install the drivers.
Its quite a cost really ,even though i like it myself. If they had brought out a version with a 120GB SSD, WIndows 7, 8GB of ram for £499.95 and had it ready to rock out out of the package without any user intervention it would make more sense.
They are caught between targeting the educated enthusiast user who could do all the install stuff, but who won't want to pay the price, as other, faster options are available at less or similar money.
the size is the main thing people will love, but im not too fond of the appearance, would have looked better out of aluminum or shiny materials.