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
CPU performance is strong, almost matching the scores of the Core i7 2960 XM that was in the Alienware M18x flagship.
As we mentioned earlier- the MSI GE40-2OC Dragon Eyes is running in single channel memory mode, thanks to the inclusion of just a single 8 GB SO-DIMM. Not an ideal configuration to maximise overall system performance.
No laptop is worth that money, u could get a PC that blows that out of the water for the same price
When I see a mechanical drive now in such a machine I always despair. its such an oversight as nothing is more important for a machine than a fast drive. even the CPU or GPU isnt as important.
@ Stephen, well you can’t really carry around a £1,000 desktop, or put it in a bag in cabin luggage on a plane. Its horses for courses. Many people love these tiny little machines for mobile gaming.
I think MSI dropped the ball a little with this spec though.
is this windows 7 or 8 ?
What do you think it is? Microsoft is paying big money to shove win 8 down our throats.
I bought this laptop last week and it came with a 128 ssd + 750 gig standard HD. I upgraded the ram to 16 gigs and so far it’s been a great little machine. The pre installed software bloat is definitely an issue though. Navigating the msi site for driver updates is also a bit of a pain. If you go to the main site it’s alright but picking the Canadian site and trying to find any information is completely useless.
The machine ships with Windows 8. I got the machine with no OS installed and slapped on Windows 7. All drivers available on the product page at MSI.com