SiSoftware Sandra

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.

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.

The SANDRA DhryStone and Whetstone tests are CPU tests that run completely within the CPU + cache memory itself. These tests are perfect for seeing general efficiency per processing core. Dhrystone is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs and is an older CPU tests. Even so, it remains a simple and accurate way to show RAW CPU processing performance. The whetstone benchmark primarily measures floating-point arithmetic performance.

So far, each of our synthetic test suites have shown us the same thing. The Athlon-II X2-260 outperforms its predecessor by about 3%. Sometimes that margin raises up to 5%, but that is about the limit. While that may sound like it isn't a good thing, its really exactly what we would have expected from this processor. The extra 100MHz in the clock speed of the Athlon-II X2-260 adds up to a 3% increase in clock speed. Therefore, seeing a 3% increase in performance consistently and throughout most of the testing is exactly what we want to see. We can't be too dismayed, either, by the fact that the triple-core X3-445 processor is outperforming the dual-core by around 45% on average. Most of our benchmark tools have integrated multi-core elements into their tests, making sure that we get a good result of the actual performance value of the processors. So, as we stated earlier, if you know that you will be using mostly programs that utilize a single core or only up to two cores, the Athlon-II X2-260 will certainly be an excellent value.

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