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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.

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, and so on.

New Styles, including METRO inspired by future Windows 8

Introduced with the Zune player, the METRO style is the style for Windows Phone 7.x and the future style of Windows, starting with Windows 8 due next year. Love it or hate it, it is here to stay.

Overall Score for complete computer performance evaluation

While each benchmark measures the performance of a specific device (CPU, Memory, GPU, Storage, etc.), there is a real need for a benchmark to evaluate the overall computer performance: this new benchmark is a weighted average of the individual scores of the existing benchmarks:

- (Native) CPU Arithmetic/Multi-Media: measures native processor performance
- .Net/Java Arithmetic/Multi-Media: measures software virtual machine performance (e.g. for .Net/WPF/METRO applications)
- Memory Bandwidth: measures memory performance
- File System/Disks: measures storage performance
- General Processing/Bandwidth GP(GPU/APU): measures GPGPU/GPAPU performance

Device Performance Certification

Device Performance Certification validates whether the benchmark result (score) you have obtained upon benchmarking your device is valid (i.e. the device you tested is performing correctly) and how it compares to the scores obtained by other users when testing the same device.

Based on the variability of scores you can determine whether the performance of your device is consistent or varies significantly from test to test. A large variability would indicate a problem either with the device or your environment (e.g. OS device drivers, virus checkers, etc.) that should be addressed.

General Processing (GP) benchmarks
Fully test modern APUs (CPU+GPU) and multiple GPGPUs

Traditional benchmarks either test CPUs or GPUs but not both: as an APU contains both CPU and GPU units some parts may remain unused and untested. Sandra's General Processing (GP) benchmarks (GP Arithmetic, GP Cryptography, GP Memory) harness the full power of OpenCL and run simultaneously on both the CPU and GPU units of an APU, thus using all the processing power available.

The GP benchmarks allocate workload based on the respective processing power of CPU and GPU units of the APU. If a discrete GPU is also installed, regardless of manufacturer, its power is also harnessed (CPU + int GPU + ext GPU).

Key features of Sandra 2012

- 3 native architectures support (x86, x64, ARM).
- Huge official hardware support through technology partners (Intel, AMD/ATI, SiS, VIA).
- 5 native virtualisation technologies support (Virtual PC 7, Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V Server, VMware Server/ESX, VMware WorkStation/Player)
- 3 native GPGPU/GPAPU platforms support (OpenCL, DirectX Compute Shader/DirectCompute, CUDA).
- 4 native Graphics platforms support (DirectX 11.x, DirectX 10.x, DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0+).
- 10 language versions (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified), Russian, Portuguese) in a single installer.
- Enhanced Sandra Lite (Eval) version (free for personal/educational use, evaluation for other uses)