All around tool, benchmarking, system diagnostic and analyser.

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) 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, PCIe, ODBC Connections, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native Unicode ports for 32-bit Windows (2000/XP/2003/Vista), 64-bit & x64 Windows (XP/2003/Vista) as well as Windows CE (Pocket PC 2002/2003/2003SE, Smart Phone 2002/2003/2003SE, CE .Net 4.20) are available.

General Sandra Information:
Here are the version types, in line with industry standards:
* Sandra Lite (free for personal/educational use – no nag screens, time limit, etc.)
* Sandra Advanced (for OEMs)
* Sandra Professional (commercial)
* Sandra Engineer (commercially exploitabile)
* Sandra Enterprise (commercial)
* Sandra Legacy (home enthusiast)

List of SiSoftware Sandra Modules:
Here is a list of current modules.
* System Summary
* Mainboard/Chipset/System Monitors Info
* CPU/BIOS Info
* APM & ACPI (Advanced Power Management) Info
* PCI(e), AGP, CardBus, PCMCIA bus and devices Info
* Video Information (monitor, card, video bios, caps, etc.)
* OpenGL Information
* DirectX (DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound (3D), DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectInput) Info
* Keyboard Info
* Mouse Info
* Sound Card (wave, midi, aux, mix) Info
* MCI Devices (mpeg, avi, seq, vcr, video-disc, wave) Info
* Joystick Info
* Printers Info
* Windows Memory Info
* Windows Info
* Font (Raster, Vector, TrueType, OpenType) Information
* Modem/ISDN TA Information
* Network Information*
* IP Network Information*
* WinSock & Internet Security Information
* Drives Information (Removable Hard Disks, CD-ROM/DVD, RamDrives, etc.)
* Ports (Serial/Parallel) Info
* Remote Access Service Connections (Dial-Up, Internet)*
* OLE objects/servers Info*
* Processes (Tasks) & Threads Info
* Modules (DLL, DRV) Info
* Services & Device Drivers (SYS) Info*
* SCSI Information*
* ATA/ATAPI Information
* Data Sources Information*
* CMOS/RTC Information*
* Smart Card & SIM Card Information*

* CPU Arithmetic Benchmark (MP/MT support)
* CPU Multi-Media Benchmark (including MMX, MMX Enh, 3DNow!, 3DNow! Enh, SSE(2)) (MP/MT support)
* File System (Removable, Hard Disks, Network, RamDrives) Benchmark
* Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark
* CD-ROM/DVD Benchmark
* Memory Bandwidth Benchmark (MP/MT support)
* Cache & Memory Bandwidth Benchmark (MP/MT support)
* Network/LAN Bandwidth Benchmark
* Internet/ISP Connection Benchmark
* Internet/ISP Peerage Benchmark

* Hardware Interrupts Usage*
* DMA Channel Usage*
* I/O Ports Usage*
* Memory Range Usage*
* Plug & Play Enumerator*
* Hardware registry settings
* Environment settings
* Registered File Types
* Key Applications* (web-browser, e-mail, news, anti-virus, firewall, etc.)
* Installed Applications*
* Installed Programs*
* Start Menu Applications*
* On-disk Programs & Libraries*
* Installed Web Packages* (ActiveX, Java classes)
* System Event Logs*

* Burn-in Wizard* (test computer stability)
* Connect Wizard (connect to remote computers, PDAs, Smart Phones and other devices)
* Combined Performance Index Wizard (overall computer performance score)
* Create a Report Wizard (save, print, fax or e-mail in CIM (SMS/DMI), HTML, XML, RPT or TEXT format)
* Performance Tune-Up Wizard (tune-up computer)
* Environment Monitor Wizard (temperatures, voltages, fans, CPU power, cooling solution thermal resistance, etc.)
* WebUpdate Wizard for automatic version updating

What’s New:
New Benchmark: Media Transcode
Measures the transcoding bandwidth converting media from one format to another.

Why? Most devices cannot play video recorded by a camcorder. Such media would most likely require to be edited first and then to be transcoded (possibly transparently) when copied to a device for playback. With current high-definition media such an operation can be a lenghthy process, thus any performance improvements will save a lot of time.

Using the new Media Foundation in Windows 7, we measure WMV (e.g. Movie Maker) > MP4/H264 and MP4/H264 (e.g. phone video) > MP4/H264 using various profiles (HD TV 720p, SD TV 480p, tablet, phone, etc.).

The benchmark can compare the performance of hardware accelerated media transcoders (e.g. GPUs) with multi-threaded software (CPU) transcoders.

New Benchmark: GPGPU Cryptography
Measures the encryption, decryption and hashing bandwidth of GPGPUs

Why? While modern CPUs include special instruction sets (Intel AES, VIA PadLock) to accelerate cryptographic operations, are they a match for modern GPGPUs? The benchmark uses the same workload as the CPU Cryptography benchmark allowing direct comparison of modern CPUs and GPGPUs of the most common algorithms in use today (AES256, AES128, SHA256, SHA1).

OpenCL 1.x, DirectX 11 Compute Shader and CUDA3 3.x are supported. Multiple video cards are supported and CPUs can also be used in parallel in OpenCL. The benchmark allocates workload based on the respective processing power of GPGPUs and CPUs.

New Benchmark: Blu-ray
Measures the performance of Blu-ray optical drives

Why? While Blu-ray won the high-definition war some time ago, it has finally become affordable for computer users as a replacement for DVD. We have thus added a brand new Blu-ray Test Disk to measure the performance of the latest drives on the market, adding to the existing DVD and CD Test Disks which are still required to measure DVD and CD disk performance.

Updates:
AVX/FMA instruction set support for future CPUs
Processor Multi-Media, Processor Cryptography, Memory Bandwidth, Cache and Memory Benchmarks

Using 256-bit register width (instead of 128-bit of SSE/2/3/4) yields further performance gains through greater parallelism in most algorithms. Combined with the increase in processor cores and threads we will soon have CPUs rivaling GPGPUs in performance.

Measure each operation report min-max score as well as average

Why? The maximum time an operation can take is just as important as the average time; if the measured performance varies greatly from test to test, the response time is not consistent and thus the performance unreliable. If a minimum performance is required, then a slower but consistent device would be preferable to a faster but inconsistent one.

Using the submitted scores to the Ranker, we further measure the consistency of the performance of a device; we can also verify whether the measured performance falls between the range of performance expected for the tested device.

Geometric mean for aggregate scores
Why? When combining components of very different magnitudes, a geometric mean is more meaningful than an arithmetic one. This makes comparing the relative performance of very different devices much fairer, especially between platforms (e.g. desktop to mobile or to server).

Ranker Engine: more useful

Why? The Ranker provides additional reference results by aggregating submitted results from users – which are downloaded by Sandra automatically. We had over 200,000 submissions just for one benchmark in 2010 which allowed the generation of 1,000s of new results. The Ranker can also be searched for specific results.

By creating an account, the Ranker automatically backs-up and restores user scores to any installation.

Price Engine: very much useful

Why? The Price engine enhances the experience by providing product pictures and additional specifications – as well as the the latest price. It allows the calculation of important metrics like Performance vs. Price and Capacity vs. Price (for storage media) which are extremely useful when making comparisons. All this is done automatically rather than manually searching for pricing on stores.

Key features:
* 3 native architectures support (x86, x64, ARM).
* 5 native virtualisation technologies support (Virtual PC 7, Virtual Server 2005, Hyper-V Server2, VMware Server2, VMware WorkStation/Player)
* 5 native GPGPU platforms support (OpenCL, DirectX 11 Compute Shader/DirectCompute, CUDA, STREAM1).
* 4 native Graphics platforms support (DirectX 11, DirectX 10/10.1, DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0).
* Huge official hardware support through technology partners (Intel, AMD/ATI, SiS, VIA).
* 6 language versions (English, German3, French3, Italian3, Russian3, Japanese3) in a single installer.
* Enhanced Sandra Lite version (free for personal/educational use)

Notes:
1.- Deprecated, will be removed in the next release.
2.- Enterprise versions only.
3.- Not available at publication, will be updated later on.

What’s New:
* Fix: Incorrect CPU frequency displayed on Sandy Bridge in Turbo Mode; benchmark scores are not affected. The displayed speed was updated twice.

* Fix: Incorrect CPU frequency displayed on Phenom II/Fusion in Turbo Mode*; IMC and Memory speed were also affected: benchmark scores are not affected. The displayed speed was not updated at all.*

* Improvement: Multi-threaded Memory Bandwidth on Fusion*; score has doubled (~3.3GB/s) though short of what AMD “suggests”. No better solution has been found yet.

* Update: Large memory pages support re-added to the Memory Bandwidth, Cache & Memory Bandwidth and Multi-Core Efficiency benchmarks but disabled by default. Please use Options to disable “Use Native Memory Pages” to use large memory pages.

Why disabled by default?
Some (older) processors perform worse when using large memory pages for a reason engineers cannot explain. Thus it was best to leave it this way for now.

* Update: GUI reference list colour-matched to the graphs which finally allows you to identify which result corresponds to which value in the graph.

* External Fix: GPGPU Crypto benchmarks work with the latest 266.xx nVidia drivers even in older Sandra versions.

* Fix: Minor various fixes for Windows 7/2008 R2 SP1 RTM. Again SP1 is *required* for AVX support, and no still no idea whether Vista or XP will also be updated.

SiSoft Sandra Lite, sahip olduğu 60′dan fazla çalışma tekniği sayesinde donanımsal ve yazılımsal inceleme ve karşılaştırma yaparak, rapor sunan tanınmış bir sistem analiz programıdır. Windows işletim sistemi kullanıcıları bilgisayarları hakkında ayrıntılı bilgiye, SiSoft Sandra Lite’ın sahip olduğu 60′ın üzerinde çalışma sistemiyle kolaylıkla ve detaylı bir şekilde ulaşabilirler.