SiSoftware Sandra 31.137

SiSoftware Sandra is a system analysis, diagnostic and benchmarking utility for Windows from the London-based developer SiSoftware. It identifies the hardware and software inside a computer, measures how fast individual components perform, and compares those measurements with results from other systems. Sandra Lite is free for personal and educational use. The Professional, Business, Engineer and Enterprise editions are paid licences aimed at home users, companies, hardware specialists and corporate networks.

Hardware and software information

The information side of SiSoftware Sandra reads details about the processor, chipset, memory, storage, video adapter, clock generator and other devices, along with the operating system and installed software. Newer information modules cover the Trusted Platform Module, biometric sensors such as fingerprint readers, Storage Spaces software RAID, Hyper-V and VMware Workstation virtual machines, and SQL Server instances.

Sensor readings come from the mainboard’s monitoring chips, which Sandra reads over the SMBus. Depending on the board, this gives temperatures, voltages and fan speeds. A board may need external sensors to report a CPU temperature, and fan speeds require three-wire fans. Rather than guessing, Sandra shows nothing when it cannot reliably identify a monitoring chip.

Component benchmarks

Sandra’s benchmarks isolate one part of the system at a time and report results in units that fit the test:

• Processor arithmetic: multi-threaded Dhrystone integer tests in MIPS and Whetstone floating-point tests in MFLOPS, with results checked against expected values to catch CPU or memory faults.
• Processor multimedia: a Mandelbrot fractal rendered by one thread per core, run through separate integer, floating-point and SIMD code paths so the effect of each instruction set shows up in the score.
• Cryptography: encryption and hashing throughput using hardware-accelerated paths where the processor offers them.
• Memory and cache: STREAM-style sustained bandwidth over a large share of physical RAM, plus cache bandwidth and memory latency, with NUMA awareness on multi-socket systems.
• Storage: sequential and random reads and writes on drives and RAID arrays, using test files large enough to get past the Windows disk cache.
• Network and Internet: LAN bandwidth, connection and DNS query latency, combined into an overall Internet score.
• Neural networks: CNN and RNN inference and training on the CPU and on the GPU.
• Other targets: the TPM crypto-processor (random number generation, hashing and AES) and the .NET and Java runtimes.

Processor tests can use AVX-512, AVX2/FMA, AVX and SSE code paths on x64 and native code on Arm64. To compare two processors on identical work, users can switch off the advanced instruction tests in the options.

GPU computing

Sandra tests graphics cards through CUDA, OpenCL, DirectX Compute Shader, OpenGL Compute and Vulkan. GPGPU tests mirror the CPU ones, covering arithmetic, cryptography, financial and scientific analysis, image processing, memory bandwidth and latency. Users can therefore compare the same workload on the processor and the graphics chip.

Overall scores and efficiency

Instead of running every test one by one, SiSoftware Sandra offers overall indexes for the processor, GPGPU, video, memory/cache and disk. Each one combines several component benchmarks; the disk index, for example, joins file system bandwidth, file system I/O and physical disk bandwidth. A computer index then combines all five.

Each benchmark can also present its result as an efficiency ratio. Performance against power divides throughput by the component’s TDP, giving figures such as operations per watt. Related views compare performance with cost, capacity with cost or power, and performance with clock speed. For latency tests the ratio is reversed, so a lower value is better.

Reference results and the Ranker

Sandra displays each score next to reference results from other hardware. With the ranking engine enabled, it downloads new reference results and uploads the user’s own runs to SiSoftware’s online Benchmark Ranker. There, users can browse results by computer, brand, user and team, as individual runs or in aggregate. Scores are meant to be compared within the same major Sandra release, because benchmarks change between releases.

Reports and remote analysis

Sandra exports results to XML report files in ANSI or Unicode, with optional compression and encryption. Users can also insert reports into a database server through ADO or ODBC, using schemas supplied for supported databases.

For networked computers, the Sandra client connects to a service running on another Windows machine. It gathers information and runs tests and benchmarks there as if working locally. Network services are off by default and are enabled during setup on the target computer. The connection runs over named pipes on a LAN or TCP/IP across the Internet, with Windows or Kerberos authentication and encryption. The connecting account needs administrator rights on the remote system.

Sandra editions for home, business and engineering use