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 provides similar level of information to Norton SI, Quarterdeck WinProbe/Manifest, etc. The Win32 version is 32-bit and comes in both ANSI (legacy for Windows 98/Me systems) and native Unicode (Windows NT4/200X/.Net) formats. The Win64 version is 64-bit and comes in native Unicode format.

Do note that all the SANDRA benchmarks are synthetic and thus may not tally with real-life performance. The latter stands for whatever your environment is, i.e. which applications you run with what amount of data and so on. It is up to you to decide whether what Sandra measures is what you want to measure.

• Download SANDRA (special Guru3D.com edition)

Here you can find the scores of Sandra:

We make use of a Dhrystone test, which basically is a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs.

Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

What I'd like you to focus on throughout the review is the difference between the 800 USD FX-62 and the 320 USD E6600. It'll surprise you the most.

You can see all he way on top the 999 USD X6800  processor on the Intel NF590 SLI mainboard in overclocked status. Now look all the way to your right and compare it with the FX-62, which is planted in an NF590 SLI mainboard also.

File Encryption & Decompression