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SiSoft Sandra Benchmarks
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.

The test system used is an Albatron PX865PX PROII. It uses a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Processor (aircooling). It of course has a quad pumped 4x200 MHz FSB.

Memory is based on non-tweaked and suggested (2:2:2:5) timings. Memory timings as you probably know are good for this rule: the lower the better. Memory timings let you know how many cycles it takes for diverse operations internally to the memory with CAS being the most important one. Remember it like this: 3 is 'okay', 2.5 is good and 2 is by far the best, yet hard to achieve with regular memory. Therefore we can assume, this is not exactly regular memory ;)

As you can see from the results performance is really good. We increased the FSB until we could not go any further, unfortunately that limit was roughly 230 MHz at 2.95 DDR voltage making the memory run at 460. At slightly higher speeds tried the memory at 2-2-2-5 and even the slowest timings yet the system obviously refused to boot with that FSB, aah well... can't have it all eh?.

At standard DDR400 we are able to run CAS 2 flawlessly though. You will be able to maintain the fastest timings up-to a ~215 MHz FSB, then you need to play around with slower timings or significantly increase DDR voltage levels.

If all this is new to you: overclock your processor to the maximum and with the memory work your way downwards. This means maximum voltage on the memory with the slowest timings. Keep lowering the timings until you get issues and then go one step back.

Anyway, at a 4x230=890 MHz FSB we where able to achieve. That's okay for PC3200 memory. We had to slow down the timings to 2.5:3:3:6 though and had increase the memory voltage towards the mainboards maximum.

Furthermore on this 865 based mainboard we can use a little trick (PEM/PET - Performance Enhanced Memory mode) to enable a little extra memory performance (a shorter optimized data path) bringing performance up-to the Intel 875 chipset standard. We where able to enable that at standard 400 MHz mode, which actually is a mainboard maximum requirement, a lovely extra 300MB/sec is then added to memory bandwidth.

Of course in the past we've tested quite a few PC3200 modules. DDR400, this was the fastest PC3200 memory we ever tested. Above you can see the standard performance with SPD default settings enabled. All brands of course offer faster memory as time passes.

Let's go have a look at the PC Mark04 results.