Benchmark computer performance with Sandra Lite
Posted on February 4, 2009 at 5:06 am
Have you ever wondered how your CPU, RAM or any hardware performs compared with their contemporary technologies? I do benchmarking for the purpose of technical comparison so I can justify a purchase of a new hardware.
I buy only if the performance of the product is a great improvement over my currently installed product. With the economy getting worse, most of us can not afford to go wrong with these expensive hardware purchases especially that there are a lot of choices out there.
From SiSoftware, a UK based software company, comes a program called “Sandra” (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) that you can use for benchmarking your computer. It’s outputs are easy to interpret because they are shown as graphical charts where a line represents your current hardware while the other lines represent other products that you want to compare your hardware from.
To introduce you to this tool, I will demonstrate how to benchmark your RAM’s bandwidth. The steps for doing other benchmark types are similar.
To start benchmarking your computer’s RAM, open Sandra and choose Memory Bandwidth under the Benchmarks tab:
Set up to four reference chipset and memory pairs where you want your computer’s chipset and memory to be compared with:
Click the refresh icon on the lower part of the window to start the benchmark:
After a few moment, the output chart is generated where you can see how much your hardware fares against your assigned chipset and memory pairings:
From the above charts, we can see that my chipset and memory fared very well with the other 4 pairs that I chose as benchmark. Applying the benchmark data, I will choose the hardware represented by the orange line as a better hardware compared to my current setup in red:
That orange line is the ATI Express 1600 2xPC3200 CL3 DDR with an AMD Athlon 64 CPU:
Quite a very powerful software, isn’t it? Besides the chart, it also displays benchmark results and breakdown details at the lower part of the window. This is handy for folks who want to see how fast the electrons move inside the core of their CPUs 
Most casual users will appreciate the chart presentation and the instantaneous capability to compare with hardware listed on the database. Power users on the other hand will not be disappointed by its capability to show low level information like inter-core bandwidth and memory sub-system performance.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
» Filed Under Free Software Downloads
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