Sandra Standard is a great program to use to benchmark your computer because it has a wide variety of individual tests, and it’s free. To get started, you will need to download a copy of Sandra Standard from the Web site located at www.sisoftware.co.uk.Once you have Sandra Standard installed, you will be able to begin testing and benchmarking your system. To start Sandra Standard, click the Start Menu and expand All Programs and SiSoftware Utilities (Win32 x86), then click SiSoftware Sandra Standard (Win32 x86 Unicode) to launch Sandra.
Once Sandra is started, and you have closed the Tip of the Day, you will see a list of different information and testing modules, as shown in Figure 7-10.
In order to run a benchmark, just double-click the icon of the benchmark you would like to run. For an example, let’s run the CPU Arithmetic Benchmark. Scroll down on the list and list of icons until you find the CPU Arithmetic Benchmark icon and then double-click it. Once it loads, click the blue Refresh arrow button or press F5 on your keyboard to start the benchmark.
Once the benchmark starts, the Analyzing window will be shown that indicates the progress of the test. Do not touch your keyboard or mouse while the test is running. On some bench-marks, the status bar does not update very frequently, so don’t get worried if the benchmark seems to be frozen; most likely it is not. The vast majority of the benchmarks take only a few minutes to run, although a few may take up to 10 minutes. When the test is over, the results will be displayed in comparison to other hardware configurations.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
The CPU Arithmetic Benchmark will run a series of standard CPU benchmarks, such as the Dhrystone (integer arithmetic such as whole number addition) and Whetstore (floating point
arithmetic such as decimal addition) benchmark tests. This test takes about 30 seconds to run but is repeated several times to get an accurate test result. All together, this test takes between two to five minutes to run. This test is not very useful for measuring how much faster you have made your computer but it is useful to compare how fast your CPU is compared to other sys-tems. Within the module, the results of the test will be compared against other similar systems and you can select any processor to compare it against.
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
The CPU in your computer is a lot more advanced than CPUs from 20 years ago, which just did basic computer functions. With the growing need for high-performance multimedia applications such as 3D games and DVD players, CPU manufacturers started to include advanced instructions in the design of the chip that would allow for special multimedia performance increases. The CPU multimedia benchmark is designed to test the most popular multimedia extensions that your computer is equipped with, such as MMX, 3DNow, SSE2, and SSE3. The test will take about 20 seconds but it will repeat a few times to get reliable results. During the test, a fractal is generated and other objects using the multimedia extensions. The results are then calculated and repeated for both integer (whole numbers) and floating point (decimal) calculations and displayed in comparison to other systems.
FIGURE7-10: Sandra Standard benchmark modules.
Removable Storage/Flash Benchmark
The Storage/Flash Benchmark will measure the speed of the flash-based storage devices, such as USB pen drives and compact flash-based cards, used in many digital cameras. The bench-mark module tests the read performance, write performance, as well as the delete performance.
Then, based on the performance in each area, the drive is given a drive index score. After the test, the actual data speeds are available and the device can also be compared to similar devices.
This test can take up to 10 minutes to complete and cannot be canceled while it’s performing.
File System Benchmark
The File System Benchmark is similar to the flash storage benchmark but is designed for different hardware, such as hard drives. The File System Benchmark tests the drive by doing a series of read tests that test reading data from random locations, reading data from a series of adjacent locations, and reading data from the disk buffer. Additionally, the file system bench-mark tests the writing speed by writing data to random locations, writing data to a series of adjacent locations, and writing directly to the disk buffer. To finish the benchmark, the applica-tion completes a seek test and then calculates a drive index score based on the results of the three types of tests. The data is then displayed in comparison with similar types of drives.
CD-ROM/DVD Benchmark
The CD-ROM/DVD Benchmark test is similar to the file system benchmark but is designed for the optical drives. In order to run the test on a data CD drive, you must place a CD that has at least 600MB of data on it and contains large files that are greater than 64MB each. For a video CD or DVD, any VCD movie or DVD movie will do for the test. After the test is com-pleted, which usually takes about 10 minutes, the results will be displayed in comparison with other drives.
Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
The Memory Bandwidth Benchmark tests the system memory using the popular STREAM memory benchmark. This benchmark tests the storing and retrieving of data of both integer and floating point operations. Once the test is completed, usually after two minutes, the results will be displayed. The “ALU” results are from the integer arithmetic tests and the “FPU” results are from the floating point tests. If you would like to learn more about the STREAM memory benchmark, visit www.streambench.orgto find out how it works.
Cache & Memory Benchmark
The Cache & Memory Benchmark tests the CPU cache and memory using floating point operations. The test is designed to make it possible to compare different CPU configurations.
After the test is run, which usually takes about 10 minutes, the results will be given in a graph that shows how effective the cache is at different text block sizes, as shown in Figure 7-11. This test is great for determining exactly how CPUs of the same speed but different cache sizes are different.
Network/LAN Bandwidth Benchmark
The Network/LAN Bandwidth Benchmark will measure how fast your local area network is.
The test will ping and transfer data from another machine on your network to test for response time and for maximum speed. Although this test is limited to the maximum speed of the
hardware that the test is testing across the network, the benchmark is still effective when used to detect how fast your network can really go. The test may take a while to load, as it needs to search your local area network to find another machine that it can connect to so that it can run the network benchmark. Once the module loads, and the test is run, the results will be displayed within 5 minutes.
Internet Connection Benchmark
The Internet Connection Benchmark attempts to measure the speed of your Internet connection link. The test will detect the first gateway of your ISP and measure the speed of the data transferred to and from. Then the test measures the latency of your connection by pinging the gateway. The tests are run a number of times and the mean of the results is what is reported.
This benchmark is useful for comparing your results against other types of connections on which the test was run. However, the numbers generated by the benchmark are not the true FIGURE7-11: Results of the Cache & Memory Benchmark test.