SiSoft Sandra 2003 Professional

I mentioned in my last review that our version of Sandra was getting long in the tooth, so I figured it'd be a good time to update it. For these tests I used the very latest available from SiSoft, Sandra 2003 Professional. For those of you not familiar with Sandra, it is a synthetic benchmarking application that measures every aspect of your computer's performance. It will also run diagnostics and recommend settings to increase performance and/or fix problems you might be having. It's pretty cool as long as you remember that it is synthetic and the results may not reflect real life performance.

That being said, this new version of Sandra adds a processor cache and system memory benchmark that is very similar to (although not as comprehensive as) Linpack. We'll look at the regular numbers first though.

Here we can plainly see that the two E7500 boards are identical for all intents and purposes. That's a good thing as it shows that we're not experiencing anything funky with either of the boards. We already know that the actual chipset has little to do with this (CPU specific) benchmark, but if anything was flaky, it would show up here.

According to Intel (and Sandra) the Xeon is the the "multi-media" processor to have. Again, nothing much to see here, let's get to the good stuff.

I was in our IRC channel recently discussing the memory bandwidth of the E7500 chipset with Dr. Damage from The Tech Report. He mentioned that the Sandra memory scores in my other E7500 motherboard reviews seemed a little low, and I had to agree with him. In fact, that was the deciding factor that pushed me to update Sandra. Well, as you can see, the new version of Sandra produced the same results. I wasn't about to leave it at that though, so I fired up the new Processor Cache/System Memory benchmark to see what it had to say.

DOH! Same thing here. At least we can see that it is a Sandra issue and not a problem particular to one motherboard. See how the two E7500 boards are almost identical? That's a good thing... I guess. Something is still fishy here though.

Cachemem and Cinebench >>