Thread: Synthetic Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2009 is a comprehensive suite which consists of benchmarks such as File System, Processor Arithmetic and Memory BandWidth, and these benchmarks target the hard drive, processor and RAM respectively. To stress and evaluate the hardware's performance, they emulate real-world activity in relevance to the hardware.

Processor arithmetic: This benchmark involves intensive number-crunching. It determines the processor's efficiency in handling the Floating Point and Integer calculations. Here, the higher the score, the better the processor.

Files System: This benchmark is used for checking the performance of hard drives. It shows the Drive Index, Sequential and Random read/write speed, and the Random Access Time of the hard disk being tested.

The Drive Index represents an overall score which i6 derived from the average of scores obtained from individual tests. The Sequential read and write speed is nothing but a simulation of a single file being written on the hard drive and being read from it. Similarly, the Random read and write speed is where multiple files are written and read. Both these scores are represented in terms of MB/s (megabytes per second). Here, the higher the speed, the better the hard drive. Random Access Time (RAT) shows as to how much time it takes to access random storage points on the hard drive platters. It is measured in milliseconds (ms), and the lower the RAT, the better the score. This benchmark is also often used to test optical drives and external storage.

Memory bandwidth: As the name suggests, memory bandwidth measures bandwidth (speed) of the memory modules. Based on that, it evaluates their performance. Even in this case, the higher the memory bandwidth, the better the RAM.

Sisoft Sandra also features other benchmarks such as Multi-Core Efficiency, Cache and Memory, and Memory Latency that give an in-depth analysis of the hardware used. PCMark Vantage Professional A product by Future Mark Corporation, PC Mark and 3DMark are amongst the most comprehensive synthetic