Memory performance - SiSoft Sandra

Website: SiSoftware

SiSoft Sandra is possibly the most famous 2D benchmarking tool going, and like Lavalys Everest, it has tools to gauge the theoretical performance of every sub-system and component in your PC. Sandra is multi-threaded and we use it to gauge the unbuffered memory performance and the latency of the memory latency.

To run the unbuffered memory test, open the Benchmarks screen, go into the Options and deselect buffering. This will give a more accurate and consistent reading of memory throughput. Then enter the Graphs menu and deselect Animate Controls and Animate Tools - these options are designed for exhibitions like Computex or CES, and are just annoying for end users.

Hit F5 to run the benchmark and once it's finished enter the Graph menu and keep pressing Change Controls Mode until the graphs look like those below. You can now average the Internal Memory Bandwidth and Float Memory Bandwidth numbers to give the unbuffered memory performance.

The latency test is much easier to run - find the Memory Latency tool on the Benchmarks page and just run it by hitting F5. The latency is the top result in the text window.

Unbuffered memory bandwidth

Memory latency

We started by retesting the Xeon W5580, as a new version of Sandra, which supports Intel's implementation of NUMA, has been released since our original review. These new results show that the Xeon W5580 system has significantly more memory bandwidth and lower latency than either Opteron system - an important consideration if you're running lots of apps together such as a server used to power multiple virtual machines. However, it's not a completely one sided win for Intel - the older Xeon X5482 system is clearly hamstrung by its appallingly slow FB-DIMM memory.