After running SiSoft Sandra tests on our test P4 system earlier in the week, we received an email from Adrian Silasi, the benchmarking suite's developer, kindly offering us a pre-release download of Sandra 2001.

The updated package includes SSE2 and DDR support, along with two Whetstone tests, the original FPU one and the new SSE2 version. As before, both the Professional & Standard versions use exactly the same tests and give the same scores.

Adrian has asked us to keep the download location secret for the moment, so don't ask us for it - we won't tell you.

Being properly optimised for Screaming Sindie's second set of extensions (SSE2) makes a startling difference to the P4's Sandra scores. Overclocked to 1.6GHz, our P4 with 256MB of PC800 RDRAM managed an overall performance rating of just PR563 with Sandra 2000. With Sandra 2001 this increased to PR1916.

The CPU now returns 2997mips, compared with 2807 for a normally-clocked 1.5GHz P4 and 2792 for a 1GHz Athlon. FPU performance is up to 955Mflops and 1944Mflops using SSE2, compared with the 895/1825 of the 1.5GHz P4 and 1362 of the 1 Gig Athlon.

Our 1GHz PIII (i820) returned 2720 Mips and 1336 Mflops.

On multimedia, SSE2 helped the 1.6GHz P4 hit 6291 it/sec on integer and 7818 it/sec on floating point. A 1.5GHz P4 scores 5892 and 7314 respectively, while the 1GHz Athlon is rated at 5633 and 6827. The 1GHz PIII trailed behind with 5452 and 6672.

Memory performance was almost four times better than a 1GHz Athlon using PC133 SDRAM. Our 1.6GHz P4 reaching an ALU/RAM bandwidth of 1553MBps with FPU/RAM at 1597MBps. The standard 1.5 P4 hit 1374/1400, the Athlon 1GHz 434/521 and the PIII 1GHz 325/345.

Thanks again to Adrian at SiSoft for letting us have the latest version of Sandra. ®

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