AMD Vision A8-3850 APU & Asus F1A75-M Pro Motherboard Review

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.  Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)

•       Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)

•       Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)

•       Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)

•       Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

•       SMP – Multi-Processor

•       MC – Multi-Core

•       SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading

•       MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions

•       GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics

•       NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access

•       AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86

•       IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In the Arithmetic test, the aggregate performance of the APU fell short of the Intel i3-2105 but was almost identical when overclocked.  This shows that you don't necessarily have to sacrifice integrated graphics power for CPU processing power.  In the aggregate multimedia test, we also saw similar performance from the APU when overclocked and from the Intel i3-2105 even though there were some variations in each specific test.  In all of the cryptography tests, the A8-3850 beat the i3-2105 easily thanks to excellent AES256 and SHA256 performance. Floating point performance in the multimedia test is also particularly strong.

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