Introduction

Did you know that the SANDRA portion of "SiSoftware Sandra" is an acronym. Broken down, it means System Analyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. In all honesty, even though I had been using the program for years to test my systems, I never knew that until I started reviewing products. I always thought it was just a clever name for a program. I thought maybe one of the developers had a mom or wife named Sandra, some female that kicked their butt around and told them how to fix things and run more efficiently.

SiSoftware Sandra has been around since 1997 and has been a staple of the benchmark and computer hardware diagnostic world. Sandra's features are used through modules that can test any of the computer's hardware, from the CPU to even .NET features and GPU performance. SiSoftware continues to keep up with emerging technology with each new iteration of the software. Their latest release is Sandra 2011, which introduces new features to take advantage of upcoming technologies, such as increased threaded CPUs and new x86 instruction architecture.