SiSoft's Sandra (the Sytem ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) had a recent upgrade last November with the 2015 edition and followed by SP2b, which was released on 6th July this year. Better support for all current versions of Windows along with Windows 10 were included with the new version, along with updated hardware, Device Performance Certification, new GPU, APU and CPU Scientific Analysis Algorithms and an updated overall score. There were also many other tweaks and improvements to the main structure of the program itself and a dash of Windows 8-esque flair with a set of new styles and themes.
The program itself comes in a variety of versions. There's the Lite free version, for personal system use; a Personal edition, for the home enthusiast and costing around £30; a Business edition, for OEMs and the like, costing £123; a Tech Support version, which can cost anywhere up to £1,140 with an added 16GB USB flash drive, which naturally is designed for someone in a professional technical support role; and finally there's the Enterprise version, which does pretty much everything and more and costs a pretty pound or two - up to £4,324 of them.
Nearly every component on the PC is tested, measured and detailed to the extreme. The CPU, chipset, GPU, ports, printers, audio devices, memory, network, Windows internals, ODBC connections... you begin to get the idea. They're all tested and reported on thanks to the pages upon pages of different modules that are loaded when the program starts its benchmark.
While this may seem a little overboard to some, it does mean that your system will get a thoroughly good shake down. The pretty videos that 3DMark 11 display aren't present, and you don't necessarily get to hold the bragging rights over your friends as to who has the best gaming PC, but you do get one of the best and most detailed reports of any benchmarking software.
With the numbers generated you can opt to have them made public, based on the make and model of the hardware you're testing and any global benchmarking teams you may belong to. So in some respects there is an element of bragging rights.
How much faith you put into the tests run is up to you, though. There was some talk a while back of the tests being somewhat synthetic in nature, although that could well have been unfounded rumour. Even if you have little regard for the tests themselves, you can't deny the sheer statistical data that Sandra displays.
It may not be the prettiest benchmark product around, but Sandra has everything a competent and technically minded benchmarker is after. With Sandra you can stress test and have reports generated on every conceivable aspect of your system, which makes it much more useful in the long run for locating potential problems or tweaking than 3DMark 11.
The problem, though, is how the results are displayed. While great for the technically minded, the casual benchmarker may really not care for the General Processing GPU/CPU/APU overall score. Compared to the final, single score of 3DMark 11, you can see how Sandra has fallen from favour over time. Still, it is by far the most comprehensive of the benchmark tools on test here.