SiSoft Sandra Professional is a suite of benchmarks and diagnostic tools that cover most aspects of system performance and troubleshooting. The three tests we will concern ourselves with are the CPU, CPU Multi-Media, and Memory benchmarks, all of which isolate certain areas or features of the CPU and system. For reference, the ALU portion relates to Integer performance, while the FPU isolates the Floating-Point Unit of the processor. The CPU Multi-Media scores will be most telling, since it allows us to test both SSE and 3DNow! capabilities of the Duron 1 GHz to see how each matches up.

Both the CPU ALU and FPU benchmarks show the Duron 1 GHz coming out on top, especially the all-important FPU tests. Here, the Duron 1 GHz is well ahead of the Duron competition and even bests the Athlon 1 GHz in most areas.

Moving onto the CPU Multi-Media Benchmark testing, you will notice that we provide two individual scores for the Duron 1 GHz, or one each for both SSE and 3DNow! instruction sets. The ALU testing showed the Duron 1 GHz muscling by its Duron competition, but falling slightly behind to the Athlon 1 GHz. In FPU testing, this trend reversed itself a bit, especially under Windows 2000. It's also interesting to note that when using 3DNow! extensions, the Duron 1 GHz actually performed better than with SSE and even beat the Athlon 1 GHz in a head-to-head 3DNow! Battle. In the SiSoft CPU Multi-Media testing, it became quite clear that Windows 2000 was a much better OS for the Duron 1 GHz than Win 98SE.

The last SiSoft Sandra benchmark we will look at is the famed Memory Test. This is a popular benchmark because it outlines potential memory bandwidth as a function of the CPU, motherboard chipset and memory type used. In these tests, we see the Duron 1 GHz well out in front, especially in the ALU tests. This is obviously the Data Prefetch at work, enhancing the memory transfers to and from the processor, but it is interesting that while FPU processing was key in some of the past benchmarks, the Memory ALU results here are much better on a comparative basis.