Dell Alienware Area-51 Core i7-980 X Infused Gaming PC
PCMark Vantage
Next, we ran the test systems through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows, PCMark Vantage. This benchmark suite runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition digital video playback and editing, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. We like the fact that most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, in order to exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core processors. We used the 64-bit version of the benchmark and defragmented the hard drive immediately prior to running it. However, since the Origin PC used an Intel SSD instead of a standard hard drive, we avoided defragging the drive in favor of using Intel's TRIM utility.
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Since PCMark Vantage is highly sensitive to file system performance, it turned out that more cores in the Core i7-980 X-enabled Alienware Area-51 didn't equate to a higher score. In reality, balanced system performance is more important for for some of the office and multimedia type applications that comprise the PCMark Vantage test suite. Here, even though the Area-51 is built upon a 2TB RAID 0 storage array, it couldn't quite keep pace with the Intel SSD that Origin configured with their system. Of course you could configure a 256GB SSD option on the Area-51 for about a $300 up-charge, which would likely propel the system ahead of the Origin PC. It's all a matter of priorities as they say.
