Alienware Area-51 7500 Gaming System

Name: Alienware Area-51 7500 Gaming System - Page 9
Brand: Alienware

by Shane Unrein — Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 08:00 PM EDT

3DMark06 & Quake 4

Page 9: 3DMark06 & Quake 4

Starting with our 3DMark06 test, all of the gaming related benchmarks will be using a new set of comparison systems that were configured to put up a better fight against the Area-51 7500 when it came to gaming than our productivity test systems could have.

Futuremark 3DMark06

DirectX Gaming Performance

3DMark06's test is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of different 3D scenes that are generated with software and hardware GPU renderers, which is also dependant on the host CPU's performance. In its CPU tests, the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor. GPU rendering tests employ a mix of SM2.0, SM3.0 and HDR techniques and effects.

Here we see the Area-51 7500 fall behind the custom QX6700 system, likely due to different drivers. Both systems feature two 8800 GTXs in SLI and both feature a Core 2 QX6700 processor. Let's move on to the real-world game benchmarks to see if this is the start of a trend.

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4

OpenGL Quad-Damage

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4, in late 2005. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar. Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran this Quake 4 benchmark using a custom timedemo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode at a resolution of 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled simultaneously.

The Area-51 7500 falls quite a bit behind most of the pack in our Quake 4 test. We ran this one several extra times just to be sure we were getting the right results. We don't know why the Area-51 7500 isn't getting more out of its muscle, but we started to believe it more once we ran a few more benchmarks.