Alienware Aurora R5 Review: Small Stature, Big Performance

Cinebench R11.5

The Cinebench R11.5 suite is comprised of two tests to measure CPU and graphics processing performance.

• The CPU test scenario uses all of your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

• The graphics procedure uses a complex 3D scene depicting a car chase (created by renderbaron) which measures the performance of your graphics card in OpenGL mode. The performance depends on various factors, such as the GPU processor on your hardware, on the drivers used.

The Alienware Aurora R5 is off to a competitive start here. It sits just behind the iBuypower Revolt 2, which is also equipped with a Core i7-6700K, but well within the margin of error. The 6700K trails in the multi-threaded test against some heavier hitting CPUs with six or more cores, however, until DX12 is more prevalent games rely more on single core performance which places the 6700K's - and thus, the Aurora R5 - near the top of the pack where it counts.

PC Mark 8

What makes PCMark 8 different from other benchmarks? Real-world relevance. With PCMark 8 you measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. We've grouped these applications into scenarios that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office. This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

PC Mark 8 includes several benchmark scenarios which leverage different workloads to better help you gauge which computer might meet your needs. For our purposes, we step through the Accelerated Home and Accelerated Work benchmarks...

The Aurora R5 proves itself here to be quite a productive box, taking top marks in the somewhat lighter Home workload. It does fall a little short in the Work benchmark, but still beats several machines with higher CPU core counts. In the end, these two benchmarks probably aren't why you are looking at this PC so let's move on to checking its graphics prowess...