Alienware M18x R2 Gaming Laptop: Dual GPUs Attack
SiSoft Sandra & Cinebench
 |
|
;) |
;) |
As part of this year's refresh, Alienware upgraded the M18x R2 to Intel's Ivy Bridge platform, and our review system came to us with an Core i7 3820QM processor. It's a quad-core chip that runs at 2.7GHz, and up to 3.7GHz via Turbo. It also has 8MB of Smart Cache. It's a higher end chip in Intel's mobile line-up, and that's reflected in the Sandra's Arithmetic and Multimedia tests.
;)
;)
Flanking the fast Ivy Bridge processor is 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory and two performance-oriented Samsung 830 256GB SSDs in RAID 0. Sandra benched the storage at a little over 880MB/s (read), which is insanely fast. More important than the synthetic measurement is the actual response when buzzing around Windows and loading programs, both of which the M18x excel at.
| |
|
Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on Maxon's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation chores and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.
Cinebench is a notoriously punishing benchmark designed to evaluate a system's worthiness for professional level chores, like CAD and 3D content creation. More recently, we've seen systems show they're up to the task, though they're typically high-end desktops. Once again, the M18x R2 shows it can run with the big dogs, posting one of the higher scores we've seen in Cinebench, and certainly the strongest numbers posted by a laptop.
