Alienware Area 51: Triad, Tri-SLI GTX 980, Haswell-E

How We Configured Our Test Systems:  We configured other reference test systems in this article on an EVGA X79 Dark motherboard powered by an Intel Core i7-4960X six-core processor and 16GB of Corsair DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the solid state drive was then formatted and Windows 8.1 Professional x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.

Dell's Alienware Area-51 was tested in an "as delivered" configuration, with the only modification being a quick update to the latest NVIDIA WHQL drivers for the GeForce GTX 980 graphics card.  It was only in our overclocking test area that we modified any of the speeds and feeds of the system.

HotHardware's Test Systems Haswell-E And Ivy-Bridge-E Powered

Gaming Tests Only - HH Test System: Intel Core i7-4960X (3.3GHz, Six-Core) EVGA X79 Dark (Intel X79 Express) Radeon R9 290X Radeon R7 295X2 GeForce GTX 980 x 2 GeForce GTX 970 (MSI and EVGA) GeForce GTX 780 Ti x 2 GeForce GTX Titan x 2 16GB Corsair DDR3-1866 OCZ Vertex 3 SSD Integrated Audio Integrated Network

All Tests - Alienware Area-51: Intel Core i7-5930K (3.5GHz, Six-Core) Custom Dell Motherboard (Intel X99 Express) GeForce GTX 980 x 3 16GB Corsair DDR3-1866 Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256GB 4TB WD HDD Integrated Audio Integrated Network

Relevant Software: Windows 8.1 Pro x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v14.30.1005 B2 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v344.07 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark "Fire Strike" Bioshock Infinite Hitman: Absolution Metro Last Light Sleeping Dogs Crysis 3 PCMark 8 Cinebench R11.5 FRAPS

General Performance Testing Notes:  For our gaming tests in this review (arguably the most critical for many in our audience, since this product is geared specifically to gamers) we compare the Alienware Area-51 to our database of reference graphics card scores that were taken on the testbed noted above.  Though not a direct identical configuration comparison, HotHardware's reference graphics test system is also a 6-core Core i7 setup with 16GB of DDR3 memory and a fast SSD. GPU throughput will affect these game test results almost exclusively, but regardless, these numbers are for frame of reference only. The Area-51 is configured with a very powerful graphics subsystem, and for game tests, we haven't compiled enough 4K resolution test data to draw direct comparison to competitive systems. This is why we chose to offer our graphics testbed for comparison, where we have 4K data.

In a couple of CPU-centric, general purposes tests, we've compared the Area-51 to other reference gaming PCs from various system integrators. Again, these are relative metrics to offer watermarks of performance levels in specific applications. Since we have direct A/B comparison data in these test conditions, we opted to compare Alienware's new machine to these other high-end systems on the market.

PCMark 8 General System Performance

PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests--plus battery life testing—to help consumers find the devices that offers the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case. This latest version of the suite improves the Home, Creative and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments.

These tests can be run with our without OpenCL acceleration. We chose to run with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage all of the platforms’ CPU and GPU compute resources.