Next. we put these four systems through their paces with PCMark Vantage and Futuremark's latest PCMark 7 benchmarks. These are general performance test suites that measure performance metrics across a wide range of workloads and usage models.
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PCMark Vantage |
| General Application and Multimedia Performance |
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This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various subsystem in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.
We should note that the PCMark test suite results, in general, are heavily affected by both storage subsystem and processor throughput. Here the X51 trails even the slowest full-sized machine, though by a negligible variance. Graphics performance is hardly stressed in this test, with only DX9 rendering required to complete the test.
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PCMark 7
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General Application and Multimedia Performance
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Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark whole-system benchmarking suite and combines more than 25 individual workloads covering storage,
computation, image and video manipulation, Web browsing, and gaming.
It's specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware, from
netbooks and tablets, to notebooks and desktops. |
Here the Alienware X51 fared about as well as it did in the earlier Vantage version of PCMark. Not a surprise really. Let's look at a few metrics that will set overall system and gaming performance apart a bit more.
