Though we didn't have reference numbers to compare it to, we figured it made sense to run the Alienware X51 over various resolutions and settings with Batman Arkham City. We even turned on NVIDIA PhysX in the game engine, to ramp up the visuals and work the little alien speedster a bit harder.
 |
|
Batman Arkham City
|
|
Cutting Edge DX11 Game Play with Enhanced Physics Effects
|
|
|
Batman: Arkham City
|
Batman:
Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman:
Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and
even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the
original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum,
has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by
walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning
the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11
rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows,
and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game
graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions. |
Though we had image quality set to very high, tessellation and PhysX turned on and FXAA enabled in the game engine, the Alienware X51 still maintain playable frame rates, right on up through 1920X1080 resolutions. With this system, you can quite literally play any game on the market currently, at high resolutions and high image quality settings.
|
|
Power Consumption
|
|
Idle and Full Load Power Draw |
|
Before bringing this article to a close, we'll take a look at power consumption of the Alienware X51 versus the other full sized systems we tested. We let each system boot and sit idle before measuring idle power and then loaded down each system with both an instance of Prime95 (to load down the CPU) and Furmark (to load the GPU) before taking our full load power consumption measurements. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling on the desktop and while under a heavy workload. Keep in mind, this is total system power consumption being measured at the outlet.
Loaded for bear with Prime95 and Furmark, only pushing 212 Watts
Another impressive turnout for Alienware's X51, as the little system consumes the least amount of juice either at idle or under full load. Its PSU has a significantly lower power capacity as well but the external brick is likely more efficient that the larger standard internal PSUs in the full sized systems. When you consider it's performance, the X51 has the best performance-per-watt profile of the bunch, easily.
;)
