Alienware X51 R2 Small Form Factor Game PC, Haswell-Infused

Name: Dell Alienware X51 R2 Small Form Factor Gaming PC, Powered by Inte's 4th Generation Haswell Core Processor
Brand: Dell

by Paul Lilly — Thursday, June 13, 2013, 11:22 AM EDT

PCMark & 3DMark Tests

Page 5: PCMark & 3DMark Tests

To kick things off we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets 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. Also, most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

The X51 R2 wasted no time living up to the hype associated with Haswell. Right out of the gate, the Alienware system took landed in front of other SFF systems with a score of 6,310, enough to ever-so-slightly edge out AVADirect's well-equipped setup. We're splitting hairs at the top end of the PCMark 7 scoring spectrum, but more important than notching a win by a hair is the fact that this rig is tuned for performance, hence it runs at the front of the pack.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark11, is specifically targeted at Windows 7-based systems due to its DirectX 11 requirement. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Performance preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x720 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

It was only a slightly different story in 3DMark 11, which focuses much more heavily on the graphics subsystem than anything else. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 670 is outpaced by the company's own Titan GPU, but compared to other systems running running the same graphics card, the Alienware rig was able to pull ahead by a thread. That's as much a victory for Haswell as it is for Dell.

In an effort to build up a database of 3DMark 11 Extreme preset scores, and because we were curious how it would fare, we ran the X51 R2 through the benchmark's highest setting. It barely broke a sweat. To put that 2.966 score into perspective, a typical Ivy Bridge system running on integrated graphics will score in the vicinity of 200 to 300 points in the same test.