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

Batman: Arkham City follows the well-received Batman: Arkham Asylum and brings with it some new challenges for Batman and better graphics for us. Hitman Absolution is one of the newest games in our benchmark pool and is murder on most gaming PCs. Both games offer DX11 code paths and advanced graphics technologies, including tessellation.

Batman: Arkham City DX11 Gaming Performance

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.


The X51 R2 stepped up its game, literally, in Batman: Arkham City, scoring near the top of the pack and trailing only AVADirect's system, which has a pretty major GPU advantage.

Hitman: Absolution DX11 Gaming Performance

Our final game benchmark of the review is of Hitman, the blockbuster game that follows an assassin as he finds himself become a target. Here we have no other systems to compare it to compare it to as yet.


The same situation played out in Hitman: Absolution, a relatively new addition to our gamut of gaming benchmarks (hence the limited comparisons). At 1920x1080 (which is what most large screen HDTVs run natively), the X51 R2 was able to push a very playable 43.76 fps.