Test: Alienware Aurora m9700 UK

Benchmark & test

To review the performance of the laptop, I will first comment on daily usage and gaming, followed by benchmark results from the following tools:

3DMARK 03
3DMARK 05
3DMARK 06
PCMARK 05
SuperPI
SiSoft Sandra CPU arithmetic test
Passmark Monitor test v2.2


Daily usage
Long hours in front of the screen are not a problem, as extended viewing proves to be very comfortable. In word processing the letters are very clear and the image is completely still. As for surfing the web, no blurriness or smudge is to be found. If the laptop is placed in a brightly lit room, some problems can occur, as the screen will reflect some of the light. Not a mayor issue, and working on the laptop is free of most any hassle.

Gaming
Being the primary purpose of the laptop, the gaming aspect demanded some serious reviewing. As such, an entire weekend was put aside for gaming. My gaming experience is elaborated on in the following section.

Counterstrike
An old favourite of mine, Counter-Strike was the first thing to be installed. It was quickly set up to my liking. I prefer to run it at a resolution of 1024x768, and to my knowledge most other players do as well, unless the game is Counter-Strike Source based on the Half Life 2 engine. I disable vertical sync and force it to run at 99 frames per second.
I find the game review important, as an active Counter-Striker gamer, the screen performance would be extraordinary important in choosing which laptop to buy. After countless hours behind the screen, TFT screens just aren't truly competitive. The screen on the Aurora is very sharp and has a low response time, making the difference between it and a quality CRT screen minimal. The m9700 is an excellent portable alternative for Counter Strike.


Counterstrike Source
The hardware demands of this game are way greater than with the original Counter-Strike. Furthermore, I am testing it in the screen native resolution of 1920x1200. The following set up is recommended:



Running about does not cause the update rate to fall below 99 FPS. When action occurs the frame rate drops to about 60 FPS. If a smoke grenade is active during action, the frame rate drops as low as 40-50 FPS. The game is still responsive and does not appear to stutter at any time while gaming.



I am going to turn every setting to its maximum, and run the game again. Anti-aliasing is set to 4x and anisotropic filtering to 16x. To my surprise, the frame rate is pretty much the same as before, in the same combat situations. Very impressive!





Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
This game is the newest addition to the Rainbow Six series, and it will be my first acquaintance with it. It auto-detects a video set up. The game recommends a resolution of 1280x960, but I have to disagree and set the resolution to its native setting. It seems the game was wiser than I, as the game is stuttering excessively and is pretty unplayable. I'm forced to decrease the resolution to 1280x960. Sadly, the game still isn't performing as I would have hoped. A decent frame rate isn't achieved until I turn down the resolution to 1024x768. It is noteworthy however, that I am a very demanding customer, and I expect high frame rates at all times. The game is still beautiful though, and it is evident that some serious hardware is needed for playing at high resolutions.



3dMark
I've chosen to compare the Aurora m9700 with some of the laptops we've recently reviewed. One of them is the Dell Inspiron m9400 equipped with a GeForce Go 7800 and a Core Duo T2500 processor, a nice laptop quite capable of gaming. I only have results from a 3DMARK 05 test though. The Aurora will be compared against two laptops from Danish Zepto as well, namely the Znote 6214W and the Znote 6615WD, available from Zepto.dk



As clearly stated in the graph, the Alienware Aurora m9700 is leading the pack by a serious margin. It is simply way better equipped for gaming than most other laptops. The other laptops have decent specifications and receive fair scores considering that they are laptops. In 3DMARK 03 the other laptops score about 8000, while the m9700 scores higher than 20,000, clearly separating it as an excellent achiever. The same trend is observed in all the other benchmark results.


SuperPI



In the SuperPi benchmark the laptops are calculated pi based on 1 million decimals. The result of the m9700 is 39 seconds. This is within the range I would have expected of this type of processor. Its performance is somewhat lower than the competition. The aging Turion processor is having difficulties keeping up with the 6615WD's Core 2 Duo T5600 at 1.83GHz, which finishes calculations at 32.6 seconds. The difference is thus 6.8 seconds. Pretty much the same can be observed with the 6214W, sporting a Core Duo T2400 at 1.83GHz, which finish calculations in 32 seconds.


Sandra CPU arithmetic test



No surprises here, as I was aware that the aging Turion processor would perform somewhere in the vicinity of an 3800+. As evident from the results, the separation between it and the often used Core 2 Duo T7200 is quite wide. The state of the art quad-core processor leaves the others in dust, but the comparison isn't exactly fair. The Turion processor will be enough for most gaming needs however.


Passmark Monitor test v2.2
This test is excellent for finding the various weaknesses in a computer monitor. Especially the LCD pixel persistence test is noteworthy, and the results surprised me a lot. The test will show white rectangles moving sideways on an otherwise dark background. The test shows the screen capability of shutting and opening pixels with different time limits. The results are shown in pixels/sec and the available options are 100, 200, 400, 600 and 800. The results of the m9700 are excellent, and only at 800 pixels/sec very slight ghosting is visible.

Another test shows the screens ability to represent the font Arial in white with differing sizing on a dark background. Size options are from 6 and up to 13. Once again, the results are excellent. The letters are very clear in all sizes, though at the rather high resolution of 1920x1200, a size 6 font is fairly difficult to read.

Generally throughout the tests performed on this screen, it is always a top performer.

The performance of the laptop, despite my precognitions of the processor, reveals itself to be extraordinary. The m9700 is very powerful indeed, wiping out the competition in the benchmarks I've performed. It is a very worthy desktop replacement.