Alienware Area-51 m9750: Power Gaming on the Go
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Synthetic Gaming Performance
We don't place a lot of stock in the performance results generated by Futuremark's 3DMark applications, but many people like to see the numbers nonetheless. Here are the GPU and CPU scores from 3DMark03/05/06.
NVIDIA's SLI platform has always done very well in 3DMark results, and moving SLI into notebooks doesn't change anything. 3DMark03 is 62% faster than the nearest competitor, 3DMark05 is 41% faster, and 3DMark06 is also 62% faster. 3DMark06 also shows a 92% performance boost over a single GeForce Go 7950 GTX in the SM2.0/3.0 tests. The CPU results on the other hand have the Alienware placing just behind the stock M1710, likely due to the driver overhead SLI creates.
Outside of bragging rights, though, we find the above results only moderately interesting. If transportable gaming is really what you're after, a far more meaningful benchmark is actual game performance.
We don't place a lot of stock in the performance results generated by Futuremark's 3DMark applications, but many people like to see the numbers nonetheless. Here are the GPU and CPU scores from 3DMark03/05/06.
NVIDIA's SLI platform has always done very well in 3DMark results, and moving SLI into notebooks doesn't change anything. 3DMark03 is 62% faster than the nearest competitor, 3DMark05 is 41% faster, and 3DMark06 is also 62% faster. 3DMark06 also shows a 92% performance boost over a single GeForce Go 7950 GTX in the SM2.0/3.0 tests. The CPU results on the other hand have the Alienware placing just behind the stock M1710, likely due to the driver overhead SLI creates.
Outside of bragging rights, though, we find the above results only moderately interesting. If transportable gaming is really what you're after, a far more meaningful benchmark is actual game performance.
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Frumious1 - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
Oop - was apparently posting at the same time as you. Count me for keeping the graphs as is!Marlin1975 - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
It still uses the 945 chipset and not the newwer 965?I would think being on the cutting edge it would benifit fromt he new Mem. controller and other upgrades the 965 had?
toon26 - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
I have buy this portable with 4 giga of mémory but the bios reconize just 2559Mb of méméory.Commercial service of alienware For the small history my son comes to acquire this portable with option 4 giga of memory (it makes studies to become data-processing engineer) and appear that the BIOS of this portable recognizes only 2555Mo of memory.
The engineering department of Alienware is informed of a problem on this BIOS. The sales department of Alienware wants to offer a mouse well to my son for the damage undergoes (the option to pass from 2 to 4 giga has to cost 280 to him€, for a portable with 3400€)
Most comic of the history it is that the site of Alienware always proposes this option of the 4 gigas who is completely unusable so much than a new BIOS will not come to correct this problem.
All the tests which I could read on this portable in the newspaper industry or on Internet were made only with 2 giga of memory, and thus nobody could locate this BUG, not even the Alienware company which is praised to make pass more than 200 tests to your portable before sending it to you
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
Which is why I have the following in the review:The OS options further cement the deal: no 64-bit, don't bother with the hugely expensive memory upgrade! And of course, for 64-bit you'd need new GPU drivers, which are MIA.
yacoub - Monday, September 3, 2007 - link
Nope, most major laptop manufacturers (Dell/Alienware being prime examples) seem to have a fetish for extremely over-priced laptops with outdated chipsets. Here, pay $5,000 and we'll give you 945 and DX9. WOW WHAT A DEAL! ;PJarredWalton - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
It's a case of time to market. SLI notebooks were initially demoed at CES 2006. The first ones didn't show up until quite a bit later, and they were Go 7900 GTX cards. NVIDIA released the faster Go 7950 GTX, but I don't believe laptops supporting the faster cards became available until early 2007. Alienware probably doesn't have to resources to update their laptop line every time a new chipset comes out. Besides, they'd still have to deal with NVIDIA's driver updates (or lack thereof), and Santa Rosa wouldn't make that big of a difference in most titles - especially not in the GPU limited games.