Gaming Performance

If this were a normal laptop then we'd probably be lecturing on endlessly about general performance and Xvid encoding speed tests right now. Fortunately though, this is a laptop computer built and designed for a specific purpose - gaming. That means that it's probably most prudent to look at how it performs in gaming tests first.

And we're saying that that is fortunate because it means that instead of having sit back and watch graphs compile in our bespoke testing software, we get to sit down and do some serious gaming. That's never a bad thing.

Don't worry though - if you are a little bit worried about the general performance of this laptop then we will go over the usual gauntlet of tests too on the next page.

The fact of the matter is though that this is a machine built expressly for the purpose of pumping out polygons and calculating unit AI. To use a swanky new laptop like the Alienware Area-51 m15x for anything other than gaming is probably going to be a waste; this isn't a machine you should think of getting if you want to balance your spreadsheets on or use as a superpowered netbook. It can do those things, but if that's what you're looking for then we recommend you look else where - there are plenty of decent netbooks out there for that.



When it comes to the gaming performance, there are two ways to handle it. We can present the information as dozens of charts and graphs showing pointlessly in-depth numbers and framerates over a dozen games. Or, we can sit down for a day or two and actually play the games, letting you know what games are playable at what settings.

When it comes to laptops we like to opt for the latter – that way the information is much more digestible and sensible.

We wanted to test the gaming performance of the Alienware Area-51 m15x on a number of the latest and greatest games, but they also have to be games you’d likely expect to play. Nobody buys a super-pimp gaming rig like this just to play RooGoo afterall.

Therefore we selected three games which we think m15x would likely play, then spent some time playing them and tweaking various settings until we found the settings that produced the best playable experience. We quantify that as a smooth framerate, with no stuttering or lagging, while still hitting the maximum possible graphical fidelity.


The games we chose to test with were also the same as those we’ve used in previous gaming notebook reviews, so this method should provide some level of real-world comparison. There games were Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World in Conflict.

Each one of these games showcases some of the best graphics that can currently be seen in PC games, whether that be incredibly high-res textures (Call of Duty 4), mass-scale physics and smoke (World in Conflict) or just general, all-round visual perfection (Crysis).

In the chart above you can see our results, which pretty much speak for themselves in terms. Overall the results were pretty much as we expected and the Alienware was more than up to the task of gaming in all three games.

In fact, the only game that really disappointed us was World in Conflict, in which we had to drop down through the Very High and High settings to the Medium Detail present. This forced the game out of the DirectX 10 mode and down into the DirectX 9 version. That doesn’t have a massive effect on the game really, but it’s always disappointing not being able to use your hardware to it’s full potential.

The system is built with an Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX 512MB graphics card and 2.8GHz Extreme Edition Intel processor inside, so you'd expect it to crunch through these games, however the super-high resolution screen stresses it all considerably. You could always run the lower resolution, but out of an LCDs native resolution things always look awkward and blocky.

It’s also worth noting that, since World in Conflict has an in-game benchmark, we did a few runs on this. On the medium preset, though the game was very playable, the average framerate was just 12FPS, with a maximum of 26, averaged out over several runs.