General Performance

To gauge general performance we use a range of different programs that run an automated set of processes and output several results in seconds. We perform each test three times in order to get a good groundwork, then we average these times to try and get a figure which is the most fair and representative.

It’s also work mentioning that the Alienware m15x comes with a super-special Stealth Mode option, activated by pressing one of the touch sensitive buttons above the keyboard. This locks off the CPU at a slower 1.6GHz speed which obviously impedes performance, but this also makes it more energy efficient and an awful lot quieter, meaning if you want to watch movies or listen to music, you don't get the fan infringing on the experience.

In order to be fair and really show the whole performance, we’ve included both sets of results below.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.


The Alienware Area-51 m15x took an average of 973 seconds to process over 400 photos in stealth mode, which is almost twice the time it would take a normal laptop. However, considering that the stealth mode effectively halves CPU speed, that’s fine.

In the Normal Mode test, the results were considerably improved – the whole test took only 355 seconds, which is just over a third of the time. Unsurprisingly, this time is identical to the Rock Xtreme 770 which features the same hardware.

File Compression & Encryption:

Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt a MPEG-2 source file with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.

The m15x in stealth mode managed an average of 328 seconds in the first large compression test, which again is pretty poor. The second compression test, which is a compression of the photos from the previous tests, took an average of 312 seconds to complete.

In Normal Mode these times were siginificantly reduced – 174 seconds for the large, 124 for the small compression.

Comparing to the Rock again which managed to crunch through these tests in 141 and 117 seconds, the Alienware comes out quite a bit slower.

File Decompression & Decryption:

The two RAR archives created during the compression and encryption tests were then decompressed and decrypted. If you’re an online gamer or are often installing new games then this result will be especially important if you don’t want to spend too long unzipping all those patches.

Either way, the decompression of the video file took an average of 44 seconds in Stealth Mode, which is almost four times the normal speed. In Normal Mode this test took just 16 seconds, which is even faster than the Rock Xtreme X700.

Decompressing the smaller file takes longer than the larger file, because there is a lot more work to do and in this instance the test took an average of 68 seconds in Stealth Mode, which again is massively longer than it might normally take in Normal Mode, where the test completed in 41 seconds.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

This test always takes the longest to complete, with an massive 2229 seconds on the clock when the results were in for the Stealth Mode test – yet in Normal Mode this test took only 720 seconds, which is a fraction of the time and four seconds faster than the Rock.