Alienware Aurora 7500 with FX-60

Benchmarks

We put the Alienware through its paces against the fastest notebook we've tested recently, the Rock Xtreme CT, as well as our standard gaming reference system. Provided by the kind folks at Udiggit, our reference gaming system sports a 3800+ Athlon X2 chip, 2GB OCZ RAM, a 7800GT and is housed in a Shuttle SN25P.


Here's a quick couple of thoughts that we can draw on this. One is that without any overclocking, the memory bandwidth provided by the Athlon platform is fairly consistent. The Pentium M notebook, whilst sporting great graphics, clearly suffers from the horrendously slow 533MHz FSB. SuperPi is ripped apart by the FX-60 which cruises through the calculation without breaking into a sweat - you can really see the oomph of the machine here.

Medium detail gaming

To reference back to our notebook review, we've included the same gaming tests here, just so you can see how a bleeding edge desktop system can compare to a bleeding edge notebook system. Well-heeled gamers will be taking one of these two systems to LAN parties.

Annoyingly, the Rock notebook performs better than the bit-tech reference system - it's the difference between the 7800GT in our rig and the 7800GTX in the notebook. It's clear that the Alienware is in a different class, although its potential is hardly unleashed at this level of detail. Although notebooks have come a long way, it's clear they still have a long way to go to match desktops. Of course, the Alieneware desktop is more than double the price!

High detail gaming

To really push the boat out, we fired up some games and upped the resolution and detail levels to see what would happen.

The Alienware really comes into its own here, with an outrageous amount of horsepower. FEAR was silky smooth at this detail level, even with the performance killing soft shadows turned on. We've never seen anything like it!