Gaming
Due to the three laptops in this test using different native screen resolutions (WXGA for Alienware, WSXGA for Rock, and WUXGA for Dell), gaming performance was evaluated at 1024x768.
Here's where the Alienware Area-51 m5700 becomes a little unstuck when compare to other DTR laptops priced around the £1800 mark. Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop and Alienware's 'm5700 both use NVIDIA's PCIe-based GeForce 6800 Go 256MB graphics adapter, but, and it's a big one, Dell specifies the Ultra variant, clocked in at 450MHz core and using GDDR3 memory at 1100MHz. Alienware's vanilla 6800 Go 256MB, however, runs at 325MHz core and 600MHz memory. You can see why the Dell is almost a third faster in 3DMark05's default test. The sample also scored 3028 marks at the panel's native 1440x900 resolution.
DOOM 3, set to high-quality mode that adds in 8x anisotropic filtering as standard, is perfectly playable at 1024x768. The laptop also returned an average framerate of 52.3FPS at 1440x900.
Half-Life 2 was also plenty smooth at 1024x768 and 1440x900. The results confirm that the GeForce 6800 Go 256MB video card is capable enough, but, we feel, Alienware should be specifying the Ultra edition as standard. The reason it does not may have more to do with the ODM for the chassis than anything else.