PCmark Vantage & Sisoft Sandra


According to PCmark Vantage, the average desktop system using a single hard drive will have a throughput of roughly 17MB/s in the Vista Startup test, and 19MB/s in the Windows Defender test.

Using the high-performance profile the Area-51 m15x is considerably slower with a throughput of just 12MB/s for the Vista Startup test, and 13MB/s for the Windows Defender test. Using the balanced profile reduced hard drive performance even further.


The USB 2.0 performance of the Area-51 m15x is roughly on par with those of the desktop test systems. The notebook SATA hard drive performance is again considerably lower than that of the desktop systems however.


We decided to test the network performance of the Alienware Area-51 m15x, since this laptop is designed exclusively for gaming. The network performance was on par with the PCI controllers found on desktop motherboards, clearly suggesting this is the bus used in the notebook and not a PCI Express network controller.

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