Subsystem Performance

Now let’s take a closer look at how subsystems in the Area 51 7500 perform by using PCMark ’05 to measure the whole system, and HDTach for hard drive, USB, and Firewire speeds.

Alienware Area 51 7500 Gaming System Review - Systems 47
Alienware – Intel QX6700, 2GB DDR2, 10K RPM SATA RAID 1. 2x GeForce 8800GTX 768MB.
Custom Built nForce 680i – Intel E6700, 2GB DDR2, 10K RPM SATA. ATI X1900XTX.

*Alienware Area 51 7500 2x 150GB 10K RPM in RAID 1.

Overall the Alienware Area 51 7500 proves to be very fast with big wins in the CPU and graphics department.

Alienware Area 51 7500 Gaming System Review - Systems 48
*Alienware Area 51 7500 2x 150GB 10K RPM in RAID 1.

Like PCMark above, here we see the hard drive performance of the Area 51 7500 slightly slower than the same drive in the nForce 680i. This is likely caused by the RAID controller on the system. If you were to choose RAID 0 instead, you will get much higher scores, but at the expense of data integrity and data fragmentation across two drives.

Alienware Area 51 7500 Gaming System Review - Systems 49

USB 2.0 performance on the Alienware Area 51 7500 is a bit faster than the home-brew system.

Alienware Area 51 7500 Gaming System Review - Systems 50

With firewire, there is little difference.

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