Test System

Alienware MJ-12 featuring:

AMD Opteron Dual Core @ 2.2ghz
4x512mb of Corsair PC3200
Tyan K8WE
Hitachi Drives in Raid Striped (320gb)
ATI FireGL 5100 128mb

Windows XP Pro +SP2
PCmark 2005
Sisoft Sandra
Sonic MyDVD v6.1
FEAR
HD Tach
Photoshop CS2
Specviewperf 8.01

SiSoft Sandra

Sisofts “Sandra” tool allows you to run a series of component specific tests on your system and compare them to a wide number of components within the results database. This can be useful in determining how well your system is performing and if any changes in components would benefit you performance wise.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

CPU Arithmetic results for the Alienware are close to those expected. The system pulls in Dhrystone performance in excess of the Pentium 4 950 (Extreme Edition) CPU which runs at 3.2ghz and features 2 cores and HyperThreading. In Whetstone the Intel CPU is a little ahead though.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

The Sandra CPU multimedia test provides us with more excellent results. Whilst the system doesn’t give us performance in excess of the Pentium XE or X2 4800+ its not far behind and it does give performance on par with the X2 4600+.

dont have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

Memory performance of the Alienware MJ-12 is one of the more impressive areas, comparing the units memory scores to the Intel 945 and 955 chipsets running DDR2 5300 we see the Alienware has a performance advantage of more than 400 points in both Int and Float tests. Moving to DDR tests we see the advantage increases to nearly 1000 points over an ATI Express 200 chipset running PC3200.

 

HD Tach

One of the better Hard Drive testing tools available, HD Tach allow you to scrutinise almost every aspect of your systems drive performance. For anyone who is interested we have made the full excel results file from the HD test available for download here:

The tool is available for free and we recommend you download it to compare your system with our results.

In this test we see for the first time the exceptional performance of the RAID system Alienware install with the MJ-12. When compared to the SATA 150 the Alienware is approx 65mb/s faster in burst speeds. Sequential read speed is also impressive, only dropping below 90mb a second once you get up around the 230gb mark. With an average read speed of 95mb/s this is one fast system.