SlyCat's Journal

Got my new Alienware Area 51 m5550 laptop on Friday and have had a good chance to play around with it. The first thing you notice once it's powered up is just how high the definition of the screen is. 1920x1200 in 15.4" is quite an impressive feat. It's not as painful to look at as I had expected. In fact in going back to my normal 20.1" 1680x1050 screen, you start to notice how jagged stuff is! As it's an Alienware system with a pretty modern processor and a highly rated graphic card, I expected it to blow me out of the water as far as gaming performance goes. However, it seems to only be performing as well as my normal desktop PC. Running tests in 3D Mark 2005 pretty much confirms this.

( Click for test results )

This shows that the CPU is far more powerful than my desktop PC, however the graphics performance is slightly worse. True, it's still very good for a laptop, but it's not quite the hike in performance I was expecting. Also, I can't run modern games in the native res as I would have liked but as the screen itself is physically small, turning down the resolution isn't so much a problem. Thanks to the extra processing power, the system has no trouble playing back high definition videos in native resolution, which look utterly fantastic. Ultimately, I'm happy with the system, just not as happy as I would have liked.