1. Introduction2. AlienWare X51 (Bundle)3. AlienWare X514. AlienWare X51 System (Super High Res Gallery)5. System Configuration & Software Installation6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20118. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit10. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark11. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage12. Synthetic: 3DMark 1113. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.014. HDD Performance15. Real World: 3D Studio Max 201116. Real World: Video Encoding17. Real World: Handbrake 9.518. Gaming: Battlefield 319. Gaming: Mass Effect 320. Gaming: Crysis 221. Technical: Acoustics Performance22. Technical: Thermal Dynamics23. Technical: Power Consumption24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We created a new 8200×3200 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render.

A final time of 6 minutes and 55 seconds is a good result. Combined with the Cinebench results earlier in the review we are confident that this would make a decent 3D rendering system for people on a budget.

Become a Patron!