AlienWare X51 System Review (Core i7)

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

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

We enabled GTX555 video acceleration to help support the Core i7 2600.

With CUDA hardware acceleration enabled, the system turns in a very healthy time of 9 minutes and 52 seconds. This is faster than the 2700k, which takes 10 minutes and 32 seconds to complete the same task.

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