Alienware 17 Gaming Laptop Review

1. Introduction2. Alienware 17: Packaging and Bundle3. Alienware 17: Design4. Alienware 17: Connectivity and Hardware5. Testing Methodology and Configuration6. Synthetic: PCMark 87. Synthetic: 3DMark8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage10. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201312. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.513. Synthetic: Cinebench R1514. Synthetic: Super Pi15. Real World: WinRAR16. Real World: MKV Playback17. Real World: Media Encoding18. Gaming: Battlefield 319. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 220. Gaming: DiRT Showdown21. Technical: Acoustics22. Technical: Thermal Dynamics23. Technical: Battery Life24. Technical: Power Consumption25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Here we can see just how well the i7-4800MQ performs in these raw CPU power tests.

Become a Patron!