Alienware 7500 P2 with Blu-ray

Testing methodology

To test the Alienware system, we put it through the same tests as our recent review of the ASUS Striker Extreme. This means file compression, Xvid encoding, PhotoShop work and audio encoding.

The base components are the same - 2GB of RAM, X6800 etc (check out the full specs of the ASUS here).

To test 3D performance, we realised there wasn't going to be much to say - we already know how stunningly fast the GeForce 8800 is, especially in combination with the X6800. We thought it would be more interesting to test the 8800 in SLI against single card, seeing what difference it makes in an ϋber system such as this Alienware.

So, that's what we did.

On with the benchmarks...

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

In this test, the Striker system was quicker, despite coming in with the same motherboard chipset and CPU. The major difference is the memory, and we suspect that the slower timings on the Patriot memory make the difference here (as per this article).

File Compression & Encryption, Decompression and Decryption:

For out compression and decompression test, we compressed and encrypted the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio into a RAR archive, then decompressed it back again.

The two systems trade blows in this test, but the Alienware hardly strikes convincingly, beating out the Striker in file decompression by just a second - this is down to the faster hard drive in the Alienware.