The Alien In Action
This could very easily become a tedious, eye-glazing benchmark-fest. Rather than inflict that on everyone, we'll just hit some highlights for comparison purposes. We don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone reading this that the A-51 X58 can steamroll pretty much every game currently on the market, though there are some that will make it sweat. It pretty much embarassed BI's desktop system across the board in synthetic benchmarks (Everest, Sandra, PCMark Vantage, and 3D Mark)-- by about 40% in CPU benchmarks, and by *mumble* 250% *mumble* in memory and video subsystem tests.

Weirdly enough, Vista rates this system a 5.9 across the board in terms of "Windows Experience" scores, which, given the ostensibly sliding-scale nature of this scoring metric, comes as a surprise. We'd expected to see scores above 6.0, but maybe there's a reason the upper limit of this particular scoring system hasn't adjusted upwards to which we are not privy.


Game-wise, I'll quote Steve here, because he sums up what we do very nicely:

Every performance slider was put to its maximum, and if there was a check box available for some kind of bell or whistle, we checked it.

Crysis: Warhead, under exciting conditions, will occasionally slow down to the point where a little bit of choppiness is noticeable, but not so far as to cause any extra deaths (beyond those resulting from BI's own considerable ineptitude). I think we managed to drop World of Warcraft into the high 40's once during a 25 player raid. GRID, Need For Speed, and, yes even World of Goo can all be run at wide-open throttle without a bottleneck in sight.

In short, at the maximum resolution available here at the BI orbital outpost (1920x1200), this system simply overwhelms everything in its path. Those folks with larger, higher-resolution displays (and, oh, how we envy you) might need to back things off a notch here or there -- probably in the realm of highest-quality AA or AF -- but even that isn't a certainty.

However, Supreme Commander is able to, err, reign supreme over even the A-51 X58 during massive battles on the largest maps. The framerate itself doesn't suffer -- frankly, it looks smooth and gorgeous -- but the CPU math required to track thousands of units and the attendant AI, even with a dedicated PhysX subsystem, reduced performance from one-to-one realtime to something closer to one-to-four (ie: one second of game clock time was more like four seconds out here in the real world). By way of comparison, similar situations on BI's 3GHz QX9450 run closer to six or seven to one, so the Alienware system is still demonstrating some impressive performance here -- four hyperthreaded cores giving an effective array of 8 CPUs to throw at the task -- but SupCom will gladly take advantage of twice that many cores.


They Did Say "Break It....."

Alienware's Tech and Marketing Folks: "We want you to push it hard. Overclock the CPU, the video cards, everything. Go nuts."
Big Iron: "You realize that's a really short trip, right?"

About that overclock... Not being one to do anything by half measures, we decided to go big right out of the gate, and pushed the FSB from 133 to 200 with a few safeguards and hopeful voltage tweaks, and promptly couldn't do anything at all. No problem, let's just reset the CMOS and get back in the saddle.

... at which point, the system helpfully informed us that there was no operating system or bootable media detected. Four-letter words may have been employed, along with hasty Witness Protection Program scenarios envisioned.

Suitably stymied, BI placed a call to Alienware's tech support line where, after a minimum of menu-option poking and a short time on hold (we called mid-afternoon on a Saturday), we were speaking with a very pleasant support rep who, within ten minutes, was able to correctly discern that the CMOS' "Reset to Default" did not, in fact, configure it to address the RAID array our test system was sporting. That change made, BI was back in business. Kudos to the knowledeable and friendly support rep we dealt with, despite the fairly arcane nature of the fix, they were able to get us on our way with a minimum of head-scratching (we may have overheard a telltale click or two in what we presume was their knowledge base, but that could just as easily have been Spider Solitaire).

This also gave us an opportunity to test out the "Alien Resurrection v2.0" system restore disk (not that there had been any any data loss, but we wanted to play with everything in the box). Restoring from the local partition on the hard drive, Vista estimated our restore time at 27 minutes. Fifteen and a half minutes later, we were at the desktop, and again ready to install just the aforementioned two Windows Update files.