I have the opportunity to test an Alienware m5550 with a 17" screen
computer for the weekend but I'm not sure how to go about it. I bought
the laptop a month ago and AW made a lot of screwups, shipping, tech
support, customer support, you name it...--long story.

Anyway, they're letting me hang on to the laptop and test it to see if
I still want to hold on to it. But I'm not sure how to test it. I
downloaded POV ray and rendered an image called skyvase.pov.

* The Alienware with a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, a gig of ram took 36 seconds
to render an image at 1280x1024, anti-aliased 0.3.

* My old Compaq Presario laptop with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 CPU and a
768mb or ram took 44 seconds to render the same image.

Please keep in mind that I don't understand chip speeds specifics that
well, I only read the numbers and the advertising. I expected
dramatically better performance from the Alienware--maybe I was just
unrealistic, or maybe I'm not testing them correctly.

The Alienware Area-51 m5550 specs are 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, a gig or ram,
72rpm hd and a dedicated 256mb NVidia 6600 with a 17" WUXGA.

The COMPAQ presario is 2.8GHz P4 CPU, 1 gig of ram that it shares with
video, a slower hard drive and a 15.4" screen.

Obviously the dedicated graphics and faster hard drive makes a huge
performance difference. But that much? I just expected much better
performance from the c2d chip for all the advertising that Intel's been
doing.

-ac

nightrider.36 wrote:
> I have the opportunity to test an Alienware m5550 with a 17" screen
> computer for the weekend but I'm not sure how to go about it. I bought
> the laptop a month ago and AW made a lot of screwups, shipping, tech
> support, customer support, you name it...--long story.
>
> Anyway, they're letting me hang on to the laptop and test it to see if
> I still want to hold on to it. But I'm not sure how to test it. I
> downloaded POV ray and rendered an image called skyvase.pov.
>
> * The Alienware with a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, a gig of ram took 36 seconds
> to render an image at 1280x1024, anti-aliased 0.3.
>
> * My old Compaq Presario laptop with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 CPU and a
> 768mb or ram took 44 seconds to render the same image.
>
> Please keep in mind that I don't understand chip speeds specifics that
> well, I only read the numbers and the advertising. I expected
> dramatically better performance from the Alienware--maybe I was just
> unrealistic, or maybe I'm not testing them correctly.
>
> The Alienware Area-51 m5550 specs are 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, a gig or ram,
> 72rpm hd and a dedicated 256mb NVidia 6600 with a 17" WUXGA.
>
> The COMPAQ presario is 2.8GHz P4 CPU, 1 gig of ram that it shares with
> video, a slower hard drive and a 15.4" screen.
>
> Obviously the dedicated graphics and faster hard drive makes a huge
> performance difference.

Well, not necessarily. Integrated graphics and a slow hard drive
wouldn't make any difference for ray tracing.

> But that much? I just expected much better
> performance from the c2d chip for all the advertising that Intel's been
> doing.
>
> -ac
>

Did you run povRay with two threads, or does it do that automatically?
If that was single threaded rendering, I would call that an decent
victory for your new computer, and try it again for with two threads for
much better results.