Alienware Sentia m3450 14-inch Notebook

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Alienware
Dec. 5, 2006

Specifications

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Testing: Performance

To test the performance of this laptop, I ran one benchmark that would cover the general situations this system would encounter - office and multimedia applications. This laptop should be particularly well suited to these tasks, since instead of a typical 5400RPM HD, it sports a 100GB 7200RPM HD.

Worldbench 5

Overall Score: 114
ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0: 507
Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1: 287
Adobe Premiere 6.5: 391
Ahead Software Nero Express 6.0.0.3: 323
Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (DirectX): 315
Discreet 3ds max 5.1 (OpenGL): 518
Microsoft Office XP with SP-2: 539
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0: 269
Mozilla 1.4: 341
Multitasking (Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder): 412
MusicMatch Jukebox 7.10: 440
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5: 235
WinZip Computing WinZip 8.1: 271

Worldbench 5 is touted as a real world benchmarking program. While the numbers don't mean a whole lot by themselves, what I can tell you from watching the benchmark is that any CPU oriented tasks fly by. Things like unzipping an archive or rendering a scene are very quick due to the Intel Core 2 Duo chip and the 7200 RPM HD. This set of benchmarks doesn't really stress the GPU that much, which is good, because it's integrated graphics.

Half-Life 2

Crash (Could not run)

Unfortunately, the laptop would crash when I played HL2. I would be playing for about 10 or 15 minutes before I would get either a BSOD or the unit would shut down.

Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

1280x768, otherwise default settings
Avg FPS: 53.9

Warcraft 3 was released in July 2003 (with the original WC3 being released a year earlier), and the Alienware laptop's integrated graphics had no problems with the game, especially given that this is not a first person shooter, twitch-reflex type of game.

Quake 3 Arena

1280x768 (native resolution), all settings maxed out
Demo 4 Avg FPS: 132

Now here is an old game. It was released last century (December 1999). I added it just as a frame of reference, so you can figure out where exactly today's integrated graphics are compared to discrete video cards. It turns out the G945 graphics are more or less equivalent to a GeForce 2 Ti200. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but you can see that when it comes to games, you'll need something more than just integrated graphics to play most games - from this century at least.

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Page 7 of 9

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Taking a Closer Look
Page 4: Bundled Software
Page 5: Testing: Hardware & Software
Page 6: Testing: Temperature
Page 7: Testing: Performance
Page 8: Testing: Battery Life
Page 9: Conclusion

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4 User Comments

1 - Posted by EmoMakesMeCry on December 6, 2006 - 1:43 am

pretty sweet notebook. the only problem i have with the sentia is it's keyboard. it just looks...i dunno...ugly? i can't put my finger on it.

anyways, any idea if y'all will be getting a thinkpad x60 for review? that'd be a pretty cool comparison. :)

2 - Posted by Nick on December 6, 2006 - 12:30 pm

No way would i get a notebook that shuts off under full load due to thermal throttling. That just screams poor design. Im really surprised such a problem could make it through testing unnoticed. They make test chambers specifically for rooting out these types of failures and it would surprise me greatly if alienware didnt employ them during design, testing and production.

3 - Posted by Kurtis on December 6, 2006 - 4:47 pm

I was quite surprised myself... Oddly enough, it doesn't crash under loops of 3DMark, which is what they use for stability testing. But it does crash under the heavy CPU load of Orthos (and HL2, coincidentally).

4 - Posted by Anthony on December 6, 2006 - 4:50 pm

Indeed, and its not like my room is that hot (76-78F). But two laptops later I could provoke both into shutting down while running Orthos.

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