We tested the
Alienware Aurora R11 as it shipped from the company to ensure we got the same out-of-box experience as your average buyer, with the latest Windows and driver updates installed. Because the memory speeds are set to just 2667MHz from the factory, we also used our "OC" profile described on the previous page to show what kind of additional performance was available with just a few clicks.
Many variables can affect performance, so our comparisons should serve as a reference point, but may not be exactly like yours, even with similar configurations. Our benchmarking kicks off with some SSD, system-level and CPU tests to get an idea as to how the Aurora R11 performs with a variety of workloads…
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ATTO Disk Benchmark
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Peak Sequential Storage Throughput
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Running ATTO Disk Benchmark allows us to gauge the speed of the boot drive in the Alienware Aurora R11. In this case, the boot drive is a
Toshiba KIOXIA XG6 2TB NVMe TLC SSD. Unlike SATA-based SSDs, NVMe drives shuttle data through the PCIe bus for potentially much faster throughput. This particular drive is rated to deliver up to 3.2GB/s of sequential reads and 2.9GB/s writes.
While this drive fails to break 3.0GB/s in ATTO, its peak 2.9GB/s read and 2.7GB/s write speeds are blazing fast for most purposes. A drive's theoretical speed limits are seldom fully realized in real-world usage anyway. Rest assured, the drive is plenty fast.
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Cinebench R20
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3D Rendering Performance
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With our disk speed sanity check out of the way, we can move on to assessing general system performance. The first stop is the Intel Core i9-10900K which we will step through Cinebench R20. This test is based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D modeling software that is used in movie production studios.
The Aurora R11's Intel
Core i9-10900K already delivers strong performance with the Stock profile, but the OC profile pushes it a little further to put up the strongest single-threaded score on our chart. The multi-threaded score is only beat out by higher core count chips, which is to be expected. Fortunately for gamers, the Core i9-10900K's 10 cores and 20 threads are already plenty for any title currently on the market.
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BrowserBench Speedometer 2.0 |
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Web Application Performance |
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We recently incorporated BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample webapps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
Speedometer also shows strong performance for the Aurora R11 system. While using the Stock profile, it is edged out by the EKFG 270 Conquest's
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X, but it is able to take the top spot using our custom OC profile.
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PCMark 10 |
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Full System Productivity Performance |
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PCMark and 3DMark are something of a standard when it comes to testing full-system performance in machines with discrete
GPUs and very fast CPUs. Both apps report plenty of data in both detail and summary form, and we ran all of the tests that work the Alienware Aurora R11's hardware pretty hard.
UL Benchmarks' suite of tests have been the go-to system benchmarks since the late ‘90s. We ran the Aurora R11 through PCMark 10, which is designed to gauge the system performance in everyday use case scenarios with GPU acceleration-enabled, while 3DMark tests its gaming chops.
The Aurora R11 delivers performance supremacy across every workload except for Essentials. The light tasks of the Essentials test can yield some unexpected results on many-core systems, but suffice to say
the Aurora R11 is more than capable of handling any of the video streaming and spreadsheet finagling tasks it covers.
The Productivity and Digital Content Creation workloads are much more relevant. Here the Aurora R11 stands uncontested, but all work and no play makes for a dull review, so let's move along to graphics and gaming...
