Alienware Area 51: Triad, Tri-SLI GTX 980, Haswell-E

3DMark Fire Strike has two benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, while Extreme mode targets 2560x1440. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Extreme mode is explicitly designed for CrossFire / SLI systems. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. And 80 million pixels are processed per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations. Tessellation volume is reduced to 2.6 million vertices and the number of pixels processed per frame rises to 170 million.

Futuremark 3DMark FireStrike Synthetic DirectX Gaming Benchmark

3DMark Fire Strike

The Alienware Area 51's triple GeForce GTX 980 SLI configuration and fast, Haswell-E based Core i7-5930K processor give it a clear edge over our powerful graphics test-bed system in the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark. SLI scaled well with the third card installed and the combined test score was higher than our Ivy Bridge-E based test system as well.